“A lot of these defendants — and I’m going to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully — but they’re all fucking short-bus people,” Watkins told TPM. “These are people with brain damage, they’re fucking retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum.”
“But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our coworkers — they’re part of our country. These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history. Fuck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler.”
I’m not a lawyer, but I do know that this country will execute the mentally disabled, so I don’t know why Q-Shaman should get a break.
Chief Oshkosh
Writing as one who has worked with lovely people who indeed “took the short bus,” I’d say that the moral of the story here is that assholes hire asshole attorneys. Fuck this guy. There’s a lot of other ways to say what he said that don’t disrespect anyone.
Soprano2
I read that, I say “fuck them”, they’d have no sympathy for anyone else in a similar situation. Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime, assholes. I don’t believe it anyway – all of those people are not “on the spectrum”, it’s just an excuse their lawyers came up with in desperation. Besides, being “on the spectrum” IS NOT AN EXCUSE FOR COMMITTING INSURRECTION!!!
Lavocat
This guy is AN ATTORNEY!!!??? He should be disbarred simply for going on the record and saying ANYTHING like this. Holy fucking shit! I am an attorney and if ANYONE of my employees said this on the record, they’d be gone before they got back to the office.
JPL
@Chief Oshkosh: I agree with you a hundred percent.
RSA
@Chief Oshkosh: Amen.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chief Oshkosh: hear, hear. No need to slander the disabled because your client is a willfully ignorant racist
cckids
@Chief Oshkosh: Thank you. As a parent of a wonderful son who, likewise, used that mode of transport, that attorney needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Assclown.
Betty Cracker
Is this the same genius attorney who okayed Q-loser and Q-loser’s-mom’s disastrous TV interview where they totally incriminated themselves?
Still, he’s not wrong about the propaganda onslaught, and that’s a common theme among the insurrectionists’ defense teams. But his own analogy isn’t great for his client: “I was just following orders” wasn’t exculpatory for Nazi henchmen, and it shouldn’t be for the insurrectionists either.
PS: Remember that asshole Republican congressman who likened the insurrectionists to tourists in a recent hearing? (Name escapes me…) Enterprising people uncovered photos of his panicked reaction to the 1/6 invasion of the Capitol Building, and he’s getting dragged to hell on Twitter for it. LOL!
The Dangerman
PERHAPS disrespectfully?
The other side has gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs mad. No disrespect intended for Cocoa Puffs.
Ten Bears
This is literally the problem with a “commission”, spend a couple years further confusing the issue before sweeping it under a rug, like the Hamilton Commission (“9/11”), and the Warren Commission (JFK). A cover-up, no one responsible will be held responsible, while the damned fools that got sucked into the dirt-work are going to jail, they lives forever … changed.
The damned fools that got sucked into the dirt-work, to say the least, are going to jail, their lives forever … changed. I’m pretty ambivalent about that: on the one hand, where I come from when you buy the ticket you take the ride. But on the other they’re damned fools, that got sucked into it. Not just a handful, but a broad swath of the population. Bigger than a few damned fools.
Also bothered that if I had pulled a stunt like that I’d be dead.
ET
That may/may not be true for the QShamen and some of the others, but I would guess that a lot of them would be highly offended because they knew what they were doing and will be happy to tell you so if asked. Many are doubling down and some aren’t blaming that fucking guy but using that as a reason.
Citizen Alan
@Lavocat: I had to read the article for myself to believe that he actually said that and it wasn’t mistermix paraphrasing him sarcastically. Amazing!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: Andrew Clyde, I think he’s the guy flattening himself against the wall behind what looks like a security agent with a gun
BC in Illinois
This is the quote of Mr. Shaman’s defense attorney.
He thinks that he’s making the best case he can on his client’s behalf.
As J J MacNab, who follows “sovereign citizens, tax protesters, U.S. paramilitary militia groups, and related anti-government extremist organizations,” commented:
Joe Falco
@Betty Cracker:
Andrew Clyde. He’s an absolute clod.
Raven
@Joe Falco: my rep
Baud
That’s what the trial is for. They will have a prior criminal history in due course.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT: I just listed to the Fresh Air interview of Carol Loennig about her new book about the Secret Service, which is very scary. Not surprisingly, the NPR interview was very both-sidesy and barely grazed the trump stuff. Rachel Maddow’s segments on it were much more informative. Most dramatic part– leaving aside Vanessa trump’s probable affair with her kids’ agent, and Tiffany’s rumored fling with one of hers– is that trump made one of his detail a deputy CoS, where he played a key role in organizing the Tulsa rally and the Lafayette Square performance. Then when trump left office, he went back to the Secret Service as a deputy director.
