Jan 6 Committee has a winning formula:
1) simple message
2) of the truth
3) delivered by notable Republicans in Trump’s orbit
4) repeated again by notable Republicans in Trump’s orbit https://t.co/esUXItTbZT— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) June 13, 2022
The second January 6 hearing begins with Liz Cheney talking about how Trump listened to advice from "an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani" pic.twitter.com/u6WvTPCbHe
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2022
The January 6 committee closes today's hearing with a video of Trump supporters saying on January 6 that they were there because of election fraud conspiracy theories Trump had given voice to pic.twitter.com/Qydmj7SS4F
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2022
"There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of [January 6th]” – Mitch McConnell
Therefore, he voted “not guilty”. Remember this.pic.twitter.com/X73PEDkQoK
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 7, 2022
War For Ukraine Day 111: Ukraine Holds On In the East
piratedan
and while Trump is at his core a narcissist, I refuse to believe that he was mentally incapable of processing his defeat, I believe he simply chose not to accept it and continue on the very same path that he’s followed his entire life and do as he pleased until someone stopped him.
we STILL haven’t stopped him, he’s still out there and doing shit and he’s still got loads of cannon fodder and wealthy supporters that use him as a cats paw to their own ends.
I really hoping that the J6 committee is ready to name names to those that helped the attempted coup from within Congress and that we can expose all of those that spent the money to allow these logistics to come into play to get these extremist groups to the Capitol and to pay to put them up and get them in place.
Mike in NC
Garbage in, garbage out is a great metaphor for the entire putrid Trump administration. He was elected by troglodytes who hated Obama.
Spanky
When is it not in the national interest to prosecute powerful politicians bent on insurrection?
Rhetorical question, in case you were tempted to answer. The answer is Never.
Starfish
This video from the committee about someone telling John Eastman to get a criminal defense attorney was good.
Another Scott
@piratedan: TFG tried to be President for Life. His whole MO was to keep pushing the boundaries and breaking the norms and daring people to stop him. Remember all his comments about ignoring the 22nd Amendment because he was probably entitled to 3 (or more) terms.
TFG refusing to accept defeat is the least surprising thing he did in office.
The Committee is doing a great job. I hope they keep it up.
Cheers,
Scott.
Starfish
I am following fewer of the centrist Democratic tweeters now because they are just spending all their time whining about AOC. She has eaten their brains, like she has eaten the brains of Republicans, and the whining is uninteresting.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Verily, Dick Jr knows how to hate
HumboldtBlue
@Mike in NC:
And the Russians. I am convinced Russian interference and GOP culpability got Trump elected in 2016. Remember, they tried it in 2012 when Carl Rove was shocked when Ohio was called for Obama. The fix was in, it just didn’t work and when they tried again in ’16 we got the fat fucking traitor.
Mike in NC
@HumboldtBlue: Exactly. The Fat Orange Clown first went to Moscow in 1987 to beg for money, and the KGB marked him as an asset for years.
CaseyL
Alas, TFG’s followers will keep on believing when it suits them. Right now, in New Mexico, a GOP-led commission is refusing to count votes and certify an election because he doesn’t trust the Dominion machines.
The poison is out, has made itself at home, and will be impossible to get rid of.
Elizabelle
Tom Rice lost the GOP primary in South Carolina. To a Trumpette. It was not even close.
The Oracle of Solace
I see all this staggering criminality and immorality and (dare I say it) treason, and I really don’t want to believe it. Which is just one more reminder that a lot of us on the left (and certainly most of the Democratic leadership) simply don’t want to believe so many of our fellow Americans are monsters, but those on the right will embrace any lie that makes us sound like monsters—the easier to justify violence against us, I suppose.
Wag
@HumboldtBlue:
everything you say is true. I especially wonder about Karl Rove and his slimy work on the background.
Brachiator
Yep. A smart move because it immediately neutralizes any accusation that the hearings are a partisan witch hunt. Those conservatives who still want to believe Trump did nothing wrong have to dig deeper into their bag of denial.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
Something I’m sure they’ll have little trouble doing, if Tom Rice’s recent primary loss is anything to go by
opiejeanne
@Starfish: AOC needs to mind her own district and stop harassing incumbent Democrats.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Something I’ve wondered about for awhile:
Would it be possible and thus worthwhile to do a disinformation campaign aimed at Republicans/conservatives to sow disunity and chaos?
Wag
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
That may be a side benefit of the current J6 hearings.
Brachiator
@piratedan:
Even though he has obviously lost many times in his life, Trump hates being called a loser, and avoids having to acknowledge defeat, especially on a big public stage. He just cannot do it. And being the President of the United States is the biggest stage he could ever occupy.
