When tragedy strikes I can tend to be cynical with people's responses, for better, and for worse. Like say, when someone says "thoughts and prayers" after a mass shooting, I roll my eyes, for those words don't mean anything. In America, it's only a matter of time until there is another shooting.
The cynical thoughts can happen for yesterday's shooting at a Pittsburg synagogue, killing 11, when someone like Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) sends out a tweet like this:
The reason I'm cynical about that tweet comes from tweets like this one:
"David Duke without the baggage," came from a New York Times article back at the end of 2014:
Stephanie Grace, a Louisiana political reporter and columnist for the past 20 years, first with The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and now The Advocate of Baton Rouge, recalled her first meeting with Mr. Scalise.
“He was explaining his politics and we were in this getting-to-know-each-other stage,” Ms. Grace said. “He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage. I think he meant he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but he wasn’t David Duke, that he didn’t have the same feelings about certain people as David Duke did.”
Conservative columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty has written about Rep. Scalise in the recent past, asking for him to step down as majority whip of the House, for speaking to a group organized by David Duke (emphasis mine):
If the people of the Louisiana 1st Congressional district want Steve Scalise to represent them in Congress, they can have him. But after the revelation that Rep. Scalise (R) spoke to a group organized by former Ku Klux Klan leader and all-time racist gadabout David Duke in 2002, the party should dump him as majority whip. Not because the liberal media demands it, but because it is just political common sense. And decent.
The reality is that in order to have the world that David Duke wants, it can only happen with violence, and that Steve Scalise has never made a public atonement for his past means that his tweet is worthless....
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