Rifle-posing Sid Miller fuels a sickening trend
There is much that we need in this country. We need to reduce the number of Americans living without health insurance. We need to improve funding for public education.
We need to upgrade our infrastructure and continue moving toward renewable energy sources.
We need to combat the scourge of gun violence.
One thing that we absolutely don’t need is an escalation of violent imagery and threatening rhetoric in our politics.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’re seeing in Texas now from one of our statewide elected officials: Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.
In an ad supporting Texas House District 121 Republican challenger Marc Lahood, Miller poses with a rifle in his hands, brands GOP incumbent Steve Allison a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and declares that Allison is one of the targets of Miller’s “RINO Hunt.”
The mailer comes less than five months after Accuracy in Media, a right-wing, self-described watchdog group, targeted Allison for his opposition to school vouchers by parking a truck outside his Terrell Hills home, blasting pro-voucher messages, ringing his doorbell and doing a video shoot on his front lawn.
It comes only 16 months after a home intruder attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-u.s. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by bludgeoning him with a hammer. All the while, the attacker was asking, “Where’s Nancy?”
It comes only three years after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-president Donald Trump.
The last thing we need is for politicians to pour gasoline on this incendiary political environment, but it’s becoming an increasingly common occurrence.
In a 2022 video, Jim Lamon, an Arizona Republican vying for the U.S. Senate seat held by Mark Kelly, depicted himself as an Old West sheriff firing his pistol at Kelly, Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden. Lamon apparently gave little thought to the fact that Kelly’s wife, former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, had been shot in the head in 2011.
We’ve also seen Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene produce an ad in which she took aim with her sniper rifle and fired at a Prius with the word “Socialism” emblazoned on it.
It’s a measure of how sick our politics have become that Miller considered it cute and fun to play around with this kind of imagery.
He’s hunting those he disagrees with? Despicable