Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Bullying bullies bullying

Speaking of bully politics , I watched Josh Hawley snarling at mild-mannered Attorney General Merrick Garland Wednesday, as did fellow insurrectionists Lyin’ Ted and Tom Cotton and, in a gentler way, the folksy, 88 year-old gentleman conservative from Iowa, ancient Chuck Grassley, laying on the lash as Garland sat for more than four hours being grilled in front of a senate committee.

The Trumpists were pummelling Garland about a memo he sent to local DOJ offices advising them to work closely with local law enforcement to protect school board members against threats of violence.

The Trumpists find this memo offensive and despicably partisan, as it clearly applies only to passionate Trump voters, who are styled “domestic terrorists” if they so much as express their First and Second Amendment rights at school board meetings and some scared little cucks feel threatened.   The partisan memo, they made clear, is grounds for Garland’s removal as A.G.  

The rightwing echo chamber contends, in one endlessly amplified voice, that this intolerable memo is as explosive an affront to America as the loathsome Hillary Clinton murders in Benghazi, something so threatening to American decency and democracy that Garland must answer for it, publicly and under oath.   The NY Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns FOX and the Wall Street Journal, chimed in: 

Today Merrick Garland’s thuggishness and partisanship show him to be unfit for the Supreme Court and he is not ethical and committed to justice as Biden’s attorney general. He should go.  


A website called welovetrump expressed a similar statement,which came up number three on the Duck Duck Go search engine about yesterday’s hearing:

Attorney General Garland Won’t Deny Under Oath that Federal Agents May Have Incited January 6th. Something interesting happened this past week. Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned about January 6th. Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky had a straightforward question. Were federal agents present at the January 6th protest at …


Once Garland took his seat the GOP members of the committee began lustily pounding him with angry sound bytes for the right-wing echo chamber.

Tom Cotton kept calling Garland “judge” and told him, toward the end of his dressing down, that he thanks God that Garland was kept off the Supreme Court and that he thinks Garland should resign in disgrace.  Hawley was more superficially respectful, addressing Garland as General Garland, but his angry aggressiveness — in  defense of innocent parents merely expressing their understandable frustration with libtard cucks and making perfectly justifiable threats, was apparent.  He pointedly challenged Garland to call the guy on the poster behind him, the distraught father whose daughter was raped in a bathroom by a fake trans boy dressed as a girl AND WAS DRAGGED OUT OF THE SCHOOL BOARD MEETING BY SECURITY!!! a domestic terrorist [1].   

Lyin’ Ted began “For eight years under Obama the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized.  When you came before this body during your confirmation hearing, you promised things would be different.” The four years with four Trump A.G.’s personally loyal to Trumpie, enabling their boss’s seamless obstruction of justice? Never happened, irrelevant, immaterial. How dare you?!! We’re talking about what that hateful black devil did!

Then, using his genius as a collegiate debater, Cruz forced Garland to admit that a fed up parent simply giving the Nazi salute at a school board meeting, especially if the smug, Nazi bastard deserved it, was protected expression under the First Amendment.   

I watched a GOP senator take one word from a statute — “annoy”– and focus on it to make the rest of the law Garland is intent on enforcing (to protect school board members from the physical rage of infuriated mobs) seem like liberal scolding — pricelessly sickening. 

Garland, they all agreed, owed Trump nation an apology.  Garland, who had no reason to apologize about the memo Republicans were flogging him over, acquitted himself as an earnest, mild-mannered, judicious man.   The most respectful thug ever.

The geniuses of the GOP on the Committee were on a mission unrelated to law or justice, they were busy making Benghazi-style talking points for their base (al-Q’eada, in Arabic). Roll clip three:

“This is shameful. Judge, this is shameful. This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful. Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court. You should resign in disgrace, judge.”

source

Come on, wrestling fans, thirty words, each one a direct knee in the nuts!  Hard to improve on that one by Cotton. 

Hawley tried hard, probably got the one about pretending Garland had called the father whose daughter had been raped by an alleged fake trans boy in the girl’s bathroom a domestic terrorist in a playable byte for OANN, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, FOX, etc.

