When I saw the headline ("Republican Prays for Obama's Death"), I assumed the referenced Republican was a hard-right party chairman in a depopulated county at the end of nowhere. Nope.
As a Georgia voter, I apologize to the American people and to President Obama for the crass, mean-spirited speech given by Georgia United States Senator David Perdue to the Faith & Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority conference.
Regrettably, Sen. Perdue's words represent the now mainstream Republican rhetoric which made Donald Trump's ascent not only possible but inevitable. Trump has made public the winks, nods, codewords and dog-whistles that have long been the inside language of the Republican Party, even before Ronald Reagan went to Philadelphia, Mississippi to publicly launch the formerly GOP's "Southern Strategy."
Faced with reporting of this latest travesty, Sen. Perdue had his office put out this statement:
"Senator Perdue said we are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and for our president. He in no way wishes harm towards our president and everyone in the room understood that. However, we should add the media to our prayer list because they are pushing a narrative to create controversy and that is exactly what the American people are tired of."
This holier-than-thou press release is a dissembling, weasel-worded, who-me? response conjoined with the predictable, Trump-like effort to shift blame to the media for actually reporting what the Senator said and to whom. It is these kinds of statements from sanctimonious politicians of which "the American people are tired".
Unintentionally the media has made public the one thing for which we can thank Donald Trump: making the damn whistle deafening.