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Let me file that under fuck it.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

How stupid are these people?

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Consistently wrong since 2002

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

In my day, never was longer.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Goddamned Traitors

Goddamned Traitors

Apocalypse Imminent, House Edition

by Tom Levenson|  October 16, 202312:35 pm| 167 Comments

This post is in: Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Politics, Republican Stupidity

Just a quick drive-by to note the Gym Jordan (R-treasonweasel) seems to be heading for the speakership.

Apocalypse Imminent, House Edition
Little American Brown Weasel (Mustela fusca) from the viviparous quadrupeds of North America (1845) illustrated by John Woodhouse Audubon (1812-1862)

At least Josh Marshall thinks so:

Yesterday we noted that the latest GOP Speaker wannabe, Jim Jordan and his allies have shifted to mobilizing base MAGA supporters against the substantial number of holdouts who have either claimed they won’t vote for Jordan on the floor of the House or claim they will never vote for him. This morning Jordan seems to be making substantial headway. One key Republican holdout, Mike Rogers of Indiana, now says he’s on board. So does Ken Calvert, who represents a swing district in California.

…

Late Update: Now another, Ann Wagner (MO), has flipped. The rationale is refusal to be forced to work with Democrats to elect a Speaker. Steve Womack seems to be the only high profile NeverJim who’s holding tough. My assumption now is the Jordan probably wins this. Though we need to see more to know.

This seems pretty disastrous to me.  Sure Jordan will heighten the focus on GOP extremism, and that may well help push the House back into D hands beginning in January 2025.  But that’s fourteen and a half months away from now, and the country and the world will suffer the effects of a radical-right-led House at a time when so much hangs in the balance.

To sum up my mood…we’re getting closer to an answer to Ben Franklin’s challenge (“A republic, if you can keep it) and it ain’t coming out the way we’d hope.

Melancholy open thread.

Image: John Jacob Audubon, Little American Brown Weasel, between 1845-1848

Apocalypse Imminent, House EditionPost + Comments (167)

Robert E. Lee Is Trending, That’s Never a Good Sign…

by Adam L Silverman|  September 9, 202112:49 pm| 192 Comments

This post is in: America, domestic terrorists, Goddamned Traitors, Military, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security, War

In the wake of Richmond, VA removing the monument statue to Confederate General Robert E Lee this week, Trump decided to do one of his favorite things: issue a stupid statement rooted in his gleeful ignorance of just about everything. In this case he managed to max out the stupidity in regard to not only why the statue was put up in the first place, why it is coming down, but also why the US was unable to achieve a successful battlefield termination in Afghanistan. Trump’s statement, of course, has led to a tremendous amount of hot takes on Lee, on Confederate memorials that aren’t on Civil War battlefields, the Confederacy, and just about anything and everything in the US of 2021.

As a result of what I do professionally, I have a few thoughts regarding Lee.

The first is we don’t actually know a lot about Robert E Lee. Before everyone asks if I’ve lost the plot given all of the biographies, military histories, popular histories, historical novels, etc where he is either the singular focus or one of the major foci of the research and analysis, there’s a reason we know very little about Robert E Lee. Specifically, his descendants have restricted a significant amount of his professional and personal writings and those of his immediate family. Critical portions of his  journals, notes, diaries, and correspondence have never been properly archived and made available to researchers, as have those portions of his wife’s and children’s concerning him. They’re not available to historians of any type, nor are they available to students of strategy or leadership or the Profession of Arms. As Glenn W LaFantasie, the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, recounted in 2011:

It was during the late 1980s that I first encountered how protective the Lee descendants are about their great ancestor. Having gained some previous experience on some historical editing projects, I gave a great deal of thought to the possibility of initiating a Lee Papers project. In those days, I was working in Washington, D.C., and I learned that Lee’s granddaughter, Mary Custis Lee deButts, lived in Upperville, a tony little village in Virginia horse country, not far from the nation’s capital. So I wrote her a lengthy letter spelling out my plans and asking only for her endorsement of my efforts. A couple of weeks went by with no answer, and then those weeks turned into more than a month. I decided to call her, but that phone call proved to be one of the most bizarre I’ve ever had as a historian.

