(Dobbs) It's Scary That This Man Is In Congress
The joy on their faces, days after four more high school students died.
This picture is worth a thousand words. It’s also worth a decent dose of dread, distress, and disgust.
For those who haven’t seen it before now, this is a Christmas card sent out this past weekend by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie. The people pictured— they appear to be his family— probably aren’t holding what look like heavy-duty weapons to protect their home. They probably aren’t on their way out to a target range. They probably aren’t gearing up to hunt quail.
What they are doing is flaunting their savage obsession in our faces. And they’re doing it heartlessly, because only five days before Massie posted his picture, Michigan high school sophomore Ethan Crumbley killed four kids at his high school with an “early Christmas present” from his parents: a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. On social media, the 15-year-old Crumbley called it “my new beauty.”
This is madness. The Massies and the Crumbleys alike.
But it doesn’t stop there. The menace of the Michigan shooter was underscored the day before the massacre when a teacher saw him searching for ammunition on his phone. The congressman’s tweet accompanying his macabre photo five days later was, “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.”
It was already sick. The timing only makes it sicker. Four families in Michigan were burying their children when the congressman from Kentucky was asking Santa for more ammo.
And victim families from school shootings around the nation were given new grounds for grief. The father of 14-year-old Jamie Guttenberg, one of 17 kids killed by a former student four years ago at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, countered Massie’s photo with two of his own, and the story they tell.
This is all so scary on so many levels. One is something you might not think about: how the rest of the world sees us. You’ll get the picture from the front page of this newspaper from Chile, 5,000 miles from Michigan.
I’m angry and ashamed, not just because this is not the image I’d want to project of my country, but because the congressman from Kentucky, elated from ear to ear, is not being panned as a pariah. He has been just as cheered on social media as condemned.
We can leave aside arguments about the right to bear arms (although if those are machine guns in Massie’s photo, then absent a special license to own one, that right is moot). Apparently he and his six immensely-amused fellow fanatics not only believe they have that unlimited right, they believe it stands taller than human decency.
I don’t have to tell you which political party Massie is in. It’s the party populated by senators who, just two days after the shooting in Michigan, blocked the “Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021,” which would have extended background checks to gun sales between private parties. They called it “hostile.”
It’s the party populated by the likes of Colorado’s Lauren Boebert (she of the venomous bigotry against Muslim members of the House of Representatives) and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene (she of the sick anti-Semitic sentiments), both of whom have agitated to pack pistols on the floor of the House, as if it’s the Wild West. With people like these there, maybe it would be.
It’s the party populated by the likes of Arizona’s Paul Gosar, who tweeted (and then, after being formally censured for it, retweeted) an animation of himself slashing the throat of a liberal member of the House.
You’re known by the company you keep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky has earned entry to this ignoble list.
It is a list of politicians who would see no irony in this mournful meme that has been traveling around the internet.
Who could possibly understand irony when all they understand is zealotry?
I keep thinking that if people like these are reelected next time they run, we get what we deserve. But that’s not right. We don’t deserve representatives like these. We don’t deserve a nation like this.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
I agree. This is not about the issues and questions surrounding the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. 1. Sending a card like this out at this time was insensitive and thoughtless, to say the least; and, 2. Is this really the message people want to send out or receive for Christmas? Shaking my head in the Adirondacks of upstate NY