Rex Rammell says he was joking
Idaho Republicans Should Step Up and Denounce Threatening Language
"Those who recognize this danger must challenge it wherever it exists, even in those with whom we politically agree."By Jill Kuraitis, 8-27-09
This is what 'lame jokes' can lead to. When did it become okay not to say anything?
UPDATE, Friday Aug. 28, 9:45 AM: Rammell released this: “Due to the large amount of press concerning his statement Dr. Rammell would like to clarify his comment: ‘Anyone who understands the law, knows I was just joking, because Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting tags in Washington D.C.’”
You’ve probably heard that Jared Hopkins, reporter from the Twin Falls Times-News, reported in another one of his scoop-them-all stories that at a Republican fundraiser Wednesday in Twin Falls, Idaho Republican candidate for governor Rex Rammell gave a speech.
Hopkins wrote, “After an audience member shouted a question about ‘Obama tags’ during a discussion on wolves, Rammell responded, ‘The Obama tags? We’d buy some of those.’”
Rammell told Hopkins it was a joke.
Let’s start with some basics. What would Rammell’s mother say? Mine would have said, “Threatening the President is a felony, and you will never say anything like that again. Clear?”
What would Rammell’s father say? Mine would have said, “I expect you to take this matter seriously. And if you ever hear anyone make a statement threatening the President, you will loudly object and then call the police.”
Dad meant the law enforcement experience to make an impression on the person who threatened the President and thought it was funny, not to have the threatener arrested. 
Lifelong Democrats except when it came to President Eisenhower, my parents would have said this no matter which party elected the president, just like the McCain-supporting Whoolerys of Rexburg, who were suitably alarmed when kids chanted “Assassinate Obama” on a school bus:
A couple named Whoolery found out about it when their second and third graders got off the bus and reported the chanting. The Whoolerys weren’t Obama voters, but they were astonished and contacted the school. According to a Twin Falls TV station, the Whoolerys “just don’t like people joking about a serious matter concerning any leader of the country.”
In north Idaho, also during the 2008 presidential campaign, Ken Germana put up a sign advertising a “free public hanging” of President-elect Barack Obama and several other politicians.
“‘That’s a political statement,’ Germana told the Bonner County Daily Bee. ‘They can call it whatever they want, a threat or whatever.’” A rope noose – a symbol used by the Ku Klux Klan and other racists, hangs down the middle of the sign.
Germana said he wouldn’t lose sleep if the president-elect came in harm’s way.”
There was silence from McCain supporters in Idaho.
Where are the other Whoolerys in the Idaho Republican Party? Why didn’t any of them condemn Germana’s sign and attitude? And why haven’t any Idaho GOP leaders or members at least sent out a press release denouncing Rammell? Have any of them called Rammell (208-716-2053) to say his words were disgraceful, illegal and wrong? Rammell is running in the Republican primary for governor. The event was a GOP fundraiser.
There were several state legislators at the event when Rammell made his statement. One of them, Rep. Steve Hartgen (R-Twin Falls) told NewWest.Net/Boise that he was off to the side of the arena talking with other legislators and didn’t hear it. “I’ve heard Rex many times so I wasn’t paying attention.” He thinks the remark was “very inappropriate and ill-advised” but “I accept Rex’s explanation that it was a lame joke.” Hartgen said that after Rammell’s speech, he wasn’t aware of anyone confronting Rammell.
Hartgen, former publisher of the Twin Falls Times-News, has a Ph.D in American history. He thinks Rammell’s words are an example of the change in American rhetoric – “and it isn’t a good change.”
“Words have the power of persuasion. If words point someone in one direction, and it’s a dangerous one – of course we have freedom of speech but that doesn’t mean you can shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. There are things you can’t say and shouldn’t say.”
Hartgen should be commended for recognizing that language can influence behavior. His tone clearly indicated he was very unhappy with Rammell, but his acceptance of Rammell’s explanation that the statement was a joke is disappointing.
Tossing a serious matter like this off with a simple “Rammell, what part of ‘that’s not funny’ don’t you understand?” isn’t good enough. Calling the remark “tasteless” “unfortunate” or “inappropriate” isn’t good enough, either.
This isn’t about silencing anybody’s voice. Standing up to threats, no matter the intention of the speaker, doesn’t mean the speaker’s opinions should be silenced. Rhetoric encouraging any sort of violence, especially toward the president - any president - is the issue.
Right after the 1995 bombings in Oklahoma City, President Clinton said:
“In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love free speech when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”
Howard M. Halpern, former president of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, wrote this to the New York Times in 1995:
Social psychologists and demagogues have long known that if ordinary citizens are to be provoked to violent actions against individuals or groups of fellow citizens, it is necessary to sever the empathic bond with those to be attacked by painting them as different and despicable.
