Texas GOP convention will happen in person -- but Republican leaders will speak via video

[soothsayer]

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/texas-gop-convention-will-happen-in-person-but-republican-leaders-will-speak-via-video/

Snip

As the state has seen a surge in coronavirus cases, calls have been growing over the past week for the party to cancel its Houston event.

The Republican Party of Texas is moving forward with its controversial in-person convention during the coronavirus pandemic — but elected officials including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will be giving their scheduled speeches virtually.

“All the elected officials are switching from a live, in-person speech to videos,” Kyle Whatley, the party’s executive director, said during a town hall livestreamed Tuesday night. “They’re doing that for us in order to focus all the attention on the business of the meeting and to get everybody in and out of here as quickly and as safely as possible.”

Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
Texas Republican officials typically headline their party’s biennial state convention, which this year is scheduled for July 16 to 18 at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center. Roughly 6,000 people are expected to attend the event. Attendees will be required to wear masks during most of the gathering, according to party Chair James Dickey, after Abbott issued a statewide mask mandate last week.

[texasfiddler]

1. That's elitist and selfish. Oh yeah the GOP!

Get all the underlings sick.

[malaise]

2. Well if Texas ReTHUGs are willing to expose themselves while their leaders hide

they deserve whatever comes their way

[Phoenix61]

3. What a bunch of snowflakes! nt

[ret5hd]

4. COWARDS!!! You chickenshit snively cowards!!!

Oh my god, my sides are hurting from laughing at ya'll (repugs) so hard! Not only will you not open your eyes, you have purposefully decided to keep them closed with a multi-layered duct tape/superglue concoction!

[tanyev]

5. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What happened to Dan Patrick's willingness to sacrifice himself?

[soothsayer]

6. Well, he's still willing to sacrifice others

So he’s got that going for him

[dalton99a]

7. Typical Republican hypocrisy

[frazzled]

8. Let them eat (infected) cake!

How Marie Antoinette of the elected officials. (With apologies to Marie Antoinette, who reportedly never said that.)

[soothsayer]

9. I thought she said let them eat brioche

Not true? Don’t make me sad...!

[frazzled]

10. No, it is most probably apocryphal and/or misattributed

This was covered pretty extensively in Antonia Fraser’s exhaustive biography (I read it!)

But here, from a Wikipedia article on the subject that is worth reading in full:

While the phrase is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no reliable record of her having said it.

The phrase was first attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789, supposedly having been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI.

Although anti-monarchists never cited the anecdote during the French Revolution, it acquired great symbolic importance in subsequent historical accounts when pro-revolutionary commentators employed the phrase to disdain the upper classes of the Ancien Régime as oblivious and selfish. . . .

The phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his autobiography (whose first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published in 1782). In the book Rousseau recounts an episode in which he was seeking bread to accompany some wine he had stolen. Feeling too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess.” . . . Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, as Confessions is not considered to be entirely factual. . . .

A second consideration is that there were no actual famines during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, the first of which occurred in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king's coronation on 11 June 1775, and the second in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. . . . Letters from Marie Antoinette to her family in Austria at this time reveal an attitude largely contrary to the spirit of Let them eat brioche:

“It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The King seems to understand this truth.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

[soothsayer]

12. I'll read this after Bastille day...

So I can eat cake!

[jayfish]

11. Why? It All A Hoax, Right? -NT-