Republican sorry for suggesting ‘hanging by a tree’ as execution method
Paul Sherrell
That’s the headline on a Guardian story published on Thursday, March 2, 2023 (read it here).
If he’s sorry he said it, maybe he shouldn’t have said it; instead, maybe he should have engaged his brain, if he has one, before opening his mouth.
Lots of Republicans stick their feet in their very wide mouths. This offender is Tennessee state Rep. Paul Sherrell (photo, left). He’s 63 years old, married with two children (how did he figure out how to procreate?), and attended the Tennessee Law Enforcement Academy and a real estate school, which hints at his previous occupations. He is not a college graduate, and it shows.
The purpose of college is to teach people how to think (see my article here), and he’s no good at it. For example, last month (February 2023) he introduced a bill to change a Nashville street named for the late Congressman John Lewis to “Donald Trump Boulevard” (see story here). What kind of jackass removes a civil rights hero from street signs and replaces him with a twice-impeached racist coup inciter? Given a city full of streets, any one of which could be named for Trump (if one is so inclined), it’s obviously a deliberate provocation. In these circumstances, it also looks — and almost certainly is — racist in intent.
It’s becoming pretty clear what the next phase of the Republican Party’s evolution will look like. Instead of trying to govern, they’re devoting all their ingenuity (such as it is) and energy to pissing off liberals.
That certainly is the intent behind Florida state Sen. Joshua Brodeur’s (photo, right) blatantly unconstitutional bill to require bloggers who criticize Florida elected officials (especially Gov. DeSantis) to register with the state (see story here), although with this U.S. Supreme Court I wouldn’t assume that free speech is still safe in this country.
Unlike Sherrell, Brodeur has a college degree (in food economics), but if he ever learned to think, he forgot how. He’s another jackass using his legislative office to troll Democrats (he’s also a gay-basher) instead of building schools, libraries, roads, and bridges.
And then there’s Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (photo, below left), another college dropout, who introduced a bill to ban the Democratic Party in Florida on the grounds it supported slavery before the Civil War (details here), an unconstitutional interference with the First Amendment right of free association.
This stuff tells you several things: Republicans aren’t interested in governing. They’re too busy picking fights. They have no respect for the Constitution or other people’s rights. They’re bigots, racists, and not very bright.
Look, folks, this isn’t Eisenhower’s or Reagan’s Republican Party anymore. It’s an unsavory collection of insurrectionists, secessionists, bigots, and racists who hate everybody and talk as though they want to smear America’s landscape with the blood of their political opponents. They’ve saturated our country with guns and tried to overthrow our government. They never have anything intelligent to say; they’re braying jackasses.
Why? How did concrete fill the space between their ears? I suspect it’s a combination of low intelligence and little education. But that doesn’t explain the Republican Party. There was a time, within living memory, when America’s political parties didn’t nominate or elect people like these.
They’re clearly the bottom of the barrel, and I have a theory about that, too: They’re what’s left after anybody with any brains fled the Republican Party. Nobody who cares about their reputation runs under the GOP label anymore; and this is what you get by default.
At least Sherrell admitted that hanging death row inmates “from a tree” is a stupid idea, but only after the fact. By the way, Iran hangs people from construction cranes (see photo here, if you have the stomach to look). Rep. Sherrell has more in common with the Iranian mullahs than he realizes.