Even before the election Trump would rattle on about how the Democrats were doing bad things to try to steal the election and about how he would not even say in advance that he would accept election results if he did win the election.
But it’s not about processing defeat. Even if he knows he lost, he will continue to play an infantile game of denial. He doesn’t care if he brings the country down. He will slap down every disloyal aide who will not also play along, and he will find comfort hiding behind his loyal base.
The Republican leadership might have been able to burst Trump’s bubble had they disavowed him or voted to convict and remove him from office when they had the chance.
The Republicans maybe have one more chance to do the right thing.
debbie
I wonder how many of the people bitching about the price of gas also sent money to Trump’s election defense fund that never was? Chumps.
danielx
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Off the top of my head, I’d guess Republicans/conservatives for the most part already think the whole hearing thing is disinformation.
opiejeanne
@Brachiator: Trump hates being called a loser that he didn’t want to name Don jr after himself, arguing, “What if he turns out to be a loser?”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@opiejeanne:
Almostmakes me feel sorry for Manbaby Jr. But not quite
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Wag:
Hopefully.
@danielx:
I was thinking more along the lines of disinfo that sows divisions among each other and makes them self-destruct. That will make GOP voters less likely to turn out
VOR
@CaseyL: One of the losing Republican candidates for Governor in Georgia got 3.4% of the vote while the winner of the primary got 73.7% of the vote. That’s right, a full 70% more of the vote – 887K votes vs. 41K votes. But the candidate w/3% is refusing to concede, claiming the election was fraudulent.
This is the party TFG made.
piratedan
@Brachiator: it speaks to something…..
either they are so scared of the monster that they have nurtured, with the Christian theocrats, the gun nuts, the tin foil hats, the incels and your rank and file bigots and bullies to take out their figurehead…
or they actually are allowing their freak flags to fly and answering their overdeveloped id’s to try and recreate Gor or Gilead or whatever fascists dystopia you choose to name… with themselves in charge, ‘natch.
I guess a third option would be that they’re so beholden to whatever dark money daddy pulls their strings that they dare not disobey…
or its the poopoo platter of Conservative politics with a healthy portion of all three.
Kent
You mean like anti-Choice Cuellar in Texas or Schrader from Oregon who’s torpedoed prescription drug price reform and who’s parting shot was to vote against any gun control?
Kent
@piratedan: As Talking Points Memo recently pointed out. It makes absolutely NO DIFFERENCE whether Trump believes his own lies or not. In fact, that is beside the point. Because what Trump ALWAYS does is pursue whatever path or fiction most benefits Trump. ALWAYS. Whether in business or government. Whether he believes any of his bullshit about his businesses or the election doesn’t actually matter. It is to Trump’s benefit that he pursue the big like full throttle. So that is what he is going to do. Belief has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Trump is not like us normal people who have moral qualms. He has none and his only compass is what benefits him. He cashed in financially from the big lie to the tune of $250 million and counting, and he is maintaining is control over the party in a way that neither Romney nor McCain nor Bush ever did. Win, win from his perspective.
Leto
@Elizabelle: Nancy Mace won her bid against an insane Trumpist; TX special election for a temp 34th District seat was flipped red. It’s only for a few months, and the redrawn district is very blue, but still…
mario
would it be too much to ask to add twitter links to the twitter images?
Steeplejack
‘@Anne Laurie:
Request: For tweets where you use the non-clickable image, can you append the short embed link (e.g., Hillary Clinton for the one at the top of this post)? Some of the tweets are hard to run down with Twitter’s anemic search function, especially if they’re not very recent.
opiejeanne
@Kent: No, those two are terrible.
I’m talking about endorsing candidates like Nina Turner against Shontel Brown and Jessica Woolford against Jeffrey Dinowitz. There are others that I can’t remember off the top of my head.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@opiejeanne:
It was very disappointing to see AOC and a bunch of others who should know better endorsing Nina Turner. Has AOC ever commented on Turner’s ungracious speech when she lost? IIRC, Turner more or less said the election was stolen from her, proving her no better than a Republican in essence
thalarctosMaritimus
@opiejeanne:
How uncharacteristically prescient of him.
sukabi
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: lol, yes she does.
James E Powell
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Not really germane post-primary and if AOC and her occasional caustic remarks about other Ds isn’t the least of our worries, it’s pretty damn close.
We’ve got Republicans to defeat.
livewyre
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Short answer: not really, but…
The thing is that disinformation is how that whole arrangement operates, and it works in its grotesque favor by erasing the concept of fact. But that doesn’t mean the concept of fact doesn’t have a few tricks left up its sleeve.
