Unrepentant as ever

Jason Rapert just can’t leave awful enough alone. After a perfunctory prayer for the innocent victims of another weekend massacre back east, our state senator (R-Bigelow and Lip Service) struck again.

After a bombing on the coast, and a crazed man stabbing people in Minnesota, Senator Rapert spoke out loud and clear and mistaken as ever. The more he keeps posting on social media, the less he seems to learn. Unfortunately, just as a bell cannot be unrung, some things can’t be taken back in this merciless age of electronic record-keeping. But they can be deleted by the IT folks.

Facebook apologized for blotting out a couple of hateful posts from the Arkansas pol and called the whole thing a mistake, but Senator Rapert can’t take sorry for an answer. Instead, he pushed a conspiracy theory: “One I could see as an accident,” he said of Facebook’s reversal. “Two, that doesn’t seem so accidental.”

It all started with an original post that said something Trumpian, inasmuch that “we need to round up every single Muslim extremist sympathizer and other anti-American crazies and detain them or deport them.”

But what if you’re one of those Americans who backed Muslim freedom fighters years ago when they were fighting side by side with our troops? The object then was to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

Or suppose you’re decent enough to feel sorry for Americans of the Muslim persuasion who are being picked on by haters who have nothing against them except the religion they practice or the clothes they wear? Does that make you a clear and present danger too? Ditto, if you applaud those of our fellow Americans who exercise their First Amendment rights to speak out for what they consider just doing the right thing?

What about those who put their lives on the line to help American soldiers as translators in various hotspots in the Middle East? Should the ones who have (finally) made it to these shores be sent back to the tender mercies of the enemy? You’d think that a Muslim who’d helped Americans in the wars could safely be assumed to be a sympathizer if his own religion.

What a tangled web we weave when we set out to smear a fifth of the planet. Let’s stop. And, as mama told us, start acting pretty.