We are unlikely to harm a friendly neighbor because she has strong views about equal rights for women, but if we call her a “femi-Nazi,” she becomes “the other”—evil, dangerous, hated. We are unlikely to harm the couple down the block who are active on behalf of protecting endangered species, but if we call them “environmental whackos,” they become “the other”—weirdos who must be vilified and suppressed as enemies to “normal” Americans.
When our shared humanity with those with whom we disagree is stripped away, it becomes acceptable to blow them up. The answer is certainly not to censor such speech, but those who recognize this danger must challenge it wherever it exists, even in those with whom we politically agree.
What they said.
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"What I would say to all my Democrat Idahoans: Take a deep breath and relax," he said. "We're not going to go out and hunt Obama."
Yes, Rex, we DemocratIC Idahoans get that. What we don't get is why the Idaho GOP won't roundly condemn what you said and why - as a would-be public servant - you said it in the first place.
If you want a radio talk show, get a talk show, but don't ask Idahoans to make you our leader when you don't understand why what you said - jokingly or not - was vile. That's our President you're talking about.
What he has said is despicable; it would be insane for Idaho to elect him as a governor. All of my brothers had guns and used them for hunting in the Adirondack Mountains; never did one of their friends mention anything about shooting our elected representatives or the president. It my opinion both the FBI and the secret service should investigate. In Massachusetts we know all to well how our elected representatives have been vilified and assassinated.
Do you think it was a joke when a Virginia student massacred fellow students? When the Columbine students massacred others in their school? I am led to believe that children on the school bus say the same thing that Mr. Rammell has said.
Threats of violence are not jokes where I come from; we have lost our Kennedy brothers to guns and insane, crazy people. There should be a clear apology from the leadership of the Republican meeting. People like Sarah Palin who go around inciting others to violence need to be stopped. The voices from the podium and the stage or platform are incendiary and they instigate others to go out and murder (don't you know of the recent murder of a physician who performed legal abortions because some crazy thought his friends were telling him to do that?) When you mix guns with incendiary language it is an extremely dangerous world. I intend to stay in Massachusetts but I will donate to the Defenders of Wildlife because they need to represent the wolves and the other creatures in Idaho who are being massacred by so-called "hunters"...
Jean E. Sanders, Ed.D.
Have we learned anything from our past?
while the whole world is getting better,smarter and more civil.
are we getting more stupid and backward everyday?
how can we compete with other nations when we are so divided?
"The Dispossessed" by Daniel Bell, 1962
Why are we tolerating this when the shoe is on the other foot? The right wing people inciting this in weak minded people (who can still buy guns and bus tickets) ought to be ashamed of themselves.
You would think Obama was trying to perpetrate something horrible when all he is trying to do is help the poor 1/6 of this country get health care and prevent them from possibly dying. How ironic he gets death threats for such an attempt at kindness and charity.
The sad truth is that these people need a visit from the Secret Service. This would never have been tolerated under any other President I have heard about.
Maybe these people actually think they are going to stage an armed rebellion?
This is the kind of stuff we heard before Oklahoma City, only even more extreme.
I fear for the President and our country.
I notice that no one here has commented on the other picture in this article which calls for the assassination of Bush. Shall I assume from your silence that you agree with this sign? The ignorance and fear coming from this set of comments easily matches anything I have seen coming from the right. You people should really take a look in the mirror.
And for the record, Rex never should have said what he said. I don't stand behind his statement, and I don't stand behind Rex Rammel in any way. I have not, and will not vote for the man.
What you said Mr. Rammell was WRONG !! I wouldn't vote for you if you were running for Dog Catcher !!
Know of any other lunatics threatening the life of OUR President? Contact the United States Secret Service in Boise @ 208-334-1403
What's worse, stupidity, or hypocrisy? Plenty of both to go around, so don't push or shove folks.
And yes, I have to snigger somewhat about the indignation here when it was perfectly all right to do posters like that shown above and not have the same kind of condemnation. So there's some hypocrisy.
Never mind that most of us on the R side saw it for what it was, just overblown rhetoric from the left. Rammel is going to have a hard time taken seriously from here on out, nonetheless.
Just goes to show...
I remember that there were no restrooms in Prineville that hadn't had shit smeared on the walls and seats when the Rainbow Family convened there a decade ago in their "right to convene on public land", and our outfit had to find someplace in the pine woods to dig a hole to crap in. I remember the mill worker wounded in the explosion of a bandsaw that hit a ceramic spike in a log in California. Metal detectors don't find ceramic spikes, so the intent was to maim or kill, and it did maim. The left never voiced vehement distaste. I remember the tv news of unfinished homes completely afire, and seeing the destruction of a cottonwood clonal research facility. We must not forget the bank robberies by the left, and the killing of police officers, and the Black Panther criminals with their guns and the havoc they wreaked on the society. The Symbionese Liberation Front and the shoot outs they had. All left wing political statement making in these United States, in my adult years, complete with murders and mayhem and vast property damage. And they got a pass from the left. The were "lionized" by the liberal media. Poor misunderstood kids who could not make their voices heard any other way. So the only thing they can say today is about the KKK, but don't mention Senator Byrd was once a member.
