For the past week, there’s been an intense focus on the disturbing words of Alabama State Senator Scott Beason who said, in a speech on immigration:
“If you don’t believe illegal immigration will destroy a community, go and check out parts of Alabama around Arab and Albertville.” He concluded with this admonition, “empty the clip, and do what has to be done.”
Yep.
Senator Beason became a national figure with that shocking rhetoric, especially in the wake of the recent Arizona massacre. And a number of bloggers took him to task.
Andrea Nill at Think Progress helped expose the story with at post on Tuesday titled, Alabama State Senator Advises Politicians To ‘Empty The Clip’ To Stop Undocumented Immigrants.
Chris in Paris at AMERICAblog quickly followed up with a post: Alabama Republican on undocumented immigrants: ’empty the clip, and do what has to be done,’ remarking that as anyone might have guessed:
“the Alabama Republican now says it was all a big mistake and taken out of context.”
How exactly? With a very lame excuse. As Michael Stickings at the Moderate Voice writes on The Violent, Gun-Loving Rhetoric of Scott Beason, Alabama State Senator:
Beason said the quote stemmed from a story he told at the beginning of the breakfast.
“I began telling the story about a family visiting a big city when some guy with a knife or gun jumps out from behind some bushes and comes at them,” Beason said. “The story talks about how a Democrat handles the situation, I think I said the Democrat tells the guy he’ll put together a charity basketball league or something to raise money to help him. The second family, that father has a gun but takes only one shot. The third family, and that father also has a gun, but he empties the clip. He solves the problem.”
Solving problems was one of the themes of Saturday’s speech, Beason said.
“I think we face a lot of problems and we need to tackle them with everything we have, with all of our brain power, our imagination and with courage,” Beason said. “That’s what I meant by emptying the clip.”