Lyin’ Ted got in a killer shot by making the Jewish jurist admit that a disgruntled guy at a schoolboard meeting who gives some smug putz the Nazi salute is exercising his First Amendment right of free expression, something the Department of Justice is sworn to protect. Garland acknowledged that simply giving the Nazi salute is indeed expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.

But what was your larger point, Lyin’ Ted, in making the Jewish A.G. tell America that he protects a Nazi’s absolute right to give his party’s heil Hitler salute anywhere and any place he so chooses?

All that poor guy did was give that smug school board the good old Nazi salute, no violence just a strong, constitutionally protected expression of his opinion.

What is America coming to, these senators wanted to know, when you can’t even give the Hitler salute or fly into an understandable rage after your daughter is raped in a school bathroom, by a rapist dressed as a girl?

Garland didn’t seem to have an answer beyond repeating that the DOJ is committed to making sure angry mobs don’t carry out threatened violence against school board members for things like insisting that American history courses include an accounting of slavery, segregation and violent mobs who attack and kill people they hate and never face justice.

The seething hostility of these Big Lie embracing partisans, one after another, is so reminiscent of Nazi judges and prosecutors barking dismissively at defendants during the Thousand Year Reich. They certainly deserve a big old Nazi salute!

Happy Halloween!

[1] Cotton also, inaccurately, said the high school girl

“was raped in a bathroom by a boy wearing girls’ clothes and the Loudoun County School Board covered it up because it would interfere with their transgender policy during pride month.”

The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia https://nyti.ms/3nHQvqh

The true story of that girl’s rape in a school bathroom is more complicated and has nothing to do with gay pride or liberals on school boards.

How much of the $50,000,000 Stop the Steal ad buy did Zuckerberg keep?

As Facebook fights the increasing evidence that it prioritizes profit for its billionaire owner over everything else, I wonder why nobody is asking how much of Trump’s $50,000,000 mostly internet ad buy to promote his Big Lie about a stolen election went directly to Mr. Zuckerberg?   

How much did Facebook make, directly, from selling ads promoting Trump’s Big Lie?

It’s a wonder to me that the $50,000,000 ad buy is not more in the public mind. $50 000,000 is a mind blowing sum to spend selling any product.

Then, consider, it was $50,000,000 in dark money raised in the weeks leading up to Trump’s second impeachment, when it looked like the madman was poised to do something even more desperate than send a mob down to stop Congress and lynch his vice president after the VP was warned by conservatives with gravitss to stay away from open sedition.

They raised and spent $50,000,000 to promote a lie that fueled the rage of a mob that attacked and battled police, breached all fortifications and stormed the Capitol, forcing Congress to be evacuated, as it was certifying Biden’s victory.

How much did Mark, a man not yet forty, worth well north of $100,000,000,000, personally pocket off of Trump’s $50,000,000 mostly internet ad buy?

It’s a fair question, no?

Yer Confederate battle flag

Why do many of us, including virtually every Black American, regard the Confederate flag as a symbol of targeted hatred equivalent to Mr. Hitler’s swastika?

Historian Heather Cox Richardson:

In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will.


In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-26-2021?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

Fascism, anyone?

Short video by the author of How Fascism Works, beginning with the cult of personality that causes the political right and democratically elected conservative leaders to fall in line behind a dominating autocratic leader.

Note that Stanley never mentions the one plank 2020 GOP party platform: whatever the Big Guy wants.

Führerworte haben gesetzeskraft!

The Leader’s word is law!

The 1860 election

The last time this country was as divided as it is right now, it was the monetary interests of the tiny minority that owned slaves that decided the two sides needed to settle the Constitutional question of chattel slavery on the battlefield. Today it is a tiny minority of “Right to Work” billionaires who would, in many cases, be happy to employ slave laborers, who are driving a zero-sum culture/legal war to decide the fate of our long experiment in balancing the privileges of our wealthiest and “majoritarian tyranny”.

