So writes Mary Burke in her first fundraising letter as a Democratic Party challenger to Walker, and I'm just wondering why it's okay to say "put another nail in the coffin." Whatever happened to civility? Remember when Sarah Palin was attacked for using a target image and tweeting "Don't retreat — RELOAD."
To be fair to Burke, targeting and reloading are metaphors of killing, but the metaphor of nailing down a coffin lid implies that one's victim is already dead. On the other hand, why bother to fight the Tea Party if it's already dead? I'm afraid the implication might be execution by burial, which is quite a disturbing topic. Excerpt from Wikipedia:
During the reign of the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi it is said that approximately 400 to 700 scholars were buried alive near the capital. They were condemned for saving books from destruction after an imperial ban on the classics....
Tacitus, in his work Germania, records that German tribes practiced two forms of capital punishment; the first where the victim was hanged on trees, and another, where the victim was tied to a wicker frame, pushed face down into mud and buried. The first was used to make an example of traitors, the second was used for punishment of dishonourable or shameful crimes, such as cowardice or sodomy....
In medieval Italy, unrepentant murderers were buried alive, head down, feet in the air, a practice referred to in passing in Canto XIX of Dante's Inferno....
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