R-Jud
@Chief Oshkosh: Preach. My kid takes the short bus and is on the spectrum. Fuck this guy and his client.
Baud
“My client pleads not guilty by reason of passing the buck.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: on topic:
Baud
“If my client were a bad person, wouldn’t the police have killed him on the spot?”
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: & @Joe Falco: Yep, that’s the one:
There’s also a photo of him helping other justifiably terrified congresscritters barricade a door.
Adam Lang
He seems nice.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Lavocat:
That’s a conversation that you have quietly with your opposite number as you’re begging for a grant of a little mercy on a plea.
patrick II
Greta Thunberg is on the spectrum and I can’t think of a better person.
Frank Wilhoit
@BC in Illinois: Can you make a better one?
Ken
It reminded me of a scene in one of Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Maijstral novels, where in order to get out of a duel with Maijstral a character says “All I did was hit the man. It was just… political protest.”
At which Maijstral’s second says, “In that case, I believe my associate (editor: a seven-foot tall, very strong and very angry alien) has some political points to make with you…”
Not that I’m advocating anyone perform brutal acts of tourism on Representative Clyde.
Martin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: This is why Biden swapped his detail out for people he knew when he was VP. They had knowledge there were agents they couldn’t trust.
James E Powell
@Chief Oshkosh:
Agree completely. They are cruel people.
persistentillusion
@cckids:
cckids and Chief Oshkosh, I also concur. My son rode the horizontally truncated bus and now in his 30s has never attempted armed insurrection. The occasional grumble about an early start to the working day, but no treason.
feebog
Just going to lay this out here. Any Secret Service Agent who expressed support for the January 6 insurrection should be fired for cause. All of these agents took an oath to defend the constitution and have violated that oath is they expressed support on social media. Clean out the entire rotten nest of them.
Montanareddog
I was not familiar with the concept of the “short bus”. Thanks to the Urban Dictionary I now understand it, and recognise how offensive it is. So, fuck him.
Nevertheless, it is redundant to assert the low intelligence of people who, after all, believed TFG. And admire him.
James E Powell
@Betty Cracker:
He’s Andrew Clyde (R-GA9). Dragged on twitter, re-elected by large margins. It’s an R+31 district, directly east of Greene’s.
Mo MacArbie
@Betty Cracker: Folks here have grammar peeves, but I’m of the more typographic bent that hates those phony smartquote apostrophes.
Mike in NC
I got a slender paperback in the mail with the title “Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America” by one Scott McMurrey. I’ going to devour it. One line that summed up the Republican coalition is that they looked at Donald Trump and decided “We need this cockroach in the White House”.
Raven
@Betty Cracker: we’ve gone on and on about him. He’s canadian born and owns a gun store here in Athens.
Citizen_X
“These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history.”
“This was his first insurrection” is up there with “this was his first mass murder.” Just saying.
Betty Cracker
@Raven: Huh. I figured Athens would be a blue oasis in a sea of red, like Gainesville. Maybe also not big enough to swing a district.
Martin
I am slightly sympathetic to these folks. When your elected officials are lying to you, and that is being amplified by the media, there should be a degree of trust.
They shouldn’t see any reduction in treatment, but it would be vastly more just if Trump and the Fox News personalities that amplified his lies saw the same sedition charges and prison time.
Raven
@Betty Cracker: jerrymandered to death, only local government is blue. Look how they cut Athens in half.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_9th_congressional_district#/media/File:Georgia_US_Congressional_Di…
TomatoQueen
Competence questions, financial and other mis- and malfeasances in the SecSvc became embarrassing and public during the Obama era (fence jumpers and hookers and blow), management was replaced at least once, investigated at least once, and reported on by WaPo and other local news, and this is making me think not much was actually improved. I know two now-former SecSvc employees who left military, came to SSA, then went to SecSvc and then came back to SSA shaking their heads–that kind of turnover in gov’t agencies isn’t common & at the time the most I could get out of the one I knew fairly well was a ‘yes’ to my question about the reports in the Post, worse, better, accurate?
As for that lawyer, he can fuck off and die on a fire ant hill.
scav
Ah yes, the old legal bedrocks, the “They have no criminal record and are thus necessarily good” one, swiftly followed by “They might even be related to someone (eg someone like us of course)” coup de grace. Amazing how this nation leads the world in incarcerating the entirely unrelated to others necessarily second offenders — especially with the police jumping in and offing† the clearly guilty before they even enter the judicial system.
