a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00

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.





OftenBen  ·  859 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Were they successful? What metrics would you use to say if they were or were not successful?