"Every Crime Imaginable"
No one is above the law, right? Or is that *bullshit* like most everything else we learn in school?
I’m glued to the January 6th coup d’état hearings.
For last Thursday’s primetime showing, I bought four tall boy Bud Light Cheladas and arranged the Adirondack chairs on my front deck so I could soak in the beauty of my local surroundings while periodically expressing exasperation with the inanity of life in America post he-who-will-never-be-named. My housemate threw fuel on the fire by bringing home a liter of José Cuervo1800 sipping tequila.
I thought I knew all there was to know about January 6th.
I know I know all I need to know for me to be in favor of locking up a significant portion of the previous administration. Including, of course, the mob boss himself.
I can’t help but insert the infamous quote from the previous illegitimate Republican administration’s Secretary of War. He spoke these words as an explanation for why we should bomb the living shit out of a Middle Eastern sovereign nation despite all signs pointing to there not being any weapons of mass destruction, or any active intent to bring our country harm, or being the country where most of the hijackers originated (That would be Saudi Arabia. The Middle Eastern oligarchy whose new ruler favors bone saws):
[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
The aspects of the attempt to overthrow the United States government on January 6th I didn’t know I didn’t know are these:
The militias acting as modern day Brownshirts did NOT attend the coup d’état pep rally at the Ellipse. They spent their time reconnoitering the Capitol grounds and preparing to be the vanguard, or ‘tip of the spear’, for the enraged mob to follow. Leaders of the militias had been in touch with the mango Mussolini well in advance of that fateful day. Enrique Tarrio, national figurehead for the Proud Boys, kept an appointment with the White House in the days before the violence unfolded. He also—like Deep Throat (the Deep Throat pertaining to Watergate), or every other bad political whodunit thereafter—held a meeting in a parking garage with the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes.
As an aside, I learned the term ‘proud boy’ is something a rancher uses to describe a gelding who still wants to behave as if he’s a stallion.
A gelding is a castrated horse. Seems fitting.
The never-before, twice-impeached loser of the 2020 presidential election was told people in the January 6th crowd had firearms and his reaction was to be outraged they were being denied entry.
Do you need to read that line again?
The President of the United States WANTED his “Stop the Steal” rally participants to be armed. He was okay with allowing firearms along with bear mace, sharpened flag poles, tasers, etc.
He wanted his staff to remove the magnetometers because—“They’re not here to hurt me.” Meaning—he had no problem with them hurting anyone else. Anyone else. The Vice President, the Speakers, the Senators, the members of the House, Capitol Hill Police…
Meaning—he was not only inciting people to violence—he was inciting an armed insurrection. It is true Putin’s puppet didn’t take up arms and attack the Capitol himself but—you could also argue—Charles Manson didn’t wield any of the murder weapons in the Helter Skelter killings. Manson was sentenced to the remainder of his life behind bars.
The 46th best president America has ever known then proceeded to rile the Ellipse crowd into a blood-curdling frenzy and exhorted them to storm the Capitol to ‘take back their country’.
And so they did.
How is that not a coup d’état when practically every person in the line of succession was trapped inside that building?
A former general who was summarily dismissed as the National Security Director in the earliest days of the conman’s rule pleaded the fifth when asked if he supported the peaceful transition of power.
A former general in the United States military! A once highly acclaimed former general no less!
He was opposed—apparently—to the democratic ideal. You know, the contents of the U.S. Constitution this sad sack of a human swore an oath to defend. But, if you are not aware by now, QAnon followers (as this guy is), members of the GOP and conservatives in general, bleed hypocrisy. Practically everything they project out into the world turns out to be a reflection on them—pedophilia, voter fraud, gender confusion.
True for humans as a whole, but the cult of alternative facts and cognitive dissonance—apologists, supporters and enablers of the inciter in chief—have nearly cornered the market.
Here is an excerpt from an The Atlantic article devoted to trying to understand the mind of a madman like Mike Flynn. Bear in mind, authoritarians—which make up the majority of the GOP—worship this traitorous weasel:
Michael Flynn faced the camera with brow creased and lips compressed. He hadn’t been born yesterday, his expression said. He was not going to fall for trick questions.
“General Flynn, do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified?” Representative Liz Cheney asked him in a video teleconference deposition for the January 6 committee.
Flynn’s lawyer pressed the mute button and switched off the camera. Ninety-six seconds passed. Flynn and the lawyer reappeared with a request for clarification. Did Cheney mean morally justified, or legally? Cheney obligingly asked each question in turn.
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?” she asked.
Flynn squinted, truculent.
“Take the Fifth,” he said.
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified legally?” Cheney asked.
“Fifth,” he replied.
Cheney moved on to the ultimate question.
“General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” she asked.
“The Fifth,” he repeated.
