They had Trump flags and flags that said “Fuck Biden” but it was the Confederate battle flag paraded inside the breached Capitol, as incendiary and hateful to Black people as the fuckingblack and white swastikaon a blood red field is to me as a Jew, that said it all. The symbolism of those kind of symbols is hard to miss.
The mob’s message was clear, as their leader expressed love toward his flag waving followers: the world is better without you parasites andgetting our way byviolence is a party forus.
It’s like what Ted Cruz snarled at Merrick Garland a few months later while excoriating him about DOJ overreach, feds running to the aid of threatened school board members. “Jeez, it was only a Nazi salute,” he sneered “which youadmitis protected by the First Amendment,” he didn’t even have to add “Jew”, it so naturally suggested itself as the Texan lambasted the mild-manneredGarland.Cruz is that fucking good.Manyof them are, and all very fine people. Waving a Confederate battle flag, as you do, when you’re a patriot.
When Trump revealed his theory of leadership, surround yourself with people less intelligent than you so that you are always the smartest man in the room, we all had fair warning and should have known what to expect.
Actually, most of us did know what to expect. Only it was worse than even those loyal people of less than average intelligence in the bunker with the mad, desperate Trump as he staged a valiant fight against reality could have imagined.
Leaving aside the obvious fact that the zealots in his war room all thought it was a fantastic thrill, with first class room service, on the house!
And is it wrong to have a crush on the most right-wing representative in the Congress?
As we come up to the first anniversary of Trump’s gentle, peaceful, patriotic riot at the Capitol, after weeks of frustrated, manic arm-twisting of Republican election officials in several states, desperate Oval Office meetings with Q-Anon Trump dead-ender loyalists like Mike “Lock Her Up!” Flynn (who urged martial law) Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell, personal attorney Rudy, and the MyPillow CEO, after replacing leadership at the Department of Defense right after the election and instituting a new rule for deploying the National Guard, and finally, right before certification of Biden’s win, assembling a large angry mob, whipping it up and sending it to the Capitol, a ragtag team of co-conspirators, including “alt-right” Council for National Policy member Steve Bannon and several demented authoritarian-leaning legal scholars/conspiracy theorists, sitting in a nearby war room to engineer the blocking of Joe Biden’s presidency by a coordinated plan of objections to certified electors, enabled by an insane “legal” stand by Mike Pence, by a riot, by any means necessary, it’s hard to avoid thinking about it as I drink my coffee today.
You’ll recall that immediately after the riot, when order was finally restored, the rioters allowed to go in peace, and the constitutionally mandated session continued, 147 Trump loyalists in the House, and something like a dozen in the Senate, tried to carry out the mad plan they’d hatched with Trump, insisting that since, as Lyin’ Ted Cruz put it, polls showed that millions of Americans believed the boldfaced lie that the election had been stolen, so there had to be a ten day freeze so yet another investigation could take place to prove a counter-factual case they had lost in court more than 60 times since Biden’s clear victory in the election.
The Trump appointee in charge of cyber security for the election announced, as Barr had informed Trump before parachuting out of the administration just in time, that there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed any election result anywhere. Trump promptly fired his disloyal appointee, expressed great disappointment in Barr and kept doubling down on his lie that he’d been robbed.
Right after the riot a bunch of Trump’s cabinet, including the moronic Betsey DeVos and McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, immediately resigned in protest, with days left in their terms (none will comment now, per their actual loyalties and common interests).
After the riot marquee Republicans, top Trumpers, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, people who’d resisted acknowledging that Biden was the president-elect, for crucial weeks and months leading up to the final day to overturn the election results and the riot, all denounced their enraged leader for launching his reckless and desperate attack on a joint session of Congress doing their constitutional duty.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey, all I can say is count me out, enough is enough,” said Lindsey Graham, from the floor of the Senate immediately after the January 6 Stop the Steal riot. “If you’re a conservative this is the most offensive concept in the world — that a single person could disenfranchise 150,000,000 people.”
You can parse this for obvious bullshit, clearly the most offensive concept in the world to a modern, American conservative is the idea of millions of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, big city dwellers, college students, unionists, liberals, progressives, socialists, anti-racists, minimum wage earners and poor “whites” voting for politicians who will not reflexively favor the super-wealthy and corporations, thereby ousting the “conservatives” from power. Hence John Roberts casting the deciding fifth vote to overrule president George W. Bush and a united Congress (98-0 in the 2006 senate) to make partisan/”racist” voter suppression laws the new constitutional norm (unless you can successfully prove in federal court that they are ONLY racist, and intentionally so, of course, as the Founders intended).
