She obviously misspoke given the context. Y'all are really reaching
Politics ain't beanbag.
If her opponent isn't airing clips of her saying "I would shoot my grandchildren" on every channel, what the hell are they doing?
Just because a Democrat might want to cynically use a soundbite in an act of desperation to be competitive in an R+11 district doesn't mean we on atlas forum discussion blog have any reason to pretend to believe the narrative.
Sure. Because a Republican would never support violence,
*bunch o' links about other politicians*
Do you really truly believe that Rep. Lasko[sic] meant to say on the floor of the Congress that she would shoot her grandchildren in order to save them? Is that something that makes sense to you as the most likely explanation of what happened? Or are you just using this as an opportunity to try to make Republicans look bad?
Republicans don't need help to look bad.
Republicans have regularly supported calls for violence.
Republicans increasingly target ideologies and groups they don't like as objects of hate.
Republicans act like a fanatical religious cult - a type of group that has a history of targeting family members for failing to live up to the cult's demands.
We've seen again and again that our politicians are just as human as the rest of us, prone to bigotry, conspiracy theories, and calls to violence. It seems pretty obvious that someone from the party of "better dead than red", a party that encourages both means and motives for mass killings, a party whose members act like cultists, might turn on family members and deem it better they be sent to their afterlife rather than come out of LGBT+, become an atheist, join the lizard-people conspiracy, or otherwise "disgrace" their family.
A normal person who misspeaks and ends up with a meaning far from what they intended corrects themselves. Rep. Lesko did not do so. (If the video I've seen has somehow been edited, and she did immediately correct herself, please share!) When presented with the opportunity to correct the record, she instead attacked her critics for accurately reporting what she said.
https://twitter.com/repdlesko/status/1544800639485710336Saying, "I misspoke", or "What I meant was" would have been trivial. What she did instead was deny that she ever said the words that came out of her mouth. That's practically gaslighting.
I'm old enough to remember reading Autocracy: Rules for Survival when Trump first took power. And while Rep. Lesko and her party are (thankfully) not currently in power, and not (yet) in position to force the rest of the country to obey, I find it useful to keep those rules in mind. (And yes, I understand that a Republican takeover in practice would likely lean more totalitarian than autocratic.)
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.
We have rationalized and allowed Republican extremism to be explained away again and again, with a consequence of grave harm to our country. If Rep. Lesko did not mean what she said, then she should correct herself, not attack those who correctly pointed out it was abominable.
It seems obvious to me that when a supporter of Donald "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" Trump goes on the floor of the United States House of Representative says that she would shoot her grandchildren in order to "save" them we damned well ought to believe her.