To turn it around, there’s a reason it’s said that facts have a liberal bias. Conservatism has its hands tied when it comes to describing itself. It’s awfully furtive for something so presumptuous – it has to operate in the shadows, behind flags and statues and picket fences. If it ever stops weaving its own temporary shelter from reality, it gets burned. Until that point it can seem unstoppable.
As this implies, disinformation is a tool that only works in favor of the principles of conservatism: dominance and conformity. It’s gotten a lot of mileage in recent years, since the conveyor belt of one scandal (or atrocity) after another overwhelms us into doubting whether facts can hold up on their own. But it’s all a head game. Things still happen and still matter whether we recognize them in the moment or not. We can wake up and stay woken. That’s the key.
The Jan. 6 Committee hearings and their unexpected success so far are a running start towards proving that facts can be their own weapons – openness matters, finding out matters, laws matter; even institutions matter. They have important work to do and are actually doing it, because it’s not about them. It’s about us – all of us.
Tony Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Nope.
a) The truth, backed up by real world evidence, should do that job but fails every single time, because the entire conservative movement is happily marinating in a caustic stew of repetitive lies and fake news. They don’t wanna, so they won’t, and you can’t make ’em.
b) Exposing disinformation is pretty easy, the non-conservative world does it all the time and the conservative gatekeepers would too, in which case all you’ve done is hand wingnuts and their media fluffers a genuine example of Dem Lies with which they’ll beat you around the head with Both Sides! lo unto the last generation that walketh ‘pon this Earth.
Liminal Owl
@thalarctosMaritimus: I know that was probably sarcasm, but I still need to point out the difference between prescience and self-fulfilling prophecy. Schoolkids, for instance, whose teachers treat them as failures (before there’s any objective evidence thereof) do worse than those who are treated as educational successes. Don Jr. was expected to be a loser, AND he had an extraordinarily narcissistic father. Like his uncle, he had little to no chance of becoming a “winner.”*
(Which does not excuse his utter moral failure as a human being, IMO. His uncle reportedly was a comparatively decent person, even if not a success in the terms his own father and brother recognized. Don Jr has no saving qualities that I’m aware of, and he had some choice in that development. My sympathy for him is minimal.)
*My internal jukebox wants to link to the song by that title, but it’s too far off-topic.
Liminal Owl
@livewyre: perfect. Yes. Thank you.
Ken
I’m guessing from context that this is a good thing?
(I’m vaguely aware the fellow had a TV show, but never watched it. And didn’t he get convicted of something, and thought Trump was going to give him a pardon?)
Balconesfault
The Committee Hearings are revealing a lot of things, but here are the two key takeaways the American people need to get:
1) there is a significant percentage of the GOP who will believe ANYTHING Donald Trump tells them to believe, no matter how counterfactual.
2) GOP leadership lives in absolute terror that the MAGA crowd will turn against them, and will do whatever needed to appease Trump’s followers.
I think there are still some subset of center right voters who hold the fantasy that the GOP establishment would keep guardrails on Trump.
What’s being presented is showing that this is a complete fiction.
J R in WV
I have no ideas about how to navigate the Right Wing to bring them into a face-off with the Reality most of us live in! They so avoid the facts when those facts don’t align with their favorite delusional complex.
So I think just keeping them away from having any powerful influence over the machinery of government is the best way to go.
Baud
@J R in WV:
Geminid
Congresswoman Dina Titus easily defeated challenger Amy Villela in the Nevada 1st CD primary. Three hours after polls closed the totals were Titus 83.3%, Villela 16.6%.
Titus commented on the result, “I just don’t think Nevada is ready to elect a socialist.” Villela helped found the Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which managed to take over local Democratic Party machinery a couple years ago (and also the state’s I think) a couple years ago. Villela declined to return the Las Vegas DSA questionnaire for this race, so the DSA did not endorse her but instead gave her its “recommendation.”
The new NV-1st CD is less blue than the old one and while Titus is favored she is thought to be somewhat vulnerable.
Meanwhile, Adam Laxalt leads the race to nominate the challenger to Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto.
Gvg
@livewyre: disinformation has worked for the left historically when the left was extremists. Currently our version of the left likes pragmatism and things that work, but it hasn’t always been so. It’s not built into the position.
Baud
@Gvg:
Disinformation works for zealots. You need the zealotry to turn off the parts of the brain that would respond negatively to disinformation.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: Tom Rice is the first of the ten House Republican Impeachers to lose a primary. Four- Read (NY), Gonzales (OH), Upton (MI) and Kinzinger (IL) are retiring. Meijer is thought to be leading in his western Michigan district. I think Valadeo (CA) advanced to the general election after last week’s “jungle” primary, while Herrera-Butler (OR), Cheney (WY), and a Congressman from Washington still face primaries.