But back to Lindsey, who like his buddy in the House Kevin “not as upset as some people” McCarthy, and even Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell, condemned Trump’s mad, violent plan to maintain power. Trump still hates McConnell, the man who made his biggest achievement, the Trump Court, possible, for belatedly congratulating Biden on his win, for not having Trumpie’s back about the Big Lie being TRUE. McCarthy headed to Mara-Largo where he was reminded of the irresistibly delicious taste of his master’s nether sphincter, he came back fighting the Steal, his story changed to 100% incoherent. Here’s the highly principled, persecuted single white male from South Carolina’s current stance on the man who tried to do the thing most hateful to conservatives:
“It’s his nomination if he wants it, the Republican base appreciated him, we don’t appreciate all the things he does sometimes, but from a policy point of view of he was the most successful president, from a conservative’s point of view, since Ronald Reagan. It is his nomination if he wants it and he will be in the White House in 2024 if he wins a disciplined campaign,” Lindsey Graham told the FOX audience last week.
Ominous though it is that Trump would be back in the White House in 2024, before his imagined inauguration on January 20, 2025, it’s Lindsey, it’s live TV, it’s FOX. So, shit yeah, the night of the 2024 election, when partisan officials installed in Republican-controlled swing states, pursuant to Trump’s Big Lie and his then illegal plan to undo the last “STEAL” by appealing to partisans to bend the then-law just a little, declare Trump the president, he will immediately take power, the day after the election, and woe unto his many enemies.
I have to say, abhorrent as I find her hard right political views, as creepy as I find her facial resemblance to one of the most evil men in American history, I find myself loving Liz Cheney every time I hear her speak. She is clear and cuts to the chase: an American president who incites a riot to try to cling to power, after months of increasingly inflammatory lies and manipulation, making extra-legal efforts in several instances clearly criminal (come on, fellas, give me a break … you just have to say I got 11,780 fucking votes…), and allows that riot to continue for over three hours as he calls at least one Senator/co-conspirator to make sure he’s still going to do his part to block Biden, must never have power again.
For his part, the former president, who, while increasingly beleaguered, is the current leader of the Republican party with their full backing (including paying all his legal fees) is planning an alternate program for January 6. He will tell his delusional version of the story: there WAS massive voter fraud, the INSURRECTION was on ELECTION DAY, his conspiracy was only launched to right a TERRIBLE wrong, that Blacks and others who hate him, Muslims, disloyal Jews, Mexican rapists, Communists, the Chinese, the Italians, Ukrainians and Venezuelans, somehow corrupted weak Republicans like the two traitors in Georgia and too many others to name, to PERPETRATE THE BIGGEST CRIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!! ARE YOU FUCKING LISTENING TO ME, YOU GODDAMNED WEAK LOSER MORONS!!! WE WERE ROBBED, I WAS ROBBED AND WHEN YOU ARE ROBBED YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FORM LYNCH MOBS TO GET BACK WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM YOU AND AVENGE THE THEFT. KILL MY ENEMIES! SECOND AMENDMENT, ARTICLE TWO, I’M STILL THE PRESIDENT — KILL THEM!!!
Meantime, in response to numerous lawsuits and civil and criminal investigations the Orange One does what he’s always done, spend a vast fortune of other people’s money to use the courts to delay and avoid justice. His son and daughter have filed frivolous motions to quash subpoenas for their testimony, which will delay things for at minimum a few months. Others in his orbit site phantom privilege to defy subpoenas and wait for a 6-3 Trump Supreme Court to hopefully back them up, eventually.
For now, in the wake of a year when a billionaire psychopath was Time’s Person of the Year, instead of say, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who, judging by the video of his smart move to protect the Senate from being overrun by enraged “tourists” who’d innocently broken in, possibly saved Mitt Romney’s life, we need to focus on justice being done.
As for the crowd Goodman’s quick thinking turned aside — why not kill a RINO who voted his conscience at one of the fake, evil, witch hunt impeachments of the defrauded, persecuted Leader? Death for the one public act of integrity performed in a long political career, in my opinion, is a little harsh, even if the man is an entitled vulture capitalist by trade, one who continues to vote in a Trumpist/McConnell bloc to thwart all proposed legislation, to prevent it even being debated in the senate. Preventing debate is key for Republicans — if they get to the merits of the argument WE LOSE! filibuster now, filibuster tomorrow, filibuster forever! [1].
