Infamy?

[sleigh]

 I don’t know that I’ll ever witness another day quite like yesterday. It started out well for Team Blue, with Georgia voting to send two Democrat senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to Washington, including their very first Black senator in Warnock. (“Minority Leader Mitch McConnell”—ahh, those words have a lovely ring!) But that news would be entirely overshadowed by the more dramatic and tragic events of the day.

Starting at 1:00 PM, Congress was to perform the (usually entirely-uncovered by newsfolk because it’s a pro forma and entirely boring task) tradition of counting the electoral votes and certifying the elections of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vice President. The set-up was already in place: despite relentless badgering by President Trump, Vice President Pence refused to play the role of total Trump toady and sided with the Constitution instead, saying “I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority.” Good job, Mike! Sorry that Trump’s going to tear you a new one on Twitter for being ‘disloyal.’

Washington was positively stuffed full of Trumpist protestors, and Trump played them for his own purposes. He held a ‘rally’ for them near the White House, where seditious and inflammatory language was hurled at an audience primed for such. Rudy Giuliani told them that “trial by combat” would be required. Donald Trump Jr. warned those insufficiently loyal Republican Congress-folk that “We're coming for you.” The star speaker, Trump, repeated what he’s been saying ever since the election about how it was “stolen” and he actually won “by a landslide.” The president rebuked Pence, urged his supporters to “fight much harder,” and promised the crowd that he’d walk with them down to the Capitol to protest. (He, of course, wouldn’t do that—he went back to the White House to watch the events unfold on television.)

But the crowd marched—Trump/Pence, American, and Confederate flags flying—and surrounded the Capitol. The front ranks of the mob stormed the building and broke in past the hopelessly outnumbered Capitol police. The protest turned into a bloody insurrection and attempted coup, halting the counting of the electoral votes until the National Guard and several local/regional police forces finally pushed back the insurrectionists and cleared the Capitol so Congress could reconvene. Finally, at 3:33 A.M. on January 7, Congress finally confirmed the outcome of the November 3 election.

Here are my takeaways from the yesterday’s events. First, for those who are still Trumpists, I have little-to-no sympathy. You’ve been duped for years by a con man desperately trying to hold onto power—which is all he cares about. You’re just disposable pawns he’s using; if you do his bidding he’ll tell you how much he loves you, but he actually doesn’t give a damn about you or whether you get jailed, hurt, injured, or killed in the process of doing what he tells you to do. If you can’t see that by now, you are deliberately blinding yourself to the facts. The man is a megalomaniac.

Secondly, there are now two GOP Parties, and Republicans need to quickly choose which one they belong to. There’s Trump’s GOP—his famous ‘base’—of which he is the despotic Supreme Leader, and whom he will use, profit from, and continue to try to wield.

Then there’s the ‘old’ GOP with its traditional conservative values. That political party unfortunately seems to have vanished of late. I hope it comes back. I don’t generally share their core values but I do respect them, and there needs to be an opposing, balancing force against the far left, whose ideas are sometimes (in my opinion) too radical and unrealistic, as are the values of the far right.

Thirdly, Joe Biden demonstrated to Trump with his speech how a president SHOULD react. And Mike Pence deserves a round of applause. After four years of gazing adoringly at Trump from the sidelines, he has shown that when he must, he can display a spine. At the moment, he appears to be the acting president. It wasn’t Trump who called out the National Guard last night, it was Pence, overstepping his boundaries when the actual president was the person ultimately responsible for the rioting. And applause also to those Republicans who refused to be a party to the political theater of objecting to the electoral vote counts.

Fourthly, NOT deserving applause but derision and jeers are the several Republicans who sided with Trump and challenged the electoral vote count, chief among them being Trumpist Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. My sincere hope is that by lashing themselves tightly to their Dear Leader, they have effectively killed their political careers and will go down in flames in their next election. It was jarring to see this ugliness even after the Capitol was stormed and entered by insurrectionists.

Finally, the ultimate contempt goes to Donald J. Trump, our would-be tinpot dictator. The ultimate blame for yesterday’s debacle will be laid at his feet, and I hope he is prosecuted for his part in it. He’s STILL not done. While trying to mollify the anger against him by saying he now at long last supports a peaceful transfer of power, just read his formal statement (channeled through deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino's Twitter account since Trump’s own Twitter account has been suspended): “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20. I have always said we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it's only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again.”

Read that closely: he’s still denying he lost, still insisting that he actually won, and still calling on his troops to continue the protests and fight back. So much for a peaceful transfer. And to call his four years as president “the greatest first term is presidential history” is simply delusional. After all, when Trump took office, the Republicans held the White House, the Senate, and the House. Now, four years on, they hold none of those.

There are calls for Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to be invoked (I suggested that myself yesterday) or for Trump to once more be impeached—since a twice-impeached president can’t be re-elected. I say go for it.

No matter how you look at it, yesterday was a day for the history books, and a day where Trump cemented his standing as Worst President Ever.

Comments

[minnehaha]

A solid recap, thanks. I think that "the far left" has ideas that are not radical, but restructuring, and that those ideas shift the balance of wealth to people who work hard and earn too little.

Everyone deserves a wage that allows them to live inside a building. Everyone deserves a wage that allows them to eat non-industrial food.
Everyone deserves health care. Everyone deserves dental care.
Everyone deserves a community to live in, and to support, and to be supported by, and this includes military veterans above all.

And NO ONE deserves multi-billion dollar fortunes.

K.

[sleigh]

I don't disagree with your thoughts on what everyone deserves, but I do feel that the 'rigidity' and unwillingness to accept compromise by some of the farther left folk among the liberal segment makes it more difficult for those ideals to be accomplished. If I'm starving, refusing to take half an apple and insisting on getting a whole one is counter to my own best interests.

[minnehaha]

Nationalizing the health care system and removing the profit motive is the only way people are going to ALL have health care. I don't see how this could be compromised. *I* have great health care. I don't want to give it up. And this is an argument that I have encountered against nationalizing the health care system.

Those of us who are able to afford private insurance now are pretty likely to be able to afford private health insurance in the future. Tying health care to employment is a mad idea; employers spend too much on this benefit into the profit-based medical world.

If this disagreement in society about the right to health care is not about money, then I don't know what it is about. I guess hatred is the other option.

K.