"If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to 'thin' the herd."—Congressional District 11 (California) Republican candidate Brad Goehring, engaging in a little eliminationist rhetoric on his Facebook page yesterday.
The Facebook entry has since been removed, and Goehring naturally explained he was just joking. Har har. "I intended to include the wording 'we would use votes and not bullets' (but) hit the share button by accident before I finished and decided to leave it, thinking it would not be taken in a literal sense. I'm sorry if I confused anyone."
Yeah, the real problem was the "confusion" he caused; not the fact that he was obviously playing on an eliminationist "joke" (and would have been even if he'd added his allegedly intended voting clause) that has been around for years:
Note the above-linked post is from '05, and I'm certain I wrote about the "liberal hunting license" even earlier (although I can't find it at the moment). These things, and others like them, have been onsale at gun shows and conservative conferences for quite some time.
Digby notes: "Here is the story of some of these adorable jokes... These are the kind of things they sell [at] CPAC every year. It's perfectly common right wing rhetoric."
Indeed so.
Despite the fact that many of the marginalized populations who comprise the liberal bloc in the US are disproportionately targeted for actual violence in real life, outside the absurd imaginary world in which conservative jokes about killing liberals are totes hilarious.
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