No no, I was sarcastically re-hashing an actual Ben Shapiro talking point above, sorry. I was assuming b_b was also joking, because Trump's state of mind was/is glaringly obvious, as handled in your second paragraph. Any defense of Trump is increasingly laughable and can be more and more easily dismantled, thanks in no small part to the J6 committee and the hearings. I have indeed been watching. I thought Sydney Powell's taped deposition shown yesterday was particularly enlightening, because in true MAGA fashion, she clearly has zero remorse. Not like "so I was wrong about the Hugo Chavez thing, and it's unfortunate that we never found evidence of widespread voter fraud", but like "white house OLC was too pussy to help decapitate our democracy that day, yeah, it suckedddd". She knows it was all lies, and she always knew. And that's undoubtedly every single person on "Team Crazy". Including Trump. Seriously though, fuck everyone who says "Trump truly believes his own lies" or "He lives in an alternate reality". Because (and you're not going to BELIEVE this:) that's another one of his lies, and an important one to avoid parroting, because it'll be his legal strategy. The coup attempt is ongoing. edit: Oh, and everyone lauding Mike Pence for not helping Trump? He must have seriously flirted with going along with it, if he was repeatedly meeting with John Eastman and/or Jeffrey Clark up to and on Jan. 5th. No one could listen to Eastman's "constitutional legal theories" without immediately realizing that what he's asking for is not only obviously illegal, but flies in the face of the spirit of the constitution. Sophisticated or not, I think we were a lot closer to a palace coup than is comfortable to admit. edit2: it's more likely that the meetings were ordered by Trump. More possible evidence of orchestration and intent. That's an obvious 'plead-the-fifth' question for everyone, maybe until any plea bargains, approaching sentencing. A president doing literally everything he could do to stay in office, legally or illegally, doesn't matter. Recruiting literally anyone willing to help him, as long as they would tell his lies for him. ..but who wouldn't do that, amirite?? ARE YOU A BETA, BRO?!?!?? edit3: ok so these two texts, chef's kiss, between Brad Parscale and Katrina Pierson on the evening of J6: Pierson: You did what you felt right at the time and therefore it was right I love that. This is perhaps a pinnacle form of moral permissions! "I was quite certain the _________s all needed to magically vanish, and slave labor is fantastic for production, so can you really blame me?". Very MAGA. [reported]Parscale: This week I feel guilty for helping him win [in 2016]
I was being dead serious. Kinda like when they asked Flynn if he believes in a peaceful transition of power. "Fifth," was his reply. It was a literal interpretation of that old Chapelle's Show sketch where he just keeps yelling "FIFTH" at a congressional panel (in which he was making fun of how they let white people get away with shit like that). I almost did a spit take when I saw Flynn do it. Spend the best 6 minutes of your day watching this:That's an obvious 'plead-the-fifth' question for everyone...
You start to get suspicious about the alleged title, and then it finally sneaks in there to laughterpunch you in the gut. Awesome experience, thank you. It wasn't the worst idea, just garbage execution.
It hasn't aged well. For example, police violence against african americans is hella more dire now than it was after Rodney King - a modern version would never have John Travolta acting violently with a gun because as we all know, simply holding a cell phone is enough to get black people killed. For another, the white trash in it mostly listen to Limp Bizkit because rap hadn't been completely appropriated into Hickhop and Witch House yet. I think a white person could watch that movie in 1995 and go "I never thought of it that way." I think a white person watching it in 2022 would go "I know chapter and verse it's so much worse than this." Which, in its own way, is a success... but considering the idea was to actually make things better rather than recognizing that things are so much worse that we can't even have this discussion anymore, it's not the sort of success we need. If you judge it in the context of "came out 18 months after Emilio Estevez learns not to go to Compton" ...it's still a movie that should have been better.
