Trump’s has not been a stellar presidency. Nevertheless, those of us in the United States have been forced to endure it because he was our duly elected president.
Our tolerance, however, need not have to be infinite. In the past few weeks, it was revealed that Trump impeded justice through pardons of his associates who refused to testify while not pardoning those who cooperated.
Second, in an hour-long phone call that really needs to be listened to in its entirety to be fully grasped, Trump pressured Georgia officeholders to find 11,000 votes for him to overturn Georgia’s election results.
Third, the president has insisted that the election was stolen from him. He told his “Proud Boys – stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.” That was arguably in the interest of at least delaying violence till today.
Trump says the election was stolen from him. Whether he believes it himself or not, his supporters earnestly believe him. They think they are staring at the end of American democracy. Faced with such a threat, today they had understandable responses:
rioters incited by President Donald Trump have stormed the Capitol building. Both the House and the Senate have suspended their counting because of security threats. Reportedly, shots have been fired. A photograph of a rioter occupying the House speaker’s chair shows that the Capitol is, essentially, being occupied. C-SPAN is reporting that senior members of leadership of the legislative branch are being held in an “undisclosed location.” Reporters are refusing to divulge their locations on the grounds—entirely reasonable—that doing so could endanger their safety. The National Guard has been deployed.
It’s undeniable at this point. The United States is witnessing a coup attempt—a forceful effort to seize power against the legal framework. The president has caused the interruption of the process that would certify his removal from office. The mechanics of constitutional government have been suspended. Americans are in danger of losing constitutional government to a degree unmatched even during the Civil War, a period when secession itself did not postpone either the holding of elections or the transition of power between presidents.
The group left at least one pipe bomb. At least one woman was shot and killed.
Elected politicians insisted in the run up to this that this bloodshed that theirs was a noble revolution, or at least the continuation of one:
In response to the violence, President Trump released a video on Twitter reiterating that the election was stolen from him and that his supporters fighting for him with literal bombs in the Capitol Building were in the right. The video was deleted by Twitter.
A president who cannot be trusted to post videos on Twitter should not be trusted as president for any length of time. Many have objected that we are days away from swearing in a new president anyway, but Trump’s presidency must be ended before that.
A rule that allows presidents to do whatever they want as long as they don’t have very much time remaining in office is a bad one with many easily foreseeable downsides. This should be obvious, and yet it is the most common argument put forth.
Trump has long relied on the fact that no one will ever do anything to stop him. He knew he could call politicians in friendly states and pressure them to influence elections because he knew he would suffer no consequences for it. He knew he could slow down Postal Service mail processing to delay ballot delivery because he knew no one would hold him responsible for it. He has been proven right at just about every point in his accomplished 74-year life.
Perhaps he will continue being right and no one will hold him responsible today or any other day for anything. Perhaps we really are so weak that we will accept literally behavior from him.
I am writing this on the off chance that this country’s leaders have strength to do the right thing:
Impeach him. Tonight.