To the best of my recollection, the telephone conversation went something like this: She answered the phone, I explained who I was and mentioned my letter, and she said abruptly, “We are never, I repeat, never, going to let those papers out of the family. They are safe in a bank vault. I don’t even have them here. No one is ever going to see them.” She was polite enough not to hang up on me, but the conversation did not last more than a couple of minutes. It was, of course, the first clue I had that the Lee descendants were in possession of documents relating to Robert E. Lee that no one outside the family knew about.

As it turned out, my plans for a Lee Papers project never got off the ground. Since then, other historians have also attempted to launch such a project and, for various reasons, have failed. When deButts died in 1994, at the age of 94, I figured that the letters in the vault had been passed on to a trustworthy next-of-kin — someone who would also take the Lee family secrets to the grave.

Fast forward to 2002, eight years after deButts’s death. On Nov. 27, the Washington Post reported that after more than 80 years following the death of Robert E. Lee’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee, two steamer trunks full of her papers had been “found” in a bank vault in Alexandria, Va. The trunks “came to light” after E. Hunt Burke, the vice chairman of the Burke & and Herbert Bank & Trust Company discovered them in the silver vault of the bank’s Alexandria branch. Five years later, six Lee descendants, including Robert E.L. deButts and Robert E. Lee IV, formally deposited the trunks at VHS; two years later, two of the descendants, according to a VHS archivist, “donated a quarter share of the title to this collection to the Virginia Historical Society.”

Click across and read the whole essay, it’s fascinating. But Professor LaFantasie’s thesis should inform all attempts to understand Robert E Lee: we simply know too little about him from his own accounts and the accounts of his immediate family to really have a good understanding of him as a person and as a senior military leader.

The second point is that Lee’s reputation as a brilliant general who was both a strategic and tactical genius as well as a great leader of men, as LaFantasie recounts in his essay, is largely ahistorical and was largely made up as part of the creation of the Lost Cause mythology that ultimately becomes the Dunning School of American history. From LaFantasie’s essay:

But something strange later happened concerning the photostats at the Library of Congress (LC). In 1977, Thomas L. Connelly, who had already established himself as a historian with little good to say about Robert E. Lee, published his book, “The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society.” Connelly argued that Lee’s public image had been largely shaped after the Civil War by a “Lee cult” that worshipped the general like a god and rewrote history according to a Southern interpretation of the Lost Cause. In making his case, Connelly quoted the Civil War reminiscences of Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee that revealed her sharp bitterness toward Lincoln and the Northerners who had defeated her husband. Through some administrative error at LC, Connelly had been allowed to see the reminiscences despite the restriction on the document’s use. According to LC records, after the publication of Connelly’s book, Mary Custis Lee deButts wrote again to LC and reiterated her intention and that of her sister that Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee’s reminiscences should be off-limits to researchers. In 1981, LC placed the document in a separate, restricted container, where it has remained ever since.

Despite the purposeful attempts by Lee’s children and descendants to obscure him as both Soldier and person, it is important to remember what we do know about Lee’s military career. That as the slave holding states were reaching the point of no return in their ultimatums regarding slavery, as well as how the entire US should be run to cater to their preferences, Lee was a US Army colonel. He was posted in the New Mexico Territory and he was disaffected and burned out. An excellent historical recounting of this period of Lee’s career, a period where he had basically given up and decided he was done with the Army, can be found in the beginning of Hampton Sides Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. It was partially because of his disaffection that he was home in Virginia when John Brown raided Harpers Ferry. When the Great Rebellion does finally occur, he was offered a command in the Union army and he turned it down. When Virginia seceded from the Union he was offered a generalship in the newly forming Confederate Army, which he ultimately accepted. His first posting, however, was not as commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia. After a series of lackluster performances commanding Virginia troops in western Virginia and then mixed results in organizing the coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Lee was brought to Richmond, VA. In Richmond he was placed in charge of the defenses of Richmond and served as a senior military advisor to Jefferson Davis. Lee hated this assignment. It seems that the disaffection and burn out that he had experienced in New Mexico was carried over to his initial service to the Confederacy. He was in an assignment he didn’t like, in a place he didn’t want to be in, and he was convinced he knew better than those commanding armies or parts of armies in the field. In the case of the latter he was most likely right.