There are good reasons for optimism, in spite of our recent history and the wild success of Charles Koch’s reborn John Birch Society Republican Party. We now know for a fact, verified by the sworn testimony of eye witnesses, what all of us were pretty sure of right after the long riot. Trump loved the mayhem, felt the love of that angry crowd during what he described as a love fest, watched it all on live TV with a little stirring in his pants. He ignored numerous urgings, from FOX news, from at least two of his children, from elected Republicans hiding from an exuberant mob of rioters, to call off his peeps. He did so reluctantly, lovingly, after more than three hours had gone by, the National Guard standing down and standing by. During the deadly assault, Liz Cheney informs us, he called at least one Senator, to make sure the plan was in place, that the Senator would do what they’d agreed on to Stop the Steal. No conspiracy, no quid pro quo, no collusion, total exoneration, I’m not a liar YOU ARE A LIAR, the real BIG LIE is your LIE, I don’t stink, YOU STINK, I know you are but what am I?
Is it sad to love Liz Cheney? I don’t feel bad. She is behaving heroically, putting democracy, in this instance, ahead of the willful destruction of our form of government, flawed though it most certainly is. In spite of the infamous spinal flexibility of corporate Democrats, I am feeling hopeful.
The story seems to be changing now, finally. That a third of Republicans surveyed support a violent mob’s right to object to what they’ve been convinced was a crime is troubling. That the courts can still be weaponized for agonizing delay, intolerable. But that two Republicans can stand for values higher than sheer power, and that the evidence pointing toward justice, in a court of law, appears to be so overwhelming, are very encouraging signs for 2022 and beyond. Peace be upon us all.
[1]
“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” – George Wallace
(Fucking Twitter apparently requires permission to reproduce a video from Twitter, which I don’t know how to get, so click the link and watch the 15 second clip of Trump nonchalantly saying the wall Mexico paid for would have been completed by now “had we won the election”)
And this refreshing bit of conceited honesty from the same source, just in:
The Anti-defamation League, a group of Jews who scream in the mass media and bring lawsuits whenever a mainstream outfit pushes an overtly anti-Semitic idea, threatened FOX “news” and forced them to take down this cartoon right out of Germany’s Der Sturmer 1936.
Before FOX was forced (by the Jews) to take it down 15,978 MAGA adherents liked it. 754 were moved to make comments, no doubt about the sinister truth of the cartoon, that fucking Jews control the child raping, child-blood drinking, godless, communist Democrat (sic) party. If that many FOX diehards had come out to vote for Joe Manchin III’s Republican opponent in the last senatorial race in West Virginia things would have gone differently. If the well-drawn cartoon (nice piece of artwork, credit where it’s due) hadn’t come down, the number of likes it would have by now would eclipse Centrist Joe’s 290,000 total votes in the West Virginia race he won by three points.
But a couple of larger points, before I get back to the meeting with my fellow rabbis to figure out how to get more gullible colored people into the country to vote for the party that supports intolerable affronts like affordable child care, skilled elder care, universal health care, slowing the destruction of our habitat, replacing police as first responders to mental health crises, and other communist pipe dreams like that, and to insert these coloreds to replace the “legacy Americans” (tip of the yarmulke to Swanson TV dinner heir Tucker Carlson) who embrace conspiracy theories about the one non-right wing billionaire we know about, George Soros. The story goes that Soros, at the age of six or so, worked closely with the Nazis and profited handsomely by selling Jewish homes. That’s some power, if you think about it. Diabolical, really. No wonder anti-Semites hate Soros!
This cartoon could work better as a real reflection of the USA in 2021 if you had a three headed puppeteer, say, Charles Koch, a descendant of Andrew Mellon and the reclusive, autistic math genius Robert Mercer (who put Trump over the top by hooking him up with Sloppy Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Alternative-Fact), working the puppets for tax cuts for the wealthy, right wing extremist federal judges and dismantling all government regulation (while enforcing laws prohibiting abortion). Or the monstrous Charles Koch could stand in for the rest of his network of philanthropic psychopaths, or Rupert Murdoch could, for that matter.
One more point, and I hesitate to make this obvious point, even as I make it with my traditional shrugging Jewish irony:
Doesn’t the fact that Jews forced super-powerful billionaire reactionary Rapert Merde-och to take down an arguably anti-Semitic cartoon showing a very ugly Jewish puppeteer controlling things kind of make the anti-Semites’ point for them? I mean, nu?
