Saturday, June 11, 2022

Stray Thoughts on the Recent Televised Hearing of the January 6 Committee

1. If you haven’t been following the January 6 Committee’s work over the last year or so or paid attention to their recent televised hearing (either by watching it or reading up on it afterward), you are part of the problem in this country. On Thursday they laid out a thorough, damning, and absolutely infuriating account of a coup attempt orchestrated at the highest levels of the Trump administration and very nearly successfully completed. The 11-minute video that they showed was enough on its own, though there is a mountain of hard evidence behind it – over 140,000 documents by last public count. We know what happened. We know what the plotters wanted. We know what would have happened to the country if they’d succeeded since we’ve all seen that how that movie ended in Germany in the 1930s. It is the stuff of nightmares, and the fact that so many “Americans” seem to think that this was either acceptable is a thorough indictment of their patriotism, intelligence, and morality.

2. Every single one of the people who invaded the Capitol Building that day should be rotting in jail as an insurrectionist, and everyone who planned, incited, and led that failed coup should have faced the full fury of the punishments available to the federal government months ago. Treason has a price and it is long past time that price was paid.

3. If that price is not paid there will simply be more treason. An insurrection that is not punished is called a dress rehearsal, and the Republican Party has spent the last eighteen months actively working to ensure that the next time they try to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States they will succeed. At this point I’d say it’s even money if we still have a republic in 2025.

4. It’s not an accident that the conservatives who have pushed back against this treason, who have taken their oaths to Constitution and country seriously and are just as horrified by the failed coup as the rest of us, have been systematically marginalized within or removed from the Republican Party. The GOP is no longer a legitimate political body nor is it in any way conservative. It is a radical and subversive conspiracy with a logo, and it needs to be treated that way.

5. I do feel bad for my honest conservative friends, who have nobody to represent them in government anymore.

6. Liz Cheney has been wrong about so many things in her career but here she is, destroying her own political future in order to do what is absolutely and unequivocally right, calling out the cancerous rot at the heart of the Republican Party and methodically destroying their feeble arguments that the Trump Coup was anything other than a treasonous assault on the United States by internal enemies, and for that she deserves to be called a hero. I can disagree with her politics and still respect the clear moral victory she has won here and the good fight she is waging for the United States of America.

7. As someone else pointed out, the Republicans have put out a lot of counterprogramming to distract from the public airing of their treason, but no counterevidence to deny it.

8. I spent some time working for lawyers back in the day, and the old saying is true: When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, change the subject. The GOP is doing everything it can to change the subject right now, no matter how petty, immoral, vicious, hateful, or ugly. And that tells you all you need to know.

9. After all, genuine American patriots want to know what happened so we can prevent it from happening in the future and punish those responsible. Those with something to hide want to keep it secret so they can avoid punishment for their actions and try again. Draw your own conclusions accordingly.

10. The next televised hearing will be Monday, June 13 at 10am Eastern. Let’s see if the gutless cowards at Fox will air it like every other network in the United States did with the last hearing or whether they will get the Candyman, their leading in-house sideshow clown, to rant and rave commercial-free for the entire time like they did on Thursday. It’s telling that Fox would rather lose money than see their captive audience exposed to reality.

Good times, man.

4 comments:

LucyInDisguise said...

5. (And I kinda picked that number at random …)

I was born into and raised in a Republican Family/Household. Up until I sat down and watched the Watergate Hearings I thought of myself as a Republican. Like my parents, I tended to lean a little more center-right than full-on conservative but still …

Nixon was the beginning of the end for me and that party. Rayguns shot that relationship in the head and removed any remaining doubts I may have been harboring. When Ronny got the nomination, I declared myself independent. From that time forward I studied the candidates and voted for the individual that I felt best represented where I was politically - which until Pappy Bush got elected was still Center-Right - but I always seemed to be voting Democrat. My father would have been appalled. He likely would have been voting for Democrats right alongside me, be he would have been appalled nonetheless.

I still consider myself to lean towards the conservative side, which, on today’s yardstick places me so far left of center that everyone I know considers me to be a Flamin’ Liberal. That may actually have become true now, but … damn.

We need a strong conservative party in this country if only to rein in the worst excess of the Liberals. But the Republican Party died about the time Nixon resigned, never to be heard from again. The new clown car of rethuglicans does not fill the bill, and they seriously need to pay the price for their duplicity and treasonous acts.

Keep swinging - eventually you're goin' to hit something

Lucy

David said...

It's a target-rich environment, what can I say?

Barry Goldwater died complaining that the country as a whole and the GOP in particular had lurched so far into right-wing extremism that he'd become a liberal without changing anything in his beliefs, which was perhaps an exaggeration but not by a whole lot. My dad voted for Goldwater in 1964, but by the early 2000s - after Newt Gingrich ramped up the Culture War and Bush Junior launched the flatly unconstitutional Unitary Executive Theory - he'd washed his hands of the GOP. "Bastards stole my party," he complained.

I've never been a Republican, though until the early 2000s I considered myself enough of an independent to vote for the candidate rather than the party. Most of those candidates were Not Republican, but not all. I grew up in an Old Republican area, where Bush Senior was considered the right-wing edge of acceptable and that parvenu Reagan was just tacky. There were reasonable Republicans there.

I have to say it's been a long time since I considered voting for any GOP candidate no matter what they are like as an individual - the mere fact that a person chooses to tie themselves to that howling morass of insanity and authoritarianism is enough to disqualify them as far as I am concerned.

We do need a grown-up, responsible conservative party. We haven't had one since the early 1990s and every year the GOP doubles down on its right-wing extremism until the logical result happened on January 6, 2021.

Fuck them sideways with a Buick, I say.

LucyInDisguise said...

Couldn't argue with that. Wouldn't want to.

And, again, to be perfectly clear: Not just any Buick:

A 1957 Buick Roadmaster. (But only after you sharpen the fins a bit.)

Good night to all.

Lucy

David said...

Sounds like a plan to me.

Good night indeed. :)