‘Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.’ Ky GOP has only itself to blame for effigy disgrace.
Burning and hanging effigies is not the sole province of conservatives; a helpful reader pointed me to a Washington Post story about AIDS activists in 1990, who stormed the NIH to protest its slow reaction to the AIDS epidemic, complete with an effigy of ... Anthony Fauci.
However, the Second Amendment Protest in Frankfort on Sunday that included the hanging of an effigy of Gov. Andy Beshear lies solely at the door of the Kentucky GOP, which flirts and fondles with these activists and only speaks out when it’s too late. The protesters are simultaneously angry that some people don’t like, but allow, them to wear assault weapons at the Capitol, furious that anyone thinks they should wear a mask in a global pandemic, and outraged about all the other tropes that embittered people whine about these days: Abortion, minorities, gays, vaccines, the rule of law and the place of government during a global epidemic.
These are many of the same people who paraded through the Capitol on May 2 with guns, Confederate flags, then posed for pictures with some of our legislators, like Lexington’s own Stan Lee, Rep. Savannah Maddox, R-Dry Ridge and Rep. Kim King of Harrodsburg. Maddox, who apparently thinks transgender kids are a bigger threat than coronavirus, even posed with someone making a white supremacy hand gesture. Hey, blow enough dog whistles and guess what’s going to show up?
You can’t play patty cake with extremists, and then be shocked, shocked!, that a few with more ammunition than sense happen to keep effigies of governors in their cars, complete with rope and a Sic Semper Tyrannis sign, “Thus always to tyrants.” (So yes, an effigy is probably protected by the First Amendment, but making a threat once used by John Wilkes Booth when he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln might come under some investigation.)
Let’s ask former Republican House Speaker Jeff Hoover, who spoke on the Twitter machine Sunday: “This is what happens when leaders fail to stand up, speak out and condemn such actions. I support the right of all to protest. But this exceeds all decency, just as does the posing for photo with white supremacy sign. Crickets from leaders leads to this.”
Of course, once it happened, Republicans were quick to condemn it, as they always are when things finally go too far. From genuine feeling from Rep. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville: “Unacceptable! I’m so tired of the hate. We have serious issues to resolve and hate gets us NO progress...” to the more staid Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who intoned: “There is no place for hate in Kentucky.” Except, Senator, there obviously is, and it is your voting bloc.
The most interesting reaction was from another Louisville Republican, Rep. Jason Nemes, who wrote a long twitter thread to young conservatives about doing the right thing. He noted: “We are now being squeezed from the right inside our party who flirts with anarchy and Know-Nothingism and many on the left who want to take down and redo the American System. So we scrap in front and in behind, to the left and to the right for our values.”
It’s rare to hear Republicans lament the kind of politics that have become a feature, not a bug, of modern conservatism. It’s been happening for a long time. Let’s don’t forget that Ronald Reagan, who now seems like a paragon of decency and wisdom compared to the White House’s current occupant, held a major campaign event in 1980 in Philadelphia, Miss., with a Southern Strategy dog whistle speech about states rights. It’s no accident that Philadelphia was the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, shot and then buried in a dam in 1964. And so it goes. Today, our president praises white supremacists and, until coronavirus, used a portion of all of his rallies to stoke the crowd against his enemies.
Democrats struggle with their own interior battles, including those who “want to redo the American system.” But Gov. Andy Beshear is hardly one of them. He is a centrist politician with plenty of flaws. But “tyranny” is not one of them, and when the dust has settled on coronavirus, we’ll see if he was wrong about the executive orders to slow the virus’ deadly path.
It’s particularly odious that this sorry temper tantrum happened on Memorial Day, when we honor true patriots who gave their lives for this country. The gun nuts and anti-vaxxers who think their rights are trampled because they have to wear a mask have no ideas about sacrifice. They’re like a bunch of petulant, nap-deprived toddlers stomping around the Capitol with guns. This time they even brought a doll.
The Kentucky GOP should sideline legislators like Maddox and King, and pay more attention to the vastly more intelligent members of their party, like Nemes and Raque Adams, who understand the political ramifications of the old saying: “When you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.”
This story was originally published May 25, 2020 at 10:38 AM.