But this isn’t the full story, given what we know with the limitations that his descendants have placed on what we can know about Lee, of his military reputation. Lee was a weird, transitional senior military leader during the Civil War. He was wedded to an understanding of the character and characteristics of war and warfare that had largely ceased to exist by the 1860s. So while he had a mastery of the classical literature on strategy and tactics and how to employ them, he was unable to transcend his now obsolete understanding and see what war had become and what it was becoming. This eventually came back to bite him in a big way, especially once President Lincoln was able to find a theater commander – Grant – who would carry out Lincoln’s strategic vision for the eastern theater. Specifically, find General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, fix them in place, and reduce their capacity to conduct any further operations. It took Lincoln a long time to find a theater commander who could do that. By all accounts LTG Reynolds could have, but he turned down command when his one requirement – that he not be micromanaged by GEN Halleck – was denied. As a result LTG Reynolds was the second general officer in the Army of the Potomac to arrive on the battlefield of Gettysburg where he was killed on the morning of the first full day of battle not far from his home.

Lee was a great leader. Specifically, in the sense that he had an ability to inspire his Soldiers to believe they could do things that they should never have been able to do. At the same time, however, he was also a terrible leader in that he was not a very good manager of talent within his command. This is related to his being a senior military leader stuck in a time that no longer existed. Lee was a general officer out of time and, therefore, out of place. The character and characteristics of war in the 1860s had passed him by. Here too the events leading up to and at Gettysburg bring Lee’s genius and his failings into focus. Prior to Gettysburg Lee relied on two subordinate general officers: LTG Longstreet and LTG Jackson. Jackson was, to be very blunt, nuts. He was a religious zealot, held all sorts of bizarre ideas about food and diet and health, and was a tactical savant. He worked the Soldiers in his command ruthlessly and they responded. Longstreet was different. He was quieter, more methodical. The jokes were that he was slow. The truth was he was deliberate. Jackson may have been a straight to the jaw you never saw. Longstreet was definitely the body blow that you saw, could not stop, and that ended the fight. Longstreet also had a strategic vision that neither Lee nor Jackson had. Longstreet understood that while the nature of war may be enduring, the character and characteristics of it had changed going into and during the Civil War.

Unfortunately for Lee, Jackson was killed prior to Gettysburg and Longstreet’s frustration with Lee’s inability to grasp what seemed to be intuitive to Longstreet placed them more and more at odds. Lee replaced Jackson with two other generals, neither of whom could perform at the corps commander level. But they were loyal men, Lee believed them to be good men, so no matter how badly they failed, he didn’t remove them. And at Gettysburg, they failed him miserably. Lee’s personal and professional understanding of loyalty and honor prevented him from managing his talent effectively. This is why JEB Stuart was never properly disciplined for leaving Lee functionally blind in regard to intelligence and information in the summer of 1863. It was also at Gettysburg where the head butting with Longstreet fully bloomed and bore tragic fruit for the Army of Northern Virginia. The mentee had finally outgrown his mentor.

There’s one final point I want to make about Lee and it is, frankly, somewhere between pure speculation and an informed guess. By 1863 Lee was at times erratic and this carried on throughout the war. It is well documented that he’d had some health issues and while there are professional medical disputes about what they were, it appears these included some form of cardiac condition. Whether it was angina and hypertension, just angina, or even something else is still in dispute and there will probably never be a settled history because almost none of the things we do to check for hypertension or angina or other cardiac conditions were done in the 1860s. I’m not a medical doctor, but in terms of the history, I’m in the camp of those that think that the description of Lee’s illnesses in 1863 and throughout the rest of his life seem to be cardiac related. If that is the case and he was experiencing they effects of cardiac problems, it would help to explain some of the decisions he made beginning in the spring of 1863 and carrying on through to the end of the war.