My Hebrew school teacher Miss Lipschitz was a young Israeli woman who, in the warm weather, favored sleeveless shirts. She had a habit, when the class was noisy and popping out of our seats, of extending an arm straight in front of her, snapping her fingers and loudly calling “Shave mahair!” This move would reveal a tuft of hair under her arm, something uncommon in American-born women.
In Hebrew “shave” is the command form of “sit” and “mahair” means “quickly”. She was telling us to sit down and come to order. But to some of us, hopped up on smuggled in candy, resentful about being back in school at 4:00, after a full day of regular school, not knowing a word of Hebrew, the sight gag of “shave my hair” was too good to resist.
When I was eleven I came back from the first day of Hebrew School and told my family that my new teacher was an Israeli woman named Miss Lipschitz. My family found her name as funny as I had. These unexpected moments of levity always came as a welcome relief from our ongoing wars at the dinner table. We all loved to laugh.
My father regarded me with a merry look for a second and said:
“Tell her, ‘if you’re lip shits, my ass chews gum.'”
This off-color deadpanned one-liner drew howls from my sister and me. My mother, though not managing to completely hide her amusement, made a show of reprimanding him for being such a bad example to his children.
If I’d repeated his crude army gag at Hebrew School (these off-color bits would usually be prefaced with ” a guy in the army would say…”), and got in trouble, of course, it would have been completely my problem, another illustration of my lack of common sense, in spite of my high intelligence. Both of my parents would have been on me without any mercy or sense of irony.
Which is funny too, in a way, looking back on it now.
“Oh, the honor system, of course, of course, we’re on the honor system, on my honor. I’m on my honor, absolutely. You have my word, 100%. I swear to you on the grave of my sainted mother, on my sacred honor.”
On September 29, Trump went to his scheduled debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, arriving too late for testing. Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who was the moderator at the debate, later said the event was relying on the “honor system.” Trump railed and snarled at Biden, who was close enough to him to have been in danger. Trump’s contingent refused to wear masks despite rules at the venue to do so. At least 11 people tested positive after the debate.
This honorable gentleman’s assurance was given after a man famous for his punctuality contrived to arrive at a live debate hosted by a FOX moderator too late for mandatory testing, three days after the first (undisclosed) positive test for the strongman who thought wearing a mask made him look vulnerable, weak, who’d made a strong branding decision to be the tough guy, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, as opposed to the wimpy and unmanly mask-wearing Pence, who he’d soon blame for betraying him and send a mob down to threaten, chase, perhaps rough up, or maybe actually hang. The strong contrast to weak, old Biden with his comically gigantic mask.
The tough guy assuring the others “on his honor” that this time he was actually not lying, that he’d never tested positive for Covid in recent weeks (let alone three days earlier) must have been thinking what easy marks, what pathetic losers noncriminals are… as he concealed his recent positive test for a disease that was ravaging the world, one he’d dismissed as a hoax as America led the world in Covid deaths, one he swore on his honor that he’d tested negative for (still his story).
That massive Covid disruption was not his fault in any way, whatever those exaggerated, fake death tolls supposedly were, he’d totally delegated that, to his dimwit alter-ego, his son-in-law the Covid Czar (rewarding his glorious work making historic peace in the Middle East, fixing the federal bureaucracy and ending the Oxycodone overdose crisis). Pence was also assigned Covid Czar, with equal responsibility for the outcome, but with less power than Kushner and a much better guy to send an angry mob after than the husband of his cherished daughter.
Of course, by refusing to wear a mask while bellowing at Biden he was probably hoping to spew enough active Covid to infect and kill the old man he hated and had vowed he could only lose to in a rigged election. He gave the people who prepped him for the “honor system” debate Covid. Loyal Chris Christie got a serious enough case of the deadly disease to need heroic, very expensive emergency treatment at a hospital, and hospitalization, extraordinary measures necessary to save his life. Measures unavailable to virtually any of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died of the pandemic and continue to die of it.
But really, when you’re at the top of the food chain, the apex predator, the only question is, how many more times with this stupid “honor system” bullshit? Isn’t it enough, already, with the make believe about honor systems, not lying, even if it helps you, being nice just so somebody else can fuck you? Nobody has honor, let’s face it, why insult people’s intelligence? You’re a mark that’s going to get strongly played if you believe in that honor bullshit, take my word for that, loser.
Now, did you take care of that little thing we talked about?
gratuitousblahg 