Let me spoil some of tomorrow's primetime J6 summer finalé, then. The timeline really does suggest that the timing of everything was coordinated at the top-most levels. Trump'd give the speech (holy shit I just watched 5 minutes of it and I don't think our brains were working well enough to register the true extent of his lunacy at the time), send his people off to the capitol (with their weapons, which he knew they had) at about 1:15 pm, and they'd hafta walk about a mile and half, two miles, or so, from the ellipse to the capitol building. Should take about 30 minutes to 45, depending on one's fervor. Militia dipshits had arrived at the capitol a bit earlier, presumably to initiate the agitation, and lo and behold, the rally onslaught begins to arrive a few minutes after the time House republicans have planned to object to Arizona's college elector slate, the alphabetically first state to come up for certification that had tried to send fake/illegal GOP electoral college votes. This is Mike Pence's final test, between 1:45 and 2:15 or so, just before evacuation. One last chance to unilaterally overturn the election by refusing to count contested elector slates. He decided not to overturn the election (mY hErOoOoO). Ten minutes later, after the chaos of the congress's evacuation, Trump tweets that Pence didn't have the courage to overturn the election, and the congress is in hiding. Now, it's fuckin' POTUS executive TV-time for a couple hours, and he really, realllllyyyyyyyy liked what he saw. Maybe the mob would yet prevail? Or Dan Fucking Bongino's SS coworkers could coax Pence into an Escalade, lock the doors (Mike Pence has surely not yet solved executive branch-level childlock), and whisk him far enough away to delay the vote certification, de-legitimizing the process? Ugh, they made Trump release a statement, eventually, which was surely annoying, for the poor guy, but luckily the entire Trump white house is full of fascist enablers, so the "be peaceful, totally! ;) ;) guys, haha" video message can be used to continue coup'ing. Aaaaaaaand been doin' it ever since. I think the number one thing I was surprised to learn recently was that Trump desperately wanted to get to the capitol himself. I thought he sent his goons on their way, like suckers, never planning to endanger himself out in the fray, but nope, he seemed to be most concerned with increasing the odds of his coup's success to as high as possible. Maybe that's the most hitler shit he's ever tried to pull, at least in my mind. What I mean to say is, I don't understand if/why you're doubting the Occam explanation here. Is your question whether or not Trump truly believes the election was stolen? That's like a legal defense of a bank robber along the lines of "My client, deep in his heart of hearts, felt that there was toxic alien money in your bank vault, and just wanted to help. Mary B., on facebook, and at least six other people told him about it via messenger. And plus, my client was apprehended in the act, so there's nothing to prosecute." It's clear that this is the largest and most relatively straightforward case of seditious conspiracy since the civil war. It was obviously pre-meditated/intentional. I'm certainly not opposed to negging the government, myself, but I fucking hate fascist fucks making power grabs based on lies. If DoJ prosecutes at the highest levels, they will win hella lotta cases. Not saying all cases. But the J6 committee has done an OK+ job of relaying the conspiracy, and DoJ will do even better, in 2023, and in an actual court of law. edit: oh don't fret, I never meant to imply that we're not doomed, we totally are, it'll just be interesting to watch DoJ try and mop this up in the interim. Yeah Flynn's taped deposition footage was nuts. And of course, I had to internalize almost all of Chappelle's library my first semester of jokes school (still flunked out). Even more of course, holy shit, I also lost it when Flynn did a "15-second whispering with my lawyer" and then a 'fiff' after "Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?", it was better than Chappelle, lolz.But we really need to know his state of mind to know if he acted corruptly.
DoJ ain't gonna do shit. Mark my words. Sure, they'll get the proud guys and the oath rapers or whoever, but not any actual centers of power. Eric Holder's too big to jail ethos is alive and well. Trump is just another executive whose prosecution, in the DoJ's view, would cause more harm than good. I'm sure they figure that the next GOP president will just pardon him anyway. There's a good reason Trump is going to announce his presidential bid pre-midterms: Because the DoJ will go from wavering-to-probably-not all the way to no-way-we-can-indict-a-major-party-frontrunner.
I will reiterate: the goal of the January 6 Committee is to convince Republicans that Trump is a bad Republican. Overthrowing the government, cheering on the execution of his vice president, none of that matters if he's a good Republican because by being the standard bearer of the Republicans, whatever he does is what Republicans do. The goal of the DOJ is to prosecute justice against those who committed crimes. That's hard to do when half your districts don't consider an armed coup to be a crime. If this were a Trial By Democrats it'd be a whole 'nuther world but the fact of the matter is - The United States compromised to fuck with conservative slave-owners in order to defeat the British - Then the United States compromised to fuck with conservative former-slave-owners in order to not be so weak they couldn't hold off the British - And continue to compromise to fuck with conservative wanna-be-slave-owners in order to continue to be a country And never once has this compromise taken the form of "we'll let you slide this time on this thing you shouldn't be doing" it's always a form of "clearly you violated every term you agreed to but you have us over a barrel so we're gonna change the rules to show that you were obeying them." Hitler and 2,000 Nazis marched on Munich in 1923. Sixteen Nazis died in police clashes. We learn of this as the "Beer Hall Putsch" to denigrate the seriousness of it. We don't learn that it gave Hitler a national audience to poison. If you say "Beer Hall Putsch" to any liberal, they shout "THISISWHYTRUMPWILLTAKEOVERTHECOUNTRYEVENTUALLY" like Pavlov's fucking dogs because the idea that mmmaybe, just maybe, diffusing populists diffuses populism isn't disaster-porny enough. Look - Weimar was fucked. Of the six political parties running in 1932, five were awful. Three were openly anti-semitic. Would a bunch of tanks with this bad boy on the side been as cataclysmic? I don't think so? But it still would have been bad. Fascism was coming to Germany, and it was gonna murder some jews. Hitler was just the best jew-murderer on the docket, the voters decided. Mosley? Mosley died of old age in obscurity while Churchill wrote Iron Maiden songs.