Until or unless his descendants finally make the bulk of his personal writings and those of his immediate family available to scholars and researchers, we will never have a comprehensive understanding of him as a person or as a senior military leader. What we do have is based on his and his family’s incomplete primary materials that have been made available, primary and secondary sources of those that knew him, the myth of Lee as a general par excellence created as part of the Lost Cause mythology and then put to use to fight Reconstruction, ultimately overturn it, and institute Jim Crow in its place. All of it filtered through the Dunning School of American history, which was itself created to institutionalize the Lost Cause mythology as the real and actual history.

We do, however, know some things about Lee that are not in dispute. He was an unrepentant and often cruel slave owner. That for all the tales of his vaunted personal and professional honor, when presented with the options of either upholding his oath of service or breaking it, he chose to break it. He did so in service of preserving the power to keep other humans as chattel slaves. That once he broke his oath he then willingly took up arms and led other oath breakers against his own former countrymen. That his understanding of the character and characteristics of war had been surpassed and made irrelevant by the reality of the changed character and characteristics of war in the 1860s. And that while he did have an amazing ability to inspire those under his command to do things as soldiers and as an army that they should never have been able to do, he was also a terrible manager of personnel. He was also blessed for three years with Union commanding generals who were not up to the tasks they had been assigned. Once Lee faced a commanding general of the Army of the Potomac who both understood and had the ability to execute Lincoln’s strategic vision, his ability to inspire his soldiers was simply no longer adequate to the task he had been assigned. From that point on Grant and the Army of the Potomac slowly and methodically chewed up the Army of Northern Virginia. We also know that after the war, despite being hailed for calling for reconciliation, Lee vehemently and publicly opposed Reconstruction. Finally, it is important to note that if it were not for the intervention of Grant, Lee would have been prosecuted for treason and most likely executed as a traitor to the United States. Instead, his citizenship was stripped – he was allowed to reside in the US until his death, though he was officially stateless – and it was not restored until 1975! The Richmond, VA monument erected in Lee’s honor was erected to memorialize him in 1890, twenty years after his death and twenty-five years after his citizenship as an American was revoked and purposefully not restored by President Johnson despite Lee’s signing the amnesty oath.

Open thread!

Robert E. Lee Is Trending, That’s Never a Good Sign…Post + Comments (192)

It Can Happen Here

by Tom Levenson|  August 4, 20216:55 pm| 191 Comments

This post is in: Crazification Factor, Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads, Politics

I, like many here, have said that we’re in an existential moment for the Republic. But I’ll confess that for all the cynicism and world-weariness I’ve accumulated over the years of Trump and the GOP’s steady turn towards authoritarianism, I still held on to the delusion that the US really had a robust immune system when it comes to explicit, overt fascism.

Adam Silverman has, of course, been trying to warn us all, me included, that this is in fact a delusion. That we’re in a low-intensity but real war for the direction and soul of the United States, and that by many measures, we’re in a bad position to fight that war.

The last few days have finally tipped me over.

Adam’s right.

One of America’s two political parties is not just cheating to try to win elections, but has accepted/adopted the basic tropes that have driven European fascism since the 20s, and we need to be prepared not just for electoral battle but, perhaps, for much worse.

It Can Happen Here 1

What tipped me over? A few things. But the catalyst was an email from former Boston Globe columnist turned Substacker (Truth and Consequences) which pointed me to this week’s public post. on the experience of wading into the cess pool of a website calling itself American Greatness. It was, as ever, more persuasive in the original German:

The crux of the argument made by Christopher Roach, an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness, is that the right can no longer acquiesce to liberal indoctrination. “The forces of the aggressive, secular Left are not going to let any of us retreat into our own enclaves,” says Roach. “They will hunt down every last private club, pizza shop, and bakery out of mere spite. They will steal your kids and destroy your life.”

Cohen emphasizes that this isn’t just a matter of a handful of wackaloons on some web backwater.