Peter Meijar will have a competitive race against Hilary Scholten, his opponent in 2020.
Anne Laurie
@Steeplejack: Unfortunately, FYWP treats the ‘short embed’ link as a full embed — and, I assume, that throws us back to the slow-load problem that led to screenshots in the first place.
I’m trying a copy-cut-and-paste-link function on tonight’s Covid Update, but I have very little faith in its functionality (not to mention, it takes half again as long to finish… )
debbie
@Elizabelle:
He doesn’t seem to regret his actions re. impeachment, which is good.
debbie
I can’t get over the lack of outrage from these chumps about TFG taking them for a quarter billion. ♀️
Betty
@The Oracle of Solace: You just stated the problem with the mainstream media. They simply cannot deal with the danger the country is in so downplay it and talk about inflation, staying in their comfort zone.
Betty
Chris Johnson
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): No, it wouldn’t, because it’s the weapons of fascists and Russians, and we have actual goals beyond seizing power: you know, governance.
It’s a bitch, but we have to remember that we are working towards democracy. So it’s not even ‘when they go low, do we go low?’ in a moral sense. It’s ‘what is the intended outcome here?’
If that intended outcome is democracy, we gotta go about things using democracy tools and governance and do it a certain way. If seizing power is the only part that matters, the fascists are better at that than us, but they can’t govern for shit and that is what sets up conditions for creeping democracy :)
Elizabelle
@debbie:
Props to Tom Rice for not regretting the impeachment vote. He will be one of Liz Cheney’s few “honorable” Republicans.
artem1s
@piratedan:
He knew he had lost. He and the Traitor Tots were following the playbook from 2016. He expected to lose that election. He planned on grifting based on the claims the election was rigged by Hillary. The whole administration was running the same playbook they never got to use in 2016 – throw doubt on the new Prez and administration, grift as much as possible on claims of a rigged election – rinse, wash, repeat until 2020 and run the same campaign all over again. Perpetual money making machine. Only the dog caught the car in 2016. The plan was always to sow doubt and collect cash. Even if he dies or goes to prison there will be deplorables collecting cash on these two rigged elections for the rest of eternity.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Also, straight-up lying just won’t work for our side. We genuinely believe in truth as a principle. Disingenuous or flat-out lying would get called out and shamed by our own people, and that’s a good thing. That said we can and should constantly emphasize the point that we tell the truth and present facts, the other side simply makes shit up that has no connection to reality. There is one major party that deals in facts/reality, and it’s not the GOP. Sadly, I don’t know how many swing voters will actually be moved by it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The funny thing is the whole Jan6 Coup can be looked as yet another tiresome example of the clueless, drug crazed world Trump lives in; supposedly Dumb Ass Donny thinks everything is Reality TV/Big Time Wrestling, so Small Hands probably thinks trying to overthrow the government made an awesome episode of The Trump Show, never mind people got killed. The whole, Trump wanted to march up the Capital and confront McConnell over the election and rage BS about a fixed election fits the whole Big Time Wrestling format (with McConnell cast in the Fight Commissioner role). The Nazis we had a banality of evil, with Trump we have the stupidity of evil.
Also, anyone noticed how Jared looks like a nasty version of Peter Pan?
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
I used the “short embed” in my message; it’s just a basic URL. Does FYWP handle them differently when they’re in the main post? Worst case, it would be okay to put in the URL as non-linkable text, e.g.: twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1536740839896109056
Anyway, not a huge deal, and I don’t want to add to your already formidable load of work. Thanks for replying.
ETA: At first I replaced “.com” with “[dot]com”, but (this version of) FYWP tried (unsuccessfully) to turn that into a URL. But I found that deleting the “https://” prefix instead allowed it to come through as plain text, as shown above.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: If you subscribe to the Big Time Wrestling Theory of Trumpism, disinformation is the point and reality is someone else problem.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: The way I’ve always thought of it is that lies, deceit and hate usually win in a head-to-head fight against people devoted to honesty and inclusion, because there are more tactics available to bad guys–but the down side is that dishonesty and hate are no good way to actually govern; reality gets you in the end. And you can’t turn it on and off like a switch.
So the good guys will probably never have a final triumph. But they won’t have a final permanent defeat either.
The Lodger
@Geminid: Jaime Herrera-Buetler is from southwestern WA, not OR. They’re particular about not being Oregonians. (Getting in before Kent.)
The Lodger
@debbie: That’s how these chumps operate. Never, ever, ever admit you fell for the con.
brantl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She could give a MasterClass in hate.