Sessions Cheers Young Cons for Not Backing Down, Then Backs Down from Anti-Hillary Chant
Apparently, Jeff Sessions isn’t too big on the whole “lock her up” chant. Or, at least he isn’t when the media decides to make a case out of it.
Days after laughing along with young conservatives who started a “lock her up chant” at a young conservatives conference in Washington and even saying the words himself, Sessions backed away after a raft of over-reactionary think pieces from entirely predictable sources that freaked out about it.
The whole thing began at the Turning Point USA conference earlier this week, at which Sessions was a speaker.
“I like this bunch, I gotta tell you,” Sessions said. “You’re not going to be backing down. Go get ’em. Go get ’em!”
It was at this point that someone started a chant of “lock her up!” which gained momentum until Sessions himself said the words and laughed.
“I heard that a long time on the last campaign,” Sessions said with a smile on his face.
It was, all in all, a moment of levity during a young conservative conference. Yet, the press had a conniption commensurate with Donald Trump ordering a Coke or Hillary Clinton using a private email server accessed by foreign powers to illegally store classified information and then being let off by James Comey because the FBI invented an element of intent in a statute where intentionality doesn’t actually play a part. (Oh, sorry, they actually didn’t freak out about the last one.)
In an opinion piece on CNN titled “Jeff Sessions’ smile at ‘lock her up’ tells us everything,” Peggy Drexler posited that “(t)hose looking for evidence that President Donald Trump’s misogynistic attitude and tone have effectively penetrated the culture need look no further than Tuesday’s conservative leadership conference in Washington.”
Apparently seeking any sort of justice for Clinton’s email server is now bigotry, since, “(a)s President Trump’s legal (and other) problems continue to mount — and with Sessions facing some of his own — it’s hard to believe that he or any member of the administration would so vigorously continue to sound a rallying cry that has proven meritless. Clinton, of course, was cleared.”
Yes, Clinton was “cleared” — thanks again to an FBI that wasn’t particularly interested in enforcing our statutes as written. (This is a common theme for Democrats, who now believe enforcing immigration laws as they exist on the books qualifies as racism.) And, as for the “legal … problems” of President Trump and Jeff Sessions, please do keep dreaming. But Drexler’s rhetoric — that “gleefully slamming a vanquished female opponent (the first woman to get a major-party nod to run for president, as it happens)” was somehow arrant sexism — wasn’t an uncommon reaction in the outrage factory.
So, speaking about an incident which occurred just seconds after the attorney general extolled the virtues of “not … backing down,” Sessions decided to back down.
“Well, I met I with a group of enthusiastic high school students and they spontaneously broke into that chant. Perhaps should have taken a moment to advise them that … you’re presumed innocent until cases are made,” Sessions said during a Thursday press conference.
One thing that Sessions doesn’t seem to particularly understand is that issuing an apology of this sort isn’t going to stop liberals like Peggy Drexler and her ilk, who believe that Sessions — and every conservative in America, including a room full of high schoolers — represents a reprehensible strain of sexism within American political thought. Thus, it only makes sense to apologize if Sessions really thought he did something wrong.
Except he clearly didn’t. The phrase “lock her up” is a comical way of expressing the gravity of a scandal the media tends to treat as a throwaway (or act the way Drexler did — that since Clinton was “cleared” there’s nothing to see here).
Presumption of innocence is important, but so is making sure the guilty are punished and the justice system holds people accountable. By backing away from this, he’s essentially taken the side of Hillary and her defenders. Not a good look.
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