mmmmyeah, you're still arguing this from a liberal point-of-view. IF: might makes right THEN: the strongest person is the most correct Sidney Powell knows in her heart that Trump is President because Trump is not a pussy. That's really all that matters; the parliamentary nonsense the cucks and RINOs used to dethrone him are a sign of their weakness and a tragic indicator of the uselessness of modern America. Gordon Liddy was in a similar place around the Watergate break-in his whole life - they should have gotten away with it because they deserved to get away with it because did you see what a bunch of pussies the Watergate Committee was? Blaming Venezuela and Dominion Voting is entirely correct if it works and if it doesn't, you weren't wrong, you just weren't strong enough. Hitler said it best: if the Aryans couldn't exterminate the Jews, they deserved to be exterminated by the Jews because there can be only one. This whole shitshow really comes down to "I'm in charge here" - fuck parliamentary procedure, that shit is for pussies, rules don't tell you what to do, they justify what you've done and if the current rule says you aren't allowed to do that, change it later. "Trump or country." That's what this is all about. That's what it's always been about. In the 2016 primaries, the battle was "Trump is/is not the person to lead our country." As soon as enough primary votes were in, everybody got in line because they had their leader. That 2020 Republican platform? That basically says "Trump is our godking?" if Trump could hold more thoughts than you can write on a matchbook, it would have been a manifesto. Republicanism used to be about power-sharing but a fundamental belief that leadership was entitled to make decisions for everyone else. The Democrats, on the other hand, used to be about power-sharing and a fundamental belief that leadership needed to earn the approval of everyone else. The crisis of faith in the Democrats is they've been unable to earn approval from anyone since 2008. The crisis of faith in the Republicans is they went with a guy who had no interest in power-sharing. That was the framing that ultimately broke Mike Pence back into the fold: he really wanted Dan Quayle to tell him he could be for Trump and country, and Quayle told him he couldn't, so he broke "country." And that's the framing that ultimately broke everyone else: the stuff Trump wanted to do was useful only to Trump, and would never be useful to anyone else who ever wanted to do anything for the country. William Barr firmly believes in the "unitary executive" which means he thinks the President should be able to do whatever he wants. But Trump wasn't acting as the President he was acting as Trump so he lost William Barr. This is the show trial Congress is putting on: "All these people who were close to Trump learned he didn't care about the country, he only cared about Trump." There's a bunch of disaffected people who are only in politics because Trump is there. There's also a bunch of disaffected people who are in politics despite Trump being there. The goal here is not to say "Trump is bad" or "Trump did wrong" The goal is to say "everyone agrees that Trump is a traitor." When Republicans bark they bark in unison - you are watching in real time the war for the head of the pack. Look - if you believe the lie, it isn't a lie anymore. This whole elaborate charade is a PR campaign for democracy, nothing more, nothing less. EXACTLY. This whole thing is an elaborate "alphas believe in due process" dance. Because ultimately, bureaucracies such as a representative democracy exist because a whole bunch of middle managers are interested in eking out an existence playing "decider" at a local-to-national level and under the Trump scenario, it becomes a flat hierarchy where there are those touched by the god-king and those that aren't. The move is to illustrate that you, personally, benefit more from a system without god-kings and that even those touched by the god-king abandoned him when he ran out of juice. Because Trump is out of juice. That's it. That's the whole Jan 6 Committee raison d'etre. Democrats see it as entirely something else but as amply demonstrated, they impeached the fucker twice and nothing happened. It's down to the Republicans now.
..but who wouldn't do that, amirite?? ARE YOU A BETA, BRO?!?!??