Even Timothy McVey and Nichols were influenced by liberal excess. The Clinton White House, and his shaky then, and more shaky now(karma?), Attorney General Janet Reno officiated the demise of the Branch Davidian and David Koresh by tanks and using the military in a civilian action in these United States, which thinking people though was not possible, that the military could not and should not be used against the citizens of the US, including illegal aliens coming across our border in a criminal invasion of our lands. McVey, a veteran, was offended by the huge loss of life and blew his bomb on the anniversary of Reno's debacle. So now the Acting US AG for the investigation of the Waco massacre, Eric Holder, is now the US AG...Since the Clinton Admin used the Waco standoff to divert attention from the second Rodney King trial, and the "Freemen" standoff in Jordan, Montana, to divert the media from Arkansas corruption trials during the Clinton Governorship, the Jim Guy Tucker and McDougal trials we will watch to see what transpires in this administration. When the lefty AGs are in office, lots of people seem to die at the hands of the FBI and from US Attorney decisions. Watch to see what detrimental news might be rising to the surface, and what Holder comes up with to divert media attention and the nation from political tomfoolery. Holder has a track record that was not examined in his confirmation hearings in front of a slobbering Senator Leahy ("I was a US Attorney, and I.....).
So I am turning a deaf ear to the blathering of the left, and the noisy towns halls, and their fear of the people who fear for their right to own a gun. I am sort of reminded of the bully on the sidewalk in Christmas Story who got his ass kicked because he pushed his way and his mean spiritedness on someone who did not think and act like him, and forced the very same physical violence right at the bully, in spades. The left is the cry baby bully in this deal. Somebody is opposed to their Sun God. There is a rising tide of people who don't like the results they are now seeing from the "hope and change" the election brought. A $9 Trillion dollar debt was not what they had in mind. Higher taxes and no jobs is not what they had in mind. The stated intent to financially ruin industry that the Administration does not like is not being well received. There are people who feel they were duped. And they were. All that "hate Bush" "Bush the Killer" stuff was leftist propaganda, and his replacement has yet to perform, and looks to have a smaller and smaller chance to perform as time goes by. There is resistance to the ObamaNation way of doing things. The "Rahm's way or the highway" leadership, the Pelosi "do it in the rules committee and make them vote for it on a party line vote" cramming of legislation down throats is not being well received. A reckoning is on the horizon. The crybaby left is yelling "wolf" because they don't have the answers people want. So distract the discussion and demean the conservatives, because that is "dancing with the gal what brought you."
When you don't like the rules of the game, and you wrote them, now is not the time to complain. Now is the time to endure your legacy, and try to find common ground. The left has been comfortable with yelling and disrupting, as they have in politics since Vietnam, and as they did the whole of their minority in Congress, and now the minority is giving their gift to the discourse back to them. Hooray for the political right!!! Turnabout is fair play. Sic 'em. Free speech and hate speech and all that stuff is in the playbook because the left put it there. Live with it!!!!
He has a deformed view that those who disagree with him are of a crazy "left," and deserve what they get.
Really dangerous. New West should report his IP Address.
He makes MOST candidates seem "statesmanlike"! Scary!!
Nobody should take his off-the-cuff "Obama tag" lame attempt at "humor" as a serious threat. And hopefully he hasn't set off some wack-job. The best course is to move on, I say.
But after reading this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html, I can't help but feel a greater sense of worry for Obama than I did for Bush.
You never know what's "junk" and what is a real threat, which is one of the reasons why threatening comments against Bush are every bit as bad as the subject of my editorial.
HOWEVER. But I wrote only about Idaho incidents and Idaho politicians. I searched for many hours and from many sources to try to find an Idaho Democrat who has made a statement like Rammell's, and have not been able to find one. If I ever do, you can be sure I will make just as much of a fuss about it.
I did include the Bush photo to let readers know I'm onto both sides talking threatening trash, but I needed an Idaho example (said in public on the record) to include Dems in my story.
Thank you as always for reading NewWest.Net. "Freedom rings when opinions clash."
Also, Bearbait doesn't speak for me except for where he agrees with points I already touched on. Wow, what a diatribe.