† often by entirely natural causes such as sickle-cell anemia and heart-attacks no less!
matt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: dan bongino started out in secret service. it’s a shithole agency.
Another Scott
Ohplease, ohplease, ohplease…
Garland’s DoJ is going to be very , very busy for quite a while…
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The local grocery store has several “Short bus” types bagging groceries. They sure has hell don’t come across as the vicious, willfully ignorant twats that those MAGA heads are.
Mike in NC
A woman I met on a blind date in DC in 1990 turned out to be a Secret Service agent. Seemed nice. She was trying to get assigned to Reagan’s detail in California because that was where she was from.
rp
That’s what it means to be a liberal. We understand nuance and root causes and context. Doesn’t mean we don’t think they should be prosecuted, just that it’s complicated.
Of course, no one on the other side has the same sympathy for any minorities who are arrested, because that’s what it means to be a conservative/RW ahole.
TomatoQueen
@Another Scott: Sometimes I find the Merrick Garland Arrives at DOJ video a bit sentimental, and then sometimes it’s comforting. Then I remember he’s not a young man and fume at Turtleface for depriving us.
sdhays
If being stupid and misled is now a viable defense in this country, doesn’t that basically mean we need to let pretty much 95% of all of the current prison population out and clear their records
ETA: Fuck this guy for expressing this shit argument in the most offensive way possible.
JaneE
Were they mislead, lied to, propagandized? Yeah. Did they trust and believe someone or several someones with a long history of lying? Yes again. Should we have better support for people with any number of mental and psychological (and physical) issues? Of course we should.
That does not absolve them of culpability for their actions. We don’t have “short bus” organized riots.
Did some groups take advantage of them to advance their own aims? Probably. They still have to be responsible for their own actions.
Dorothy A. Winsor
“These aren’t bad people.”
Bad is as bad does
Jim, Foolish Literalist
(thread)
SiubhanDuinne
@Montanareddog:
For quite some time there was a commenter here who went by, IIRC, “Short Bus Bully.” Haven’t seen them in a while; not sure if they belatedly recognised how offensive that nym could be and changed to something else, or simply left. I don’t believe I’ve thought of the term again until this post.
smith
As I recall, someone looked into the criminal histories of the known insurrectionists, and many of them do have prior convictions, most notably for domestic violence.
Frank Wilhoit
@feebog: You’re assuming an ability to recruit trustworthy replacements.
Steve in the ATL
@Lavocat:
Huh–I was certain you were an avocado!
ETA: for non-French speakers, “l’avocat” means both “the lawyer” and “the avocado”
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
I must have missed something really significant in the news. What Nunes parody GJ subpoena? How long ago?
ETA: Tried to find it by googling various combinations of those keywords, but was just directed back to Popehat’s tweet. Would love to know what he is talking about.
smith
@SiubhanDuinne: Wonkette explains it for you: wonkette.com/why-was-bill-barrs-doj-fighting-devin-nuness-barnyard-cow-battles-for-him
mrmoshpotato
What the fuck this guy! Fuck his entire “on the spectrum” comment. And especially fuck this:
Holy shit dude! We ALL were subjected to four years of bullshit! Hell – the Kremlin’s orange mobster shitstain wouldn’t accept losing the popular vote when he won the 2016 election! And that was just the beginning.
Also, no Clinton voter stormed the Capitol building on 1/6/2017, and we weren’t exactly happy about the election outcome! Maybe Dump’s side is just full of Nazi shitstains!
SiubhanDuinne
@smith:
Oh, thanks. Hadn’t checked Wonkette for a couple of hours, so had missed seeing that.
mrmoshpotato
@Steve in the ATL: Avocado lawyers and a burrito judge.
Tenar Arha
QFT
THIS!
catclub
@Ten Bears:
I am just SURE they were fighting that suction the whole time. Helpless things.
joel hanes
Hmm.
I can’t reply at all to any comment in this thread.
Windows 10 Firefox 88.0.1 desktop with i7
hells littlest angel
I must have missed it when The Supreme Court tossed out the doctrine of ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Ken
@joel hanes: Does the “Leave a Comment” dialog still appear? If not, this is some new bug.
If it’s the existing FF bug, the Visual tab won’t allow typing, but you can switch to the Text tab and enter your comment there.
JR
With everyone else who said “fuck this guy”. Of course that’s exactly how Trump’s people think and talk.