It was a surreal moment: Here was a retired three-star general and former national security adviser refusing to opine on the foundational requirement of a constitutional democracy. Flynn had sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Rule of law had been drilled into him for decades in the Army.
Now, by invoking the right against self-incrimination, he was asserting that his beliefs about lawful succession could expose him to criminal charges. That could not be literally true—beliefs have absolute protection under the First Amendment—but his lawyer might well have worried about where Cheney’s line of questioning would lead.
Other things I didn’t know I didn’t know and the January 6th committee has made crystal clear are that some of the criminals in the administration, and the GOP, who were not criminally insane, actually told the Baby Huey president—multiple times!—he had definitely lost the election. Some as far back as the week after the election. Some following the December meeting of the Electoral College electors. People like Attorney General Bill Barr, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and erstwhile Advisors to the President and Chief Nepotees, Jar-vanka.
Instead, the flaccid faux billionaire preferred getting his advice from a rogue’s gallery of imbeciles. People like…Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy, and late-night infomercial maven; the ‘Overstock guy’ who nobody with a White House security clearance even knew; Sidney Powell, she of the “Release the Kraken” quote in reference to the various lawsuits about voter fraud she was taking to swing states in which 60 of 61 were spectacular legal belly flops—even when the judges were stacked in her favor, and even when they managed to wend their way to the deeply corrupted U.S. Supreme Court; Rudy “Colludy” Giuliani whose called press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, nestled in between a crematorium and a bodega full of sex toys, will go down in history as one of the most “laugh out loud” political decisions ever made. From “America’s Top Cop” to an inebriated shill for the world’s lousiest businessman.
I just hope Four Seasons Total Landscaping managed to capitalize on the buffoonery.
I didn’t know the plump previous POTUS threw a hissy fit when the Secret Service didn’t allow him to join the mob besieging the U.S. Capitol.
I didn’t know Vice President Mike Pence refused to leave the Capitol Building with his possibly infiltrated and compromised Secret Service squad.
I didn’t know lawmakers, staff, law enforcement and Secret Service were scared enough to text goodbyes to loved ones just like the Americans in the Twin Towers or the hijacked airplanes on September 11th.
I didn’t know all kinds of communications over Secret Service channels during a specific period of time have been “disappeared”.
I didn’t know White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, had been worried about being charged with “every crime imaginable”, and concerned enough to speak it out loud to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ aide, Cassidy Hutchinson.
I didn’t know practically all of the witnesses coming before the January 6th Committee would be Republicans and staunch supporters of the 46th best POTUS we’ve ever had.
I was shocked to hear former conservative judge—from the liberal bastion of Texas no less, J Michael Luttig, say under oath and in front of millions of viewers that the former guy AND his supporters were a ‘clear and present danger to American democracy’.
The January 6th Committee is in recess for the month of August. They’re allowing the public and those in justice’s cross hairs to stew until September. Marinate in all the things about January 6th we didn’t know we didn’t know.
When all is said and done, it’s my most fervent desire those most culpable—and least forthcoming—are charged with every crime imaginable.
A quote from Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin after former Republican congressman, Trey Gowdy, used the originally favorite GOP pejorative—liberal—to describe his friend and colleague:
You’re damn right I’m a liberal, because the heart of that word is liberty, and if we’re not fighting for liberty, what are we fighting for?
I’m a progressive, too, because the heart of that word is progress, and if we’re not working for progress, what are we even doing in politics?
But these days my favorite thing to call myself is a conservative, because I want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. I don’t even know why you guys want to call yourselves conservatives anymore, because you want to tear everything down.
That’s not conservatism.
That’s nihilism.
I’m reading Congressman Raskin’s book, Unthinkable, and I highly recommend it.
Also, I have yet to watch one of the Soft White Underbelly interviews, but I am told they are riveting. A writer on Medium says that whether you believe the interviews are exploitive, or giving a voice to the voiceless, the takeaway ought to be that the common denominator for all of the interviews is life-altering trauma.
Regarding “the unhoused” and dispossessed, like most urbanites, I’m disgusted, discouraged and disillusioned with the visual blight of shantytowns and the impact abject poverty has on everyday citizens.
Empathy fatigue, like COVID fatigue, is real.
I favor creating visible intentional communities similar to the tiny houses being built on vacant city lots because the poverty and homelessness needs to be apparent—not hidden away in makeshift solutions like converting old hotels or warehouses which are easy to blithely disregard.
For that same reason, I need to listen to some of these stories. I often think about stopping and engaging with the unhoused I see as I make my way about my day—but I never do. Here’s a synopsis from the creator, Mark Laita.
My friend, your admirer and benefactor wrote me “ one of James’s best”. I agree.
Tell her I appreciate her appreciation very much.