The John Kerry remarks came during an exchange with Bill Maher in October of 2006 on Maher's HBO show. The YouTube video has been removed "due to terms of use violation". A partial transcript is available here http://newsbusters.org/node/8175.
http://www.newwest.net/city/article/crapo_simpson_risch_and_otter_repudiate_rammell_remarks/C108/L108/
There is NO WAY I would ever condone any criminal act on the part of anyone for any reason. That said, the left has lionized murderers for the last 40 years. Hell, there is a Weatherman, a building bomber, a bank robber and cop killer associate, advising Obama. I find that extremely disgusting. But my most vitriolic, caustic, hateful words would be for Timothy McVeigh and Nichols. But what they did is repeated daily throughout the world. How many this week in Iraq and Afghanistan? We are now jaded by random acts of murderous mayhem. Aided and abetted by the left in the Western world. The Scots sending the Lockerbie bomber home free, to be hugged by Lybia's criminal leader, was shocking. For a while. And then you understand that it was just business as usual for the left. Sort of like New Mexico Governor Richardson on his own glad handing mission to bolster his Hispanic credentials in Cuba at the expense of the US State Dept. If you think I have said something offensive about the US, read the words of Fidel over the years, and now his de facto Pan American replacement, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. They are your heros. The college boy Che' T shirts.
The threat to this Nation is not somebody waving a sign at a political rally. If that were so, half the House of Representatives would not be there, but instead be locked up. They went through the intern to staff to committees to running for office. The Left Farm System. They all held signs as a part of the job, both for someone and against another. It was their job. The threat to this country is we don't have a unified foreign policy, and our Sec of State is being undermined daily by smart ass fat boys like Richardson and the Virginia Senator Webb off on his pre-Presidential bid foreign policy trip to Burma. What Obama and his handlers are doing to Hillary Clinton is not pretty. This Presidency, right now, is like a case of dysentery, in that it runs itself. Too many Democrat supplicants and party movers and shakers free lancing all across Washington DC and the world. Obama is not at the wheel. He is just a commodity that is being handled like a head of lettuce at the green grocers wholesale market. I thought the left elected a President, but what they really did was elevate the political aspirations of a lot of hangers on that came with an eloquent word speaker and pretty face with a lovely young family, and for that we are in trouble, and the town hall protesters and screamers are people who are very aware that this deal is out of control.
August was supposed to be a time to step back and take account of the state of things, and think about how to get feedback from the constituents so as to be able to go back after Labor Day and get some work done. Instead, many elected officials ran away from the hostile crowds while their compliant press wrote about anger and hostility. That "hostility" is fear. The constituents have seen their net worths drop by 40% or more. Many, who were financially sound, are no longer. Homes are being lost by the millions. It sounds like health care is going to be paid for by taking health care from people who have it. That is what people hear. The Democrats, the radical left part of the Democrats, seems to be on a rampage to punish anyone who does not share their views. People feel that. They see that. And the response is fear, and expressed as passionate, loud displeasure. Gee. Democracy at work!!! People emotionally involved in their future. That is a bad thing? Who is the cretin in this deal? Me for pointing it out, or your for demeaning me for being me, or your not saying one word about the issues? Pshaw. I have seen the enemy and he is us. There is no threat to the Presidency from external sources. His own party is his worst enemy at the moment, and he might be smart enough to know that.
The Democrats, the left, spent 8 hateful years conjuring up images of deviltry for Bush. That is what they did best. That is their accomplish for most of a decade. And they just can't get off that horse. It is derailing their agenda, and it is scaring the pee wadding out of Americans. Scared people say hateful things. A wise Anything-tina would see that and act accordingly. America needs reassuring, not whipped by "change" without their permission. All you Woodstockian liberals had better take stock of what you have created, and find a way to throttle back on your drug induced idea of Democracy and this Republic. It is not about "me" but about the country. And the future of the just born and the unborn.
I try to think independently and support a political leader (for example I wrote to John McCain in the 90s for his support of veterans. My father was gassed by the Germans in World War I and I have hoped to create more of a sense of valuing human life as my field was special education working with brain injured children). I volunteer at the homeless center (sponsored by 14 churches not federal or state funds) and when the families move from NH or Florida to MA I can enroll the children in health care right away and the pregnant moms can get a room (the state welfare office makes them wait until they are 7 months pregnant whereas we can take them in at any trimester). The children don't get luxuries believe me but there is a basic standard of a child's health that is good for the community as a whole and Massachusetts is committed to building a system to support this financially. I have worked in the profession of special education for 50 years and when Sarah Palin says she has to defend her child from us (the professionals) she is not sincerely in "fear"; she is using the language to escalate the emotional fears of many others and that makes her a demagogue. I didn't want to rant on and on but for those (only 2 I guess) who criticized me I think it's because they don't know who I am. I don't belong to any political groups and I consider this my independent opinion.
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