GOP Led Sedition Isn’t Finished - It’s Time to Face the Facts
If Trump's coup attempt goes unpunished, it will be considered a training exercise.
The above quote gained me 15 seconds of fame back in January when I was credited as some blogger writing it on Ari Melber's MSNBC show.
I still think it's true. But I'd like to add to that thought by saying that unraveling the truth of this matter might be the key to highway when it comes to breaking up the Republican blockade against sanity on Capitol Hill.
President Joe Biden spoke to Congress and the nation on Wednesday night. It was a speech with a vision for the country that harkens back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Biden isn’t FDR, and doesn’t have the (potential-Democrats were split by racism) congressional majorities that passed much of the Great New Deal.
His proposals are supported by a majority of Americans. As a nation we’ve come around to the idea that the government can and should play a role with programs benefiting the many as opposed to the few.
Standing between the administration’s legislative agenda and reality is an intractable group of Republican politicians held together by fealty or fear of the Former Guy. Sure, he’s not on social media these days, but when it comes down to the mother’s milk of politics --namely money-- all roads run through his wing of the party.
We can forget the magical thinking by Senators like Diane Feinstein that somehow a dozen or so Republicans will see the light after hard-won negotiations craft a compromise.
Elon Musk and all his billionaire buddies could descend from their gilded mansions, offering to pay for everything Biden proposed, and nary a Republican vote would be had.
The administration will dominate news media accounts in the coming days via an all-out publicity blitz, with all the big names aligned with the White House.
Republicans, as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy demonstrated following the Biden speech, will fall back on name calling (SOCIALISM!) and repeating bullshit lies like the supposed rationing of hamburgers.
Sounds, bad, huh? The other big story in yesterday’s news offers up a ray of hope.
Key to getting anything done is breaking the GOP’s united front. Since reasoning isn’t a likely path, perhaps the judicial system offers a way out.
The FBI raid on Rudolph Guiliani’s home and office, along with other developments involving law enforcement, is significant. Republicans have grown a thick skin when it comes to criminality and I’m not leaning into any magical thinking about good guys in white hats rounding up all the evil-doers.
I believe the administration’s hands off stance with regard to the Justice Department is for real. At the same time, there appears to be a slew of long-suppressed investigations waiting to be revealed. Let’s hope the floodgates open up over the next month.
It’s going to be a slower-than-I’d-like process, as ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s are crossed. The one thing we do know about the Former Guy’s administration is that they were sloppy.
Guiliani’s self-promotion as an expert in tech is provably false, and the electronic gear seized will be a fountainhead of evidence. We can only hope all the two-bit hustlers playing on this level are offered the opportunity to play ‘let’s make a deal.’
There are 400 people already arrested for the January 6th insurrection, and the feds have made it clear that another 100 or so will get charged. Most of these folks are bit players who will face relatively minor charges; many will cop a plea rather than go to court.
What is also true is that these cases are being pursued as if there is a path toward talking down bigger fish. Smaller fry will flip, leading investigators up the chain of command. I doubt they’ll get the Former Guy (he apparently did pass Mafia 101), but his minions in Congress won’t be so lucky. There were obviously insiders among Republican electeds, along with cooperative law enforcement officials.
The thing is that we have to look at the bigger picture, namely the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism at the heart of the Ukraine scandals, impeachment trials, and the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. They were all manifestations of the same thing.
It will take years for this to play out, and odds are good that many of those involved in the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War will get away relatively unscathed.
So House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is key here. If you want to call your Congresscritter and demand action, tell them to proceed with an inquiry no matter how hard it is.
As Hunter at Daily Kos suggests, it’s time for some mechanism for getting the scope of this sedition into daylight.
There does not appear to be any plausible way for Pelosi and Democratic leadership to get House Republican cooperation on any of it, and for much the same reason Osama bin Laden was never invited to weigh in SEAL Team Six deployments after 9/11.
The plain truth is that Republican-backed hoaxes riling the base into a paranoid froth with provably false claims of rigged elections were intended from the outset as an attack on American democracy, and it was all but a given that it would rile violence-seeking militants into believing that the party was now inviting them to topple that democracy, institute hard-right rule, and bring in a new era of nationalistic retaliation against conservative enemies.
When you claim that a United States election was "stolen" out from under voters, you are specifically wrapping attempts to overturn that election in a mantle of patriotism. It is a given that it will be acted on.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1387230004983992323?s=20
The other part of this political equation is to not be lulled into apathy by the seeming ridiculousness of the GOP effort to whitewash what happened on January 6th.
Here’s Wiliam Saletan at Slate:
Three months after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party still won’t fully renounce it. In Congress, Republicans are opposing an investigation of the attack unless other incidents are included. On Friday, sponsors of a conference at former President Donald Trump’s Miami resort proudly displayed photos of the crowd that had gathered before the attack. On Saturday, Republican donors cheered as Trump boasted about the Jan. 6 crowd and complained that his allies should have fought harder to prevent the certification of his defeat.
In recent weeks, numerous Republican lawmakers have belittled the attack, defended the mob that precipitated it (Sen. Ron Johnson called them “people that love this country”), voted against a resolution condemning it, or accused liberals of overreacting to it. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, speakers blamed a “rigged election” for provoking the rioters. But the sickness goes deeper. The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.
Every player in this conspiracy needs to suffer the consequences. Call it ‘cancel culture,’ call it ‘consequences,’ call it whatever you’d like.
Here’s a San Diego example. Please share:
The “news” at KUSI is doing their bit to help a scammy group associated with the insurrection play the victim card. Paul Rudy on the station’s Good Morning San Diego broadcast, interviewed Jordan Rachel, who is affiliated with a group called Turning Point USA.
She was working hard to paint Point Loma Nazarene University (!) as a hotbed of wrong-headed liberalism due to the refusal of the student government at the school to recognize a chapter of TPUSA.
...“the reason they gave for denying the chapter, is that Turning Point USA promotes ‘problematic rhetoric,’ which of course is very vague.”
Rachel said she believes that excuse signifies, “that their belief is in leftist ideology, which in all actuality is the real problematic rhetoric, especially for those of the Christian faith.”
https://twitter.com/KUSINews/status/1387442209952190467?s=20
Notably not appearing on the program was anybody associated with PLNU. Nor could the station's producers be bothered to spend the 30 seconds or so on the internet looking for a clue as to why somebody at the conservative Christian school might think TPUSA would be problematic.
If KUSI had bothered to look, they would have discovered TPUSA’s leader Charlie Kirk’s promises about hiring 80 buses (it was actually 7) to bring people to Washington DC for the January 6th rally.
KUSI might have also discovered that other conservative student organizations, like the Young Americans for Freedom, have advised their members to avoid TPUSA events, due to the groups’ history of "boosting numbers with racists & Nazi sympathizers."
Or perhaps if they’d gone to Wikipedia, the station might have seen --among dozens of other footnoted entries-- these examples that could be considered, just maybe, problematic:
In September 2020, Turning Point USA came under fire for employing a number of teenagers, including some minors, to post disinformation about climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the integrity of postal voting leading up to the 2020 presidential election.[45]
In October 2018, the Miami New Times reported that TPUSA members at Florida International University shared jokes "about watching underage cartoon pornography and deporting Latina women, and, in the most repugnant case, share racist 'Pepe the Frog' memes showing Syrian men raping a white Swedish woman at gunpoint."[103]
In November 2018, Fox News correspondent Rick Leventhal cut off Turning Point USA's Anna Paulina after she compared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the disease herpes.[104]
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https://twitter.com/AynRandPaulRyan/status/1387586808079290373?s=20
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