Yes please.Report
You’re massively distorting both the Proud Boys denunciation and the Twitter video. I hate that. This is a serious moment, and we should be calling balls and strikes.Report
Just in case the OT doesn’t delete your comment: grow up. I’ve been here the whole time, calling balls and strikes, not doing pathetic stunts like your little name-calling. The world needs adults right now. Today, you only get a silver medal for contamination of our democracy.Report
Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem was out drinking with his crew after a game. After they had all imbibed several adult beverages, one umpire boasted: “I call ’em as I see ’em.” The second replied: “I calls ’em like they are.” Klem sat quietly for a bit and finally said: “They ain’t nothing ’til I call ’em.”Report
There’s a joke that a Vegas comedian used to tell that goes like this:
That’s exactly what the video was. You, the rioters, are special people, you’re standing up for what’s right, everyone who’s not with us is evil, but you’re done enough for now.Report
You really are struggling to ignore everything that Trump really said, aren’t you? Trump literally tweeted that he loves them and that this is only happening because his “sacred landslide” has been stolen from him. He also called Biden “so evil.” He whispers stop while screaming give me more to the. erotic delight of the Magats.Report
I’m not trying to ignore Trump’s role in all this. He has been behaving indefensibly for the past two months. While the behaviour itself is indefensible, the man should be defended against false claims, though. When Vikram makes half a dozen points and I know off the top of my head that two of them are wrong, I’m not going to take the rest of his points seriously. You know when it’s easiest to spot a person in the wrong? When only one person is in the wrong.Report
Why not name the two false points? You took the trouble to comment twice. It’s hard to take your comments seriously when you dismiss the entirety of a post with vague accusations supported by literally nothing. Give the poster a meaningful opportunity to respond.Report
Trump has repeatedly denounced white supremacists, including to Chris Wallace who asked the same question in a debate four years prior. Trump said he has denounced them repeatedly, and asked for specific people to denounce. Biden said, “Proud Boys”, who Trump didn’t appear to have heard of, but in the overtalk of being told to tell them to “stand down”, he said “stand back and stand by”. A reasonable person can’t watch the footage and come away with the idea that Trump failed to denounce white supremacy or indicated any kind of support for the Proud Boys.
Likewise, the tweeted video was clearly an attempt to defuse the situation, not an endorsement or call to arms. You can say he was too sympathetic to them in his statement, although I think it was necessary to talk them down to make them feel like they were being heard. And you can fault him for not changing his position on the legitimacy of the election if you want. But that statement of his was presidential. I can only assume that Twitter pulled it because it contained unverified statements about election fraud, but you should be able to find it.Report
Ok – armed people waving Trump flags stormed the capitol today after he said at a rally they should go up to the capitol.
What exactly would you call that? Because from the cheap seats it looks like a coup.Report
The Republican Party should be known as the party of insurrection from now until the last day of the Republic. Damn right this is a serious moment, and trying to parse the Proud Boy tweet is a not very serious effort to minimize Trump’s call to action.Report
You want to name one party the party of insurrection in perpetuity, and you decided that this trumps the Civil War?Report
Yes it does. The civil war was started by certain states who wanted to keep buying and selling people as chattle slaves to prop up their economic system. They lost.
These domestic terrorists have allegiance to a President of a particular party, a party which until yesterday had done nothing (and is still doing very little) to reign in either his followers or their own colleagues because trying to ride the wave kept them in power. They have now discovered they can’t ride the wave, much less direct it.Report
This isn’t a “good” comment, or an “intelligent” comment, or even a “more-or-less coherent” comment, but kudos on typing it all with your nondominant hand.Report
Ummm, the party of slavery was the Democrats. By your logic, we get to keep reminding them of that even though all of those Democrats are pretty much dead by this point.
No, parties get to redeem themselves. We’ll see if the GOP finds it’s way out of the wilderness.Report
Sure they get to redeem themselves. Maybe they will. But so far they haven’t and they have indeed earned the label Party of Insurrection.
And I am well aware of the fact that Democrats were the party of slavery. Brandon seems to think that means they are tarred for eternity for that. And he also seems to think there was some sort of push from Party leadership to perpetuate slavery. There wasn’t. The states made that push. The states’ leaders committed treason. And then lost the war.Report
Then they don’t get to be the Party of Insurrection in perpetuity. They get the label until they redeem themselves.Report
I love that you spelled chattel “chattle”. I’ve noticed that some people think the word means cattle-like.Report
The party whose adherents carried the flag of insurrection into our nation’s Capitol? Seems fitting.Report
The “party of insurrection”? The Republicans aren’t even the party of the most attacks on federal facilities in 2021, and we’re only a week in.Report
I wasn’t aware there was a volume threshold that had to be passed before we could condemn a party for inciting its followers to sedition and treason.Report
There’s a joke that a Vegas comedian used to tell that goes like this:
That’s exactly what the video was. You, the rioters, are special people, you’re standing up for what’s right, everyone who’s not with us is evil, but you’re done enough for now.Report
“ They think they are staring at the end of American democracy. Faced with such a threat.”