For months now, political observers have noted the conservative movement’s increasingly authoritarian bent, so I suppose it’s not surprising that a publication devoted to promoting Donald Trump would unabashedly embrace such a message. But after reading a number of posts at American Greatness, I was struck by something even more disturbing — the increasingly existential, even eliminationist rhetoric emanating from the far right. Liberalism is presented not as an ordinary political or cultural movement. Instead, it is a clear and present threat to America’s future and the American people. To read American Greatness is to believe that America is in the last throes of liberal indoctrination, and the time is now to confront it with force, if necessary.

The crux, as Cohen points out is that this is exactly the same line that the right’s leading “intellectuals” are pushing:

It would be easy to dismiss the writings at American Greatness or any publication that attempted to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpism. This kind of language has long found a home on the fringe right. But the site includes a roster of what Sykes calls “right-wing luminaries as Victor David Hanson, Seb Gorka, David Harsanyi, Conrad Black, Roger Kimball, Mark Bauerlein, Josh Hammer, Ned Ryun, Dennis Prager, and Salena Zito.” These are writers who have some level of intellectual currency and influence in the conservative movement.]

I know, I know, an intellectual murderer’s row there and all that. But this kind of violent eliminationism is both terrifying to anyone with a historical memory that reaches further back than last week and hardly confined to the bay-at-the-moon end of the GOP spectrum.  Tucker Carlson is in Hungary praising an real-life fascist dictator, Orban, with Rod Dreher, the noted Christianist authoritarian, cheering him on.

It Can Happen Here

Mike Flynn has just gone full-on Triumph of the Will at a widely web-cast mega-Church event.  Newt Gingrich is openly touting “replacement theory” on Fox News, explicitly channelling a Nazi framework on mass media to justify the radical right’s ascent/return to power.  And there’s more besides.

I’m not posting this out of a sense of fatalism or despair. These people are clearly a minority. There are as many grifters as true believers, probably more, making bank off of gullible, timid Trumpoids, with no  intention of risking a good thing by actually taking up arms. There are a handful who we know have some tactical and political skill working this crowd; Mike Flynn may have drunk waaaaay too much mercury on his way to the haberdasher, but you don’t get three stars for being wholly incompetent in the military arts, and there are others who truly seek power (not just cash) and have skills to pursue it. And yet it’s pretty clear that if allowed to express their views peaceably and the ballot box, a significant majority of Americans reject the poison these anti-patriots are peddling.

That’s the crux, of course; if allowed…

I’m not going to pretend to know how to make that our reality.  But I’m actually hopeful, in the sense that I think much of the elected Democratic leadership and an increasing number of both elite and ordinary citizens have become aware of the gathering threat. Certainly readers of this blog have. That’s the start from which all further action will flow.

We’re back to where we’ve often been: the preservation of liberty requires eternal vigilance.

To that end, I don’t have a broad based prescription. But I can say this: any Jackals that live in AZ or WV: call your senators and (politely) express your strong support for voting rights legislation. Do it often. Get to the point where the staff (and/or the answering machine) know your voice and ask after your kids.

I have some thoughts about what more to do, but they’re worth what you pay for them, and I’ll mull a bit more (as in, try to get some actual expert insight). Further suggestions welcomed below, including, especially, how to confront the increasingly armed and dangerous attempts to intimidate democracy and seize power by force.

When and as we triumph, we can gather for a Balloon Juice chorus reading of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. Deal?

 

 

Open thread, friends.

Image: Eugène Delacroix, Liberty guiding the people, 1830

It Can Happen HerePost + Comments (191)

Endless Digging

by Betty Cracker|  July 8, 20219:35 am| 124 Comments

This post is in: Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Trumpery, Violent Insurrection at the Capitol

Sometimes I wonder how much lower Republicans can sink, and the answer is always “there is no bottom.” They elected a dumb, incompetent, malignant conman. Stood by impassively while he played cock-holster to America’s most implacable autocratic foe. Protected him when he attempted to extort a vulnerable ally to cheat in a presidential election. Made excuses as he bungled a deadly pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens. Protected him again when he incited the sacking of the U.S. Capitol Building, despite threats to their own safety when the horde of violent morons stormed Capitol Hill.

