Combatting Sedition

Posted: July 28, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them (Members of Congress) and the people in this room. Too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or that hell actually wasn’t that bad. The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”

— Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone

The House Select Committee to investigate the 6 January attack on the Capitol met for the first time yesterday. I was able to watch nearly all of the emotionally charged, vivid, heart-breaking and exasperating testimony on TV. Officer Fanone was one of two Metropolitan Police Officers (MPD) from Washington DC who joined two officers from the Capitol Police Department to relate what happened during the domestic terrorists’ attack to overturn the results of the most secure election in our history. In the quote, Officer Fanone reflected the disappointment and resentment he and his colleagues feel as the majority of elected Republicans in Congress profess that the attempted coup was no big deal.

The testimony was chilling and brought home once again how close we came to losing our Republic. Had those officers failed in their duty, the past six months would have a completely different narrative. People think it was “no big deal” because the officers won. Had the terrorists won, many law makers would have been kidnapped, injured, or killed. We would live in a different world. They saved our democracy. And yet, senior elected officials willingly and knowingly disgrace those officers’ personal sacrifices.

In fact, and to their everlasting disgrace, prior to the testimony Republican leaders from the House of Representatives held a press conference and tried to blame Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for the attack. Further debasing themselves and demonstrating the depth of their moral depravity, during the hearing six other elected Republican members of Congress tried to hold a sham press conference in front of the building housing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to demand justice for the terrorists that conducted the attack. As of yesterday, 591 people have been arrested for various crimes related to the attack. However, to many elected Republicans those people are, in the words of those in front of the DOJ, “political prisoners” that are subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.” Despite the fact that the attack on the Capitol may be one of the most documented crimes of its size in history — people just can’t resist taking selfies and posting them on social media — their seditious supporters claim that evidence of their innocence is being withheld.

If it is possible, the most despicable actions took place on a main stream media platform known for its unrelenting support of the disgraced ex-president. A certain “personality” mocked the police officers by handing out acting awards for their “performance” in relating the horrific beatings and abuse that they suffered on 6 January. Other “news” organizations with no regard for the truth “revealed” that the officers were actually actors playing a role. Yet another literally laughed at Officer Fanone’s statement that he suffered psychological trauma from his experience.

This is what our country has become. All in the name of a cult of personality for one man.

Unfortunately, I think it is deeper than that. It is a sickness in our country and the cult leader was, and is, able to exploit it for his own purposes. Likewise, the bulk of elected Republican officials are going along with it not because of any policies or principles, but because it suits their purposes to gain and retain power. They are fine with autocracy.

The tool for their power grab is race.

Without sounding too superficial or simplistic, the evidence is there. Roughly 99% of the terrorists attacking the Capitol were white and most were men. The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters were all known to have a part in fomenting the insurrection, and all are white supremacist groups. The focus of the new “election security” laws, faux audits, and “stop the steal” efforts are places like, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston and other large cities with large numbers of voters that are people of color. During the presidential debate the ex-president told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” School Boards across the country are fighting back against state legislatures that are limiting the elements of history that can be taught in schools. Using “Critical Race Theory” — a term they do not understand — as a code word for diversity, celebrating other cultures, appreciating the contributions of all Americans, teaching the ugly along with the beautiful, and as a catchall for any topic or fact about race relations in the United States that may make a white person feel “uncomfortable.” They would prefer that schools whitewash history. Literally.

Here is an example of the fact that many Republican law makers don’t even pretend to hide it anymore. Texas House Bill 241 calls for an audit of the November 2020 vote for all counties with a population over 415,000 people. There are 13 such counties, of which 10 voted for now President Biden. The bill’s sponsor says that his constituents are concerned about fraud in that election — even as earlier in the year Texas election officials fell all over themselves congratulating themselves on how smooth and secure the elections in Texas had been that fall.

Here is the punchline. When asked why not audit all of the counties in the state, the bill’s sponsor State Representative Steve Toth said, “What’s the point? I mean, all the small counties are red.”

The cult is destroying our country. It is a cancer. Cancer cannot be rooted out until it is identified, analyzed, and thoroughly destroyed and removed. The House Select Committee has important work to do and they must use due diligence to follow the facts wherever they lead. To the officers that testified yesterday, who stood on the front line and faced fascism in the flesh, they have no doubt that the facts will lead to positions of power. Power politicians may not have been on the front line abusing the police, but there were undoubtedly some or many behind the insurrection. As Officer Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police put it yesterday when asked what he wanted the committee to do, he used the analogy that when somebody hires a hitman to conduct a murder, the hitman goes to jail and so does the person that hired the hit. “There was a hit carried out on January 6, and a hitman sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

We need to know who arranged, aided and abetted the hit, and hold them accountable, in order to bring our country back from the edge of darkness.

What Is Happening?

Posted: July 25, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

“If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.”

— Donald J. Trump in a 15 July 2021 statement.

It is nice to know that the ex-president would not use the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) to lead a coup, but his statement above begs the question as to who his first choice might be.

The pronouncement is a reaction to an excerpt from the book I Alone Can Fix It by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post. In the book, General Milley is reported to have been deeply concerned that the ex-president would attempt a coup after he lost the election. The CJCS spoke of the ex-president following the “gospel of the Fuhrer” and creating a possible “Reichstag moment” in the wake of the ex-president’s Big Lie about the election. (Regular readers of this blog will recall that my 11 December 2020 post expressed the same concerns. Although I did not know of the CJCS worries at that time, it was obviously a wide-spread fear.)