I disagree. These assclowns have no such fear. If they did, they wouldn’t have treated the whole thing like a damn tailgate party. If you have an existential fear that you’re way of life is about to end, you don’t pose for selfies. These violent, anti-American criminals fear little more than losing their privilege.Report
+1!Report
This would be nice. I doubt it will happen but it is deserved. There are some reporters tweeting that they spoke to Cabinet members who are considering invoking the 25th Amendment. This seems more plausible but I doubt it will happen.Report
Waiting two weeks to find out whether today was a super-spreader event.Report
It night have been for the House. They were sheltering in cramped quarters and several of the new (I’ll let you all guess which party) members refused to wear masks.Report
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We _really_ need to do what the 25th allows and set up an independent commission to do the duties of the 25th instead of the Cabinet.
We _also_ need to change the rules so Presidents cannot operate as Trump has, with so much unconfirmed Cabinet.
In fact, I’d like to forbid _any_ unconfirmed Cabinet. Like, literally everyone in charge of the Executive departments should be confirmed. We should have like two of them in each department to take over, and if something particularly bad happens, we can swap a confirmed person in from another department.
We should literally not be able to have people with cabinet authority who have not been confirmed by Congress, because, and this is something we all forget, _they are in change of removing the President_ under the 25th.
At least, if we don’t fix that.Report
What advantage does this have over impeachment and removal? It still requires a 2/3 majority to be done over the objections of the President.Report
Oh, I see. If I’m reading out right, the Cabinet and VP can temporarily remove the President for up to three weeks while Congress deliberates, at which point Biden will be in office.Report
Revolutionaries have no other means to their end, but violence.
All this talk that we’ve been hearing nonstop about 2nd Amendment solutions, watering the tree of liberty, of Patriots and 1776…It had no other possible end than this.
The media and punditry largely laughed it all off as cosplay and metaphor and hyperbole. But it wasn’t. They were, and are, deadly serious about not having faith in the democratic process and not accepting the legitimacy of any other political group than themselves.Report
The guy in the buffalo hat was definitely cosplaying.Report
He’s a well-known figure in the QAnon scene.Report
There’s a dumb group of people running around sharing photos of him in the Capitol next to photos of him ‘taken at a Black Lives Matter’ protest, to ‘prove’ it was antifa (1) that invaded the Capitol, and I’m staring at that thinking…you dumbasses can see he’s painted his face with the American flag at a BLM protest, right? And your theory is he’s a BLM protestor, instead of a counterprotestor? You think BLM walks around with American flags painted on their face at the protests?
1) I’m not entirely sure how being at a BLM protest would make him antifa, but I believe the rule is ‘White liberal=antifa, Black liberal=BLM’?Report
Yeah, that is pretty dumb. It reminds me of the lefties insisting that all the damage done during the BLM riots was done by far-right provocateurs.Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-caused-violence-protests-its-not-antifa/
https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/08/10/fact-checking-claim-about-deaths-damage-from-black-lives-matter-protests/113878088/
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-race-and-ethnicity-suburbs-health-racial-injustice-7edf9027af1878283f3818d96c54f748
“Research from the University of Washington indicates that this disparity stems from political orientation and biased media framing (Washington Post, 24 August 2020), such as disproportionate coverage of violent demonstrations (Business Insider, 11 June 2020; Poynter, 25 June 2020).” https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/01/06/portland-oregon-protest-capitol-washington/Report
Unsurprisingly, none of this supports the claims you’ve been making. Most of it boils down to the fact that BLM and Antifa are ideologies and not organizations with official membership rolls, so the arrestees and videotaped rioters didn’t have official glow-in-the-dark Antifa and BLM badges that we could use to prove their affiliations. That doesn’t mean much. Nor does the fact that a handful of right-wingers were picked up mean that lefties weren’t out there fishing stuff up.