It looks like the next level of depravity will be valorizing those same violent morons and more actively peddling the Big Lie, thereby undermining democracy even further. Crackpots like AZ Rep. Gosar have already gone there, and after licking his loser-wounds in relative obscurity, Trump has taken the maximalist crackpot position at recent events, insinuating that jailed insurrectionists are being persecuted for political reasons and demanding the name of the cop who shot MAGA martyr Ashli Babbitt.

Josh Marshall at TPM wrote this about it yesterday:

One thing that was clear to me when I read about Trump’s comments on the January 6th defendants and the death of Ashli Babbitt is that he intends to make these claims and demands centerpieces of the 2022 midterm election. For Trump everything is the Big Lie, everything is the “rigged election”, which is to say everything is payback, retribution and grievance about being driven from power.

The insurrectionists are the symbols of grievance, the symbols of absolute loyalty to Trump and the angry and aggrieved victims who are at the center of every Trump political demand, every argument. They are inseparable from the Big Lie because they are the ones who fought hardest to vindicate Trump’s claims. They are the new version of the brawny but tearful factory workers calling Trump “Sir” and asking for justice. They are, in a word, the new mascots of Trumpism.

Marshall says mainstream Republicans would rather memory-hole the insurrection so they can focus on traditional culture war bullshit and screech hypocritically about government spending as they gear up for elections in 2022. Well, maybe. But traditional Republicans didn’t want Trump to be the nominee in 2016, and we saw how quickly and completely they fell in line.

To paraphrase something Kay has said about divining the hidden motivations of Republicans,  it’s irrelevant. All that matters is their actions, and with a pitifully small number of exceptions, they’ve enabled Trump every step of the way. There’s no reason to think they’ll shrink from the next level of chaos and depravity. The usual handmaidens are already lining up to trivialize the attempted coup:

Still Digging

Florida is the state that has the most citizens arrested for the January 6 insurrection. Some fringe FL Republicans are holding a rally in Tallahassee this week to call for their release:

[T]his weekend, a handful of Florida Republican candidates will host a rally in Tallahassee calling for Gov. Ron DeSantis and others to put pressure on authorities to free the “political prisoners” of Jan. 6.

The “Free Our Patriots Rally in Tally” will be held this Saturday, July 10, and is hosted by Luis Miguel, a far-right Republican candidate looking to primary Sen. Marco Rubio. “Folks, The patriots who have been hunted down by the corrupt, communist FBI are suffering. Many of them are veterans who fought for this nation,” tweeted Miguel. “Let’s do our part to ensure they’re liberated. We can’t allow this in America. Be there at the Florida Capitol July 10.

The “Free Our Patriots” rally is likely to be treated as a curiosity if it gets any coverage at all. But unless the “mainstream” Republican Party has an unexpected break-up with its gross orange boyfriend, this crackpottery will soon be the official party line.

The potential upside? Maybe Republicans who peddle the Big Lie and valorize rioters will make it more likely that Democrats can defy history and hang onto the House and Senate in 2022. Trump will demand that Republicans embrace these delusions because his wounded ego demands evidence that he’s not the worthless loser and fraud he truly is, and there’s no reason to think Republicans won’t go along. They have with everything that came before, no matter how absurd and/or destructive.

Open thread.

Endless DiggingPost + Comments (124)

ETA: There IS Joy in Mudville

by Tom Levenson|  February 17, 20211:02 pm| 118 Comments

This post is in: domestic terrorists, Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads

Following up on Adam’s bulletin below, my son just introduced me to the crab song and meme.

It is the perfect funerary dirge for one Rush Limbaugh:

I’m so with Clarence Darrow on this one:

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

Open thread. No nil nisi bonum restriction on this one.

ETA: There IS Joy in MudvillePost + Comments (118)

A classic Gambino style roll-up

by David Anderson|  January 13, 20219:33 pm| 174 Comments

This post is in: Goddamned Traitors, Trump Crime Cartel, Violent Insurrection at the Capitol

NEW: Audio of militia members narrating the Capitol invasion:

“We have a good group: 30 to 40 of us. We’re sticking together and sticking to the plan.”

