Does anyone consider this rhetoric attractive? (The Free Lance–Star):
Members of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party and questions about health care greeted Rep. Robert J. Wittman (R-Montross) at a gathering Tuesday night in his hometown.
“Where in the Constitution is government charged with protecting people’s health?” asked Catherine T. Crabill, a maverick Republican who, despite being shunned by Wittman and state GOP leaders, came close last month to winning the seat Wittman once held in the House of Delegates.
“My frustration is that we don’t want any government-run health care. The Constitution is the only thing that will save us from this death spiral that the country is in,” Crabill said.
“Some elected officials are committing treason by not upholding their sacred oaths. Do you intend to uphold your oath of office and fight to make sure that your elected colleagues uphold theirs?” she asked Wittman, who promised he would.
I’m still laughing about how the constitutional scholar, Catherine Crabill, is making comments about what’s in the United States Constitution when she’s apparently unfamiliar with the Article III, where the founders went to the trouble of specifically defining the crime of treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
And why did Madison et al. decide to be that specific regarding the crime of treason? Consult Federalist No. 43:
As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.
But that nut Catherine Crabill wants to prosecute people for political disagreements (and probably execute them). This is the same thing that the crazies on the left wanted to do for George Bush et al. for the Iraq War and the USA PATRIOT Act.
And then we have this one:
“The federal government is gang-raping the people,” said Mark Carpenter of Acorn, a Westmoreland County community–not the controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Do I need to expand how absurd, vulgar, and bordering on obscene that comment is? Does this idiot need someone to explain to him what the crime of rape is, much less the crime of gang-rape?