I must say that in the days since the 6 January insurrection, my apprehensions about the future of our democracy have only grown deeper. I think that we are in a real crisis.

It is easy for me to ignore the incoherent rantings of a demented ex-president who spends his time scamming his followers and relieving them of their hard earned dollars. What I cannot ignore is the concerted, coordinated effort of elected Republican leaders at all levels of government to continue to push the Big Lie, spread concern over the safety of the Coronavirus vaccine, and work to divide our country for their own personal ego, power and monetary gain.

Our democracy was attacked on 6 January 2021 with the aim of overthrowing an election and extending the reign of a budding autocrat in a clear violation of our Constitution. As the criminal investigation continues, it is ever more clear that the goal of the majority of the rioters that entered the Capitol building was to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. Without the protection of the Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police (DC), sprinkled with a heavy dose of luck, law makers would have been severely injured or killed, and, in my view, the loser candidate would have invoked the Insurrection Act and sent the active duty military into the streets. That was certainly General Milley’s concern and he had a front row seat to the inner workings of the administration.

If there is any doubt about that, consider another passage of I Alone Can Fix It where the authors report that the ex-president’s only regret is that he did not send troops into American cities during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer. Not the National Guard. Active duty military forces. He was willing to use the American military against American citizens in order to silence their protests because he feared he looked weak. His only regret. Not the hundreds of thousands of people that died from the mishandling of the pandemic, not the refusal of people to take the vaccine because they think it is some kind of badge of loyalty to him, not the insurrection he fomented to bring down our democracy. Only that he did not use American military might in the streets of American cities.

Now Republicans of various stripes (perhaps down the middle of their backs?) are working hard to change the narrative surrounding the insurrection. In typical Orwellian fashion, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the events surrounding 6 January which included everything the Republicans wanted — including a co-equal chairmanship, bipartisan agreement on subpoenas, and on, and on. As a result, the Speaker of the House moved forward with a House Select Committee to investigate. Immediately came the howls of “partisanship” “politics” and other accusations that would be laughable if not so serious. They blocked a bipartisan effort! But now it is partisan. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Tr-CA) appointed five members to the Committee, of which two were clearly installed to disrupt and distract from the serious proceeding. When the Speaker took the highly unusual step of blocking those two individuals, Mr. McCarthy withdrew all of his nominees. He now intends to have his own, Republican only, inquiry into the insurrection. The intent of that move will be to create a circus to divert attention from what really happened. The current Republican mantra is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is the real cause of the attack. (Remember, logic and fact-based reality no longer apply to anything 90% of Republican officials say these days, which I find subversive and un-American because they know better. Mr. McCarthy thinks that he will be Speaker of the House after the 2022 elections and he will do anything to achieve that goal. God Bless America if he becomes Speaker because we will certainly need it.)

While Mr. McCarthy’s investigative committee will be partisan, at least two Republicans will be on the official Select Committee. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) was on the original appointee list (Speaker Pelosi gave her one of the Democrat’s slots) and today we learned that the Speaker appointed Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-ILL) to the committee. It will be bi-partisan. Politically, there is little to nothing that I agree on with those two Representatives, but I admire their courage and willingness to put the Constitution and our country above raw politics.

While I am 100 percent in favor of the Select Committee doing a thorough investigation, I have little hope that they will be able to accomplish all that we might expect had the original bi-partisan commission been able to do its work. I deeply suspect that members of Congress and/or their staff members were involved to varying degrees in the events of that day. Although the committee will have subpoena power, a lesson learned from the previous administration is that individuals can ignore Congressional subpoenas with impunity. The Congress has no real method to force people to testify other than by going to the courts. In recent years, we learned that even if individuals eventually get ordered by the courts to testify, it could be two or three years of court fights before they are so ordered. Even then there is nothing to compel them to talk. We may even find that the Biden Department of Justice protects some of the high ranking officials of the previous administration because they do not want to set a precedent of undermining Executive Privilege. I believe that our country needs to fully understand what happened and hold those responsible accountable. In the current political climate, we may never fully know who did what.

Meanwhile, the Big Lie continues to spread. There may be no bigger threat to our democracy. The 2020 election was the safest, most secure in our nation’s history. Yet, millions of people think that the election was “stolen” and that President Biden is not the legitimate leader of our country. Once people lose faith in the election process, and thus think that any election that does not turn out as they would like is fraudulent, they will take action as they did in January to “restore” what they think was stolen.

In another Orwellian twist, the only way to change the proliferating election laws resulting from the Big Lie is to vote out those people that are implementing them, but the laws are designed to keep them in power. There will be challenges in the courts, but meanwhile elections continue under the new laws. Even should voters succeed in dumping the old gang, the laws are written such that legislatures or other partisan officials can overturn the will of the people if they decide they don’t like the results. So first they are trying to suppress the vote to stay in charge, but should that fail, measures are in place to overturn the elections.

These are turbulent times. What is happening is not “politics as usual.” It doesn’t have anything to do with politics. It is a direct assault on our way of governing. Most people are not really paying attention to what is going on around our country with changes to election laws, fake audits of the 2020 election, and active measures to undermine the vote. Misinformation, disinformation and pure unadulterated lies are being used to curtail our right to vote and to end the peaceful transfer of power.

Perhaps the assault on the Capitol was more like the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch than the 1933 Reichstag Fire. We must remain ever vigilant to keep history from repeating itself.