Speaking of Religious Cant...

21st century “Progressivism” summed up a single sentence:

“I think I said that, but I don’t know why I said that.”

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s a sentence taken from the transcript of the State of Wisconsin Circuit Court Summons for 26-year-old Katherine R. Windels, the Wisconsin woman who is alleged by the authorities there as threatening to harm Republican state senators. She’s apparently the person who emailed state politicians the now-infamous sentence, “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks,” contained in this email:

“Subject: Atten: Death threat!!!! Bomb!!!!

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records.

We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent.

This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you.

Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!”

Paul Krugman, call your office:

Wisconsin’s attorney general has filed a complaint against 26-year-old Katherine R. Windels for threatening to harm the Republican state senators. The complaint lists four counts against Windels: two for computer messages that threatened injury or harm and two for bomb scares. You can read the complaint here.

Wisconsin’s police used the IP address from which the threatening e-mail was sent to identify Windels and interrogated her a few days after the controversy broke. The complaint reads:

S/A Tijerino reports he asked the defendant if she had sent out an email to anyone threatening bodily harm and she replied, “I guess . . . if you consider bodily harm . . . .” S/A Tijerino asked the defendant to elaborate and she stated, “I sent out emails that I was disgusted and very upset by what they were doing.”

S/A Tijerino reports the defendant stated that she called them a bad word, “a——-.” S/A Tijerino reports the defendant said, “I might have said that I am going to kill you or I want to kill you.” S/A Tijerino reports he asked the defendant how many emails she sent and she answered, “I sent one to the Republican senators.”

S/A Tijerino reports he asked the defendant if he read a line from the email would she be able to remember if it was her e-mail and she replied, “Probably, yeah.” S/A Tijerino reports he read the following passage:

“Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks.”

The defendant replied, “I think I said that, but I don’t know why I said that.”

But then, that can be a problem when you let a holistic religion do your thinking for you, a problem that also impacts  fellow “progressives” with much more clout than young Ms. Windels, as Ronald Radosh writes:

Yesterday, the only adult among a group of congressional kindergartners, Rep. Paul Ryan, released his budget proposal for the future. The Democratic establishment immediately responded with the kind of knee-jerk all-out attacks we have come to expect from them. Rep. Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “The #GOP Ryan budget is a path to poverty for America’s seniors & children and a road to riches for big oil #GOPvalues.”  Not wanting to be outdone, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, said: “It is not courageous to protect tax breaks for millionaires, oil companies and other big-money special interests while slashing our investment in education, ending the current health care guarantees for seniors on Medicare, and denying health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans.”

It is the usual reactionary Democratic talking points, all meant to scare seniors, make the public believe their access to health care will come to an end, and create a scenario for huge tax increases to make up the deficit.

Yes, for the left, every war is Vietnam, every ginned-up ethic crisis Watergate, and similarly, every budget fight is the eternal recurrence of 1995.

The old rules haven’t quite worked as expected in Wisconsin; is it possible the national GOP, long known as the stupid party — and often for good reason — might one day decode the playbook?

In the meantime though, the song very much remains the same.

Related: “And Now a Word From Our Greatest Generation…”