“We are in the main dome right now.”

“Keep going.”

“…Everything we fucking trained for.”https://t.co/TJnfEnX81H

— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) January 14, 2021

I am not a lawyer.

However, that sure as fuck sounds like an overt act of a conspiracy.

And given an overt act of conspiracy, there are going to be a shit ton of small fry who will soon be enjoying the full and unparrelled attention of the US government.  They will be getting lawyers who will be telling them that silence gets them 10 to 20 while talking gets them a much shorter and easier sentence.

A lot of people are extremely unlikely to be pardoned in the next week.  The incentive to squeal will be extraordinarily high.

But again, I am not a lawyer.

 

 

 

A classic Gambino style roll-upPost + Comments (174)

Sunday Rabble-Rousing Open Thread: IMPEACH HIM NOW

by Anne Laurie|  January 10, 20218:07 am| 136 Comments

This post is in: Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trumpery, Lock Him Up...Lock Them All Up

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told lawmakers to be prepared to return to Washington for action on President Trump https://t.co/t0bX4tspe3

— Bloomberg (@business) January 10, 2021

show full post on front page

Source familiar with Pelosi’s thinking says should Pence not invoke the 25th Amendment by the conclusion of her CBS interview Sunday night, she’s prepared to green-light bringing articles early next week.

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) January 10, 2021

Repubs, of course, are meeping about how inflammatory it would be to hold their Arsonist-in-Chief to account…

we don’t negotiate with terrorists https://t.co/bne0AQHlhj

— kilgore trout, brad r’s brother (@KT_So_It_Goes) January 10, 2021

Impeachment is “divisive” only if there’s an actual *divide* about the President’s conduct. If you’re ok with what he did, stand up and say it. But don’t hide behind weasel words like “divisive.”

— Elie Honig (@eliehonig) January 9, 2021

It may also have another foreign policy implication: restoring faith this kind of thing isn't going to become tolerated as normal in the US – which has deeply alarmed a lot of countries. https://t.co/bfhzjpV82c

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) January 9, 2021

No lifetime pension.

No lifetime Secret Service protection.

No running for President.

No $1 million travel budget.#ImpeachTrumpNow

— Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) January 9, 2021

What are you guys going to do, attack the capitol and kill people while trying to overturn a presidential election? https://t.co/hMrjmbZth7

— Adam Serwer ?? (@AdamSerwer) January 9, 2021

Calls for unity from Republicans are inauthentic until they stop spreading the lie that there was massive fraud in this Presidential election. Tell the people the truth it was a free and fair election and President Elect Biden was duly elected. That is the first step to unity.

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) January 10, 2021

Also, we should continue to deny that Biden won the election

— The face toucher (@JonIsAwesomest) January 10, 2021

Impeachment/25 Amendment are literally constitutional remedies. Insurrection, not so much. https://t.co/Zw8ZxJ0bSc

— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) January 10, 2021

Holding him accountable for stoking the anger and violence could make his followers even more angry and violent, so let's let him slide. https://t.co/mtMeAS3HI4

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) January 10, 2021

Instead of Republican leaders saying that Trump shouldn't be impeached because it would make his followers angry, they *should* say that impeaching (and removing) Trump in a bipartisan manner would send a signal to his followers that this kind of behavior can never happen again.

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) January 10, 2021

When Republicans say “unity” what they mean is “we would really like not to have to talk about Donald Trump anymore”

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) January 10, 2021

We have already established the precedent that a President won't be removed from office for shaking down a foreign country for political favors.

Now we are on to establishing the precedent that he won't be removed for whipping up his supporters to physically assault Congress.

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) January 10, 2021

Absolutely. Many violent authoritarians fail the first time around. https://t.co/9j9grATc9q

— Jennifer 'Prosecute Incitement and Sedition' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) January 9, 2021

Sunday Rabble-Rousing Open Thread: IMPEACH HIM NOWPost + Comments (136)

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