Kayla Rudbek
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve been told that the Secret Service tends to hire big guys who can take lots of bullets, as opposed to other agencies where they have to hire people who can come up with alternatives when the facility is being stormed and backup is a very long way away.
dww44
@Betty Cracker:
In case no one told you , Andrew Clyde is the first termer from Doug Collins old district in the Athens/UGA area, where Raven resides. I looked him up after his Congressional testimony;he was born on 11/22/1963 (the day Kennedy was short) in Canada to American parents. Served in the Navy and decided to retire in the Athens area where the Navy has some sort of supply school. Also saw a pic of him hugging MTG at a photo op. I’ve honestly come to believe that many folks who live in that part of the state have come unglued. Thanks to Fox and its ilk.
Not Raven, of course.
dww44
@Ken: That’s what I just did. Same Firefox and same windows
Poe Larity
From the same article:
The new Twinkie defense.
Obdurodon
This is kind of more LGM territory, and I’m certainly no legal expert myself, but the belittling language is pretty clearly a legal strategy. By making *himself* the bad guy, Watkins can increase sympathy for his client. He can also set up for an insanity plea and perhaps even a mistrial. The specific non-PC use of “retarded” etc. can serve as a further distraction.
Is it a *good* (i.e. effective) legal strategy? Again, not a legal expert, but perhaps it’s the best shot he has. He surely does not want increased focus on the merits of the case or his client’s persona, because on those criteria he’ll get obliterated. When a long shot’s the only shot, you take it. I think this kind of strategy is *wrong* morally, but I can’t quite say it’s ineffective.
Raven
@dww44:
“Had” a Navy Supply Corps School. It was about 4 blocks from our house and we lived by the bugle for revile, retreat and taps. It was “braced” and is now the UGA Health Sciences Campus. He owns the gun store and the feds took a bunch of money from him, he sued and won.
catclub
I am pretty sure the twinkie defense worked.
Citizen Alan
@catclub: No, it didn’t.
catclub
Sounds like it did. we will have to agree to disagree.
Danielx
@Chief Oshkosh:
Truth. My daughter has a disability and I have known many others through her, and they are generally wonderful people. They have their quirks, but who doesn’t? This guy’s clients are just assholes who were foolish enough to believe TFG, and he is pretty much an asshole himself.
I ask again whether “Fuck those guys” is a rotating tag line and if not, why?
Ken
@Obdurodon:
Q LAWYER: “See, I’m setting up for an appeal on the grounds of incompetent representation.”
OTHER LAWYER: “That’s a brilliant strategy.”
Q LAWYER: “…. Damn.”
Old Man Shadow
I’ve known folks with developmental difficulties, mental difficulties, and autism.
Somehow they’ve all avoided trying to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States of America, so please do not compare the 1/6 treason weasels with them.
Barry
(my apologies if this is wrong, the software is f*cking up the link)
@Martin:
“I am slightly sympathetic to these folks. When your elected officials are lying to you, and that is being amplified by the media, there should be a degree of trust.
They shouldn’t see any reduction in treatment, but it would be vastly more just if Trump and the Fox News personalities that amplified his lies saw the same sedition charges and prison time.”
It’s clear that Trump will be beyond justice until that mystical Third of Never when we hold presidents criminally accountable.
Until then, we can’t let people off when they pass the buck to somebody who is not accountable.
There is supposedly an old prosecutor’s saying, ‘blame the dead guy’. That’s what these guys are doing.
Barbara
“My client is an idiot but he’s not malicious” is actually not that uncommon of a defense to otherwise inexplicably stupid and self-destructive criminal acts. The problem here is that these crimes occurred only after much preparation and planning.
burnspbesq
@Obdurodon:
That’s pretty close to my initial reaction: he’s working the jury pool, because a hung jury is the only good outcome for which his client can hope. Ethically, there’s a big gray area about what constitutes zealous representation, and bar authorities generally cut criminal defense lawyers a considerable amount of slack. Despicable, but unlikely to cost him his license.
Bobby Thomson
@Chief Oshkosh: this.
Bobby Thomson
I could talk about how ADHD is part of the spectrum, or how millions of people on the spectrum are incredibly smart and/or extremely moral, or how the “short bus” transports everyone who needs special accommodations, including quadriplegics, or how many supposedly smart people were in on the conspiracy, or how incredible offensive the R word is, or how successful developmentally disabled people have been in the right circumstance, or how neurotypical the average conspirator appears to be.
But instead, I’ll just say fuck that guy. He doesn’t deserve any of my focus.