In 1860, Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln was excluded from the ballot in every state that would soon secede from the Union and prepare for The War of Northern Aggression excluded A candidate must circulate a petition to get on the ballot and the future Confederacy would not cotton to such traitors in their midst, so candidate Lincoln had no public advocates and few signatures down south. He was therefore legally left off of the ballot in 1/3 of the then 33 states.

When he won a plurality of the vote anyway (there were four candidates) and a majority of the Electoral College, the slaveholders had enough, Lincoln was illegitimate, their states quickly began to secede and prepare for a violent struggle against the tyrant Lincoln.

Today reasonable Republicans, like 88 year-old Chuck Grassley (running for reelection, because why the fuck not?), took only five or six weeks to freely acknowledge that Biden won the election on November 3, 2020. It took him only a day to denounce the MAGA riot, rioter rage fueled by a long-promoted, many times debunked lie, that brought business in the Capitol to a halt. Of course, once he said these self-evident things he got on board with the mastermind of the Big Lie and voted in a bloc to block an investigation into the January 6 MAGA riot, and anything else Biden and his party try to do. That’s politics!

But make no mistake these “Second Amendment, fuck the lazy poor and don’t let them kill their unborn, no need for a living wage, keep our borders closed, climate catastrophe skeptical, no budget for enforcing tax laws against the rich, partisan state legislatures not courts decide national election outcomes” motherfuckers are determined to see blood in the streets, come hell, high water or even criminal prosecutions of the conspirators most hell-bent on installing a permanent one-party oligarchy.

One such conspirator, contemnor [1] Sloppy Steve Bannon, is publically calling for a gigantic army of “shock troops” (storm troopers) for the next round of political violence, exercising his First Amendment right to talk the ugliest possible shit.

USA! USA!!!

[1]

Contempt of Congress

Definition

Congress has the authority to hold a person in contempt if the person’s conduct or action obstructs the proceedings of Congress or, more usually, an inquiry by a committee of Congress.

Contempt of Congress is defined in statute, 2 U.S.C.A. § 192, enacted in 1938, which states that any person who is summoned before Congress who “willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry” shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a maximum $1,000 fine and 12 month imprisonment.

Before a Congressional witness may be convicted of contempt, it must be established that the matter under investigation is a subject which Congress has constitutional power to legislate.

Generally, the same Constitutional rights against self-incrimination that apply in a judicial setting apply when one is testifying before Congress.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contempt_of_congress

Seditious Conspiracy, Mr. Eastman?

Right wing legal extremist John Eastman needs to testify about his expansive role in Trump’s wild plan to overturn certified election results and have himself declared the winner of an election he lost by an 8,000,000 vote margin and an Electoral College tally identical to the one he racked up while kicking Crooked Hillary’s ass, while losing by a much more respectable 3,000,000 votes.

Mr. Eastman had put himself on the radar of Mr. Trump’s political aides during the election when Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, had shared on Twitter an article Mr. Eastman had written. The article, in an echo of racist questions stoked by Mr. Trump about where President Barack Obama had been born, questioned whether Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, could legally become president because her parents had not been born in the United States.

Now, confronting election results that showed Mr. Trump lost, one of Mr. Trump’s aides reached out to Mr. Eastman to see whether he could come over to the hotel to help Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Eastman said he was only in the room for 15 minutes before being ushered out — but it was long enough, he said, for him to catch Covid-19 there, and he became ill for several weeks. By the time he felt better, it was the beginning of December — when Mr. Trump called to see whether Mr. Eastman could help bring legal action directly before the Supreme Court. In the days that followed, Mr. Eastman filed two briefs with the Supreme Court on Mr. Trump’s behalf, but those efforts quickly failed.

The Lawyer Behind the Memo on How Trump Could Stay in Office https://nyti.ms/3A7XCfE 

This legally sophisticated pettifogging Birther seditionist needs to testify under oath about his role in advising the former president on a supremely brazen last ditch extralegal way to cling to power, and about the intent behind his speech to help whip up the crowd who marched down to the Capitol and lynch the weak, disloyal Mike Pence.

Am I wrong?