Bloodthirsty Republican Shouts ‘Let’s Roll’ Before Obamacare Block Vote
While September 11th is a sacrosanct day in history for many Americans, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) invoked one of the event’s most iconic sadnesses in a “rallying cry” during an anti-Obamacare vote.
Culberson was charged up alongside his GOP lawmaker friends when many of the reps reportedly began chanting. And the Republican House Rep., who apparently got carried away, reportedly shouted “Let’s roll!”
If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, and the horrors we later learned about the events of the day, you’ll recall the quote as a reference to some of the last words spoken by Todd Beamer.
Beamer, a passenger on the ill-fated Flight 93, was steeling himself alongside other passengers to engage in a mission they knew would near definitely lead to their deaths. Having learned of the three other suicide hijackings and carnage at the World Trade Center, the passengers banded together to fight the men in the cockpit and perhaps, in sacrificing their own lives, save the lives of other Americans.
Rep. Culberson (R-TX) when the GOP broke out into applause over their new plan: “I said, like 9/11, ‘let’s roll!'” http://t.co/JVuPls9hL8
— msnbc (@msnbc) September 28, 2013
As you and Culberson probably recall, Beamer and his fellow passengers were successful, in a sense. While all aboard the plane perished, the crash of Flight 93 into a field and not a heavily populated area or high-profile target spared the lives of untold numbers of Americans, as difficult and horrific the decision to march to their own traumatic deaths may have been for the men and women on that plane.
No one should be co-opting the sad memories of the worst day in recent history, a day on which 3,000 people were killed on American soil, to advance a wholly unrelated political agenda. Do we need to be reminded people died? Horribly? Painfully? On live television?
That Culberson would shout “Let’s roll” ahead of a vote against healthcare for American citizens seems so much more vulgar, disproportionate, and unaware of the horror those of us who live so close to the center of the atrocity still feel was almost yesterday that it defies belief. Politically, one can fall on either side of the spectrum with Obamacare, but it feels as if someone should tell this man that September 11th was not a particularly tense and high-stakes sporting event. It was a live mass murder.
Maybe Rep. Culberson’s town didn’t lose any residents. Maybe it wasn’t a constant wait in vain hope people were coming back. Maybe he didn’t have to make phone calls every day, and watch families in halted grief, and see the cars parked at the train station not moving for two straight weeks and knowing what that really meant.
Maybe Rep. Culberson didn’t have to fly home into Newark knowing the men responsible had done the same five days earlier, and be greeted by a plume of smoke like a mushroom cloud billowing over lower Manhattan. Maybe he didn’t catch the acrid scent of burning steel and bodies on the South Bay breeze on some days for weeks, still waiting for news of someone he cared about, really suspecting deep down that no one else remained alive in the smoking rubble.
Forty eight residents in my small Long Island village did not come home on 9/11, or any other day since. So Rep. Culberson and his pals will have to forgive us for finding a reference to their traumatic murders in partisan glee to be possibly the most disgusting thing many of us have heard all year.