The “93% of protests were peaceful” statistic is somewhat misleading. They counted each distinct location and day as a separate protest, so they ended up with 7,750 in total, so 7% of that is over 500 riots. If you look at the map on the report, you can see that pretty much every major city had riots. It’s true that most protesters were not participating in the rioting, but there was a lot of rioting, which means that in absolute terms, quite a lot of them were.
There’s no question that the majority of the damage was done by people with left-wing ideological affiliations. Probably there were some opportunistic hooligans in there as well, and a few false flags, though there’s no evidence that this was more than a very small minority. This was widely acknowledged by the left early on, which is why we were seeing so much apologia for rioting and looting (e.g. “Riots are the voice of the unheard”, “We’re taking what you owe us”).
There is a lot of garbage at either end of the ideological spectrum. It’s not hard for me to acknowledge this. You should think long and hard about why it’s so hard for you. Perhaps you’ve been in bed with the garbage so long that your nose has become accustomed to the smell.Report
Source this as I did. Or drop it. Like the election fraud allegations that led to yesterdays sedition this lie needs to die.Report
They’re right not to have faith in the Democratic process—look who it put in charge last time!Report
One conservative I know has often quipped that for liberals, political violence is a bit of a dial that goes from peace to mass rioting; but for conservatives, it’s more of a switch that goes from peace to kill them all.
Obviously he is wrong, because there is apparently at least one other position (Trash and Loot and Take Selfies).Report
Chevron’s on board:
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Uh oh.
Trying to overthrow the government of the United States is one thing, but now you’ll have to answer to the Chevron corporation!
I’m thinking of that scene in Dr. Strangelove, where in the midst of Jack D Ripper initiating a nuclear holocaust, someone breaks a vending machine to get a Coke, and a general says, “Now you’ll have to answer to the Coca Cola company!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUAK7t3Lf8sReport
The twitter account for The Dead Kennedys has thanked both Mittler and McMuffin.
It’s a weird day.Report
But what do the Butthole Surfers think?Report
They have not tweeted recently.Report
I hope they didn’t get caught in a butthole rip tide. Those are the worst.Report
Speaking of Dr. Strangelove…
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JP Morgan has released a statement too
It’s been weirdly surreal to see the business community denounce this stuff. Normally, they try to hide their political influence behind lobbyists and whatnot.
With both staff and politicians scattered, I guess they didn’t really have any way to reach Congressentities beside Twitter and say ‘WTF are the Republicans doing?’Report
They are reminding their employees on the Hill of their duty to the corporation.Report
I agree. Pelosi should have articles drawn up and submitted immediately. Whether it ends in his impeachment or the clock runs out the important things is that that congress defends itself. Also it’d force the GOP to decide where they stand on this matter.Report
Rep. Omar is drafting them last I heard.Report
Hell
She may well
Have had them in a drawer ready to go.Report
If they can get it done they should.Report
As my brother says, Mitt Romney, not an arsonist: https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1347010009150988297?s=20Report
To share a tweet here, go to the tweet’s menu and pick Embed Tweet. That’ll give you HTML that displays the text without requiring a click-through. E.g., that tweet is
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Yup impeach again. Impeach two more times if they can fit it in. Impeach him from ” can’t you just find some votes” and for instigating this riot to stop the counting of votes.Report
Amen.Report
Yes, impeachment or 25th amendment. Or some other legal means.Report
And now the House has gone into recess. So, we’re left with the choice of the party of insurrection or the party of incompetence.Report
As I mentioned in the other thread, I think the 25th is the most expeditious route. Since then, It seems POTUS has ‘pledged’ that there will be a peaceful transition. Obviously I have no insider info, but this strikes me as a concession granted to Pence. If true (and that’s a big if)… I’m profoundly disappointed in Pence; a cowardly dereliction.Report
Well, Pence was picked for a reason. Did anyone (seriously, *anyone*) think he was a man of high or any ideals? I can’t think of a more oozy, gelatinous, unprincipled politician in action right now.
OK. Ted Cruz. But Pence is solidly in the second tier.Report
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