The Importance of Labeling Correctly

An OpEd piece appears in the Washington Post this morning. The title reads Opinion: There’s a name for someone who calls violence ‘legitimate.’ It isn’t ‘Republican.’

Penned by Dana Milbank, at the end of the piece, he points out the irony of calling someone a “Republican” who uses the euphemism “legitimate political discourse” to describe a violent insurrection, including the murder of police officers.

I appreciate his piece. After all, it’s important to label correctly. Words mean things.

Milbank says:

Now, the Republican National Committee, the official leadership of the GOP, has embraced this unspeakable violence as legitimate discourse. It’s an absurd euphemism — and it points to another one.

To call a person who endorses violence against the duly elected government a “Republican” is itself Orwellian. More accurate words exist for such a person. One of them is “fascist.”

Dana Milbank, Washington Post: There’s a name for someone who calls violence ‘legitimate.’ It isn’t ‘Republican.’

While I agree with this view offered by Milbank and have no qualms whatever against calling the current GOP, “fascist”, I want to suggest another word, “terrorist”.

I do so while pointing at the historical record. Terrorists and terror organizations routinely seek to rationalize violence against civilians and soft targets as their justified means when seeking political ends otherwise unattainable.

To them, the ends justify the means.

So, for the supreme value of those political aspirations, to a terrorist, it is reasonable and legitimate to blow up a bus full of schoolchildren.

Or to shred and kill innocent shoppers in a crowded marketplace by deploying a mentally unstable suicide bomber as your DDD, Death Delivery Device (with promises of Paradise and renown as a martyr as inspiration for the act.)

Or, you know, to commandeer and fly commercial airplanes into high-rise office buildings as weapons.

Those are all just acts of legitimate political discourse, right?

Or, shifting back to the Republican National Committee’s recent acts and pronouncements, it is apparently fine to attack the Capitol and its protective cordon of police officers when an election doesn’t go your way. To the RNC and to Trump this is protected political activity.

It’s just political discourse.

There were bombs. They just didn’t go off. There were guns, they just didn’t make it to the “after-party”. The DOJ didn’t call the OathKeeper’s plans, legitimate political discourse. They called it, Seditious Conspiracy.

It’s important to call things what they are.

The mysterious failure of the WMDs to detonate forced these peaceful tourists on a normal tourist visit to bludgeon police officers to death with flag poles to which were attached the Stars and Stripes and the name of their Demi-God.

I suppose by the RNC’s twisted logic, it’s also “legitimate political discourse” to erect a makeshift gallows, complete with a noose, while hundreds chant in unison their desire to hang the vice president who refuses to violate the Constitution, his oath of office, and his conscience.

And it’s political discourse to break out windows, defecate in the Rotunda, steal lecterns, and rummage through elected officials’ offices while hunting them down like a lynch mob.

Oh yeah, all of that’s legit.

Therefore, when I read last week, of Ronna McDaniel, that champion of Republicanism and Constitutional norms, who serves as the head of the Trump-worshipping RNC, gloating over the censure of GOP representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their role on the January 6 Select Committee, but not the actual cause of the existence of that Committee, the 45th President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump, I tweeted the following:

Greg Proffit@gproffit

When the National GOP meets to censure Liz Cheney for investigating another "GOP" member for inciting an insurrection and admitting he attempted to overturn an election, and doesn't censure him, you know all you need to know about the GOP. It's a domestic terrorist organization.

11:46 AM · Feb 4, 2022

1 Repost · 13 Likes

So, while I agree with Mr. Milbank that the current iteration of the GOP is fascist, it is also adopting the language of the world’s terrorist organizations.

Of all the brilliant things Abraham Lincoln (a real Republican, if you’re looking for an example) did to preserve the Union he recognized as insolubly embedded in the Constitution, is something he chose not to do. He never recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate political organization.

He did not recognize the breakaway Confederate states as a bona fide “nation”. They were simply law-breaking citizens and territories engaged in treason and rebellion.

It is important to label things correctly.

To be sure, those rebel states and their leaders wanted to use the violence of a bloody four-year war, still the most deadly in our nation’s history, to achieve their political ends, but Lincoln refused to legitimize those political aspirations by calling the perpetrators anything but “rebels”.

Words mean things.

Thankfully, those rebels failed. But Lincoln provided all of us, Democrats and Republicans, with an example of how to label correctly. We’d do well to follow his lead.

In our time, we’d also do well to relearn the meanings of the words, “fascist, terrorist, and rebel.”

It should be easy. We have members and leaders of one of the main political parties in the country serving as living examples.