Enough With The Cutesy Titles, People Are Dead: US Politics January 2021 pt 2

Not circumsized

dogs

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl)

and their guardians

+ our friends in the anti-fireworks lobby

+ veterans

I had the layout of the Capitol building wrong. I thought the officer started off with the mob right next to the chamber room and lead them away from it. Not that he started elsewhere and lead them past the entrance as the commentator showed.
If he had the bulk of the mob obscured from him by the L or inverted L shaped corridor doorway is it lucky he didn't wind up with a bunch of the mob milling back in there. Or would that be a gallery looking down on the chamber. Open doorway anyway if the corridor is providing a bottleneck between elements of the crowd and the officer. Weird also that word of what is through the doorway they are mainly heading through. Would think somebody might tell the rear of the group to run or something.

Still pretty heroic move and I hope he does get recognised for it.

There will be a rescue dog AND a cat inhabiting the White House

living together? mass hysteria!

if he can unite those...

I saw the commentary by the black policeman who I think is NYPD on the Goodman footage which shows him leading the mob away from one entrance to the senate chamber and it appears that he became aware that he had lead them past the upper entrance. he then comes out with a piece of misdirection where he shoves or at least puts his hand on the chest of the lead mob member then moves away from that entrance. So there is at least abunch of people following him. BUt aren't there like 50 people in the mob? So is it surprising that none of them wonder about teh doorways they are going by.
Or are they only there because they can be lead around like sheep anyway. Would have thought at least somebody might have been curious to see wherethey lead to.

Also looks like the mob is coming in from the left of the picture as they head out of the doorway and are met by other police. So is there no communication passing through the crowd to tell them what is coming up ahead of them and that they might not be best heading in this direction or are they all thinking there's more of us than them?

Give Goodman all the honors and more.

The Bernie meme was played so fast. By maybe 7 or 8 pm it was over for me.

In other news: what an asshole Trump was, and how lucky we are to be rid of him

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/trump-reportedly-extended-24-hour-034700637.html

I don’t know what it was about this particular meme storm that got to me. Certainly the “it’s just another day, cool but I got shit to do” nature of his couture was punk as fuck and a lot of people agreed but ... I mean, how long until he becomes a sticker you see on streetlamps or a tattoo on biceps?

Maybe it just happened too fast for me because I’m getting old

kind of wild that biden is older than bill clinton

he's also the first real d.c. insider to be president since george bush sr i think?

"There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch." -->

Sources told CNN there simply was no vaccine distribution plan under Trump, leaving Biden and his team having to essentially start from "square one." https://t.co/u2hwMVMt10

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) January 21, 2021

NO WAY!

Hopefully they at least suspected this weeks ago

Nowhere to go but up, right?

Anyone else see the first press secretary conference? Refreshing, to say the least, esp. considering she was given a couple of hardcore questions the very first day, like "does Pres. Biden have faith in FBI director Wray?" and "Has Pres. Biden talked about retribution for the Russian cyber hack or scheduled a call with Putin?" And she was all "guys, most of our team are just turning their computers on for the first time as we speak." But she did throw some nice subtle shade on Russia re: the Putin question. I think her answer was along the lines of "Pres. Biden's first call with a foreign leader will be Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and then he will likely work his way through friends and allies, and then eventually he'll get to Putin."

Re: vaccine distribution, or lack thereof, what's up with the Deep State asleep on the job? You'd think at least *someone* would have had their head down, working on some sort of a plan. Then again, I can imagine that person getting fired for actually doing their job.

Warning: link goes to National Review; story is by Kevin Williamson.

Witless Ape Rides Helicopter

Well, that sucked.

Memo to MAGA and all its myriad fellow-travelers: Maybe Death of a Salesman as presented by Leni Riefenstahl just wasn’t the show Americans were dying to tune into this season.

And, while we’re at it, maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.

Think on it, Cletus. I know this whole thing still sounds like your idea of a good time — how’s that working out for you?

Let me refresh your memory: On the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Republicans controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress. They were in a historically strong position elsewhere as well, controlling both legislative chambers in 32 states. They pissed that away like they were midnight drunks karaoke-warbling that old Chumbawumba song: In 2021, they control approximately squat. The House is run by Nancy Pelosi. The Senate is run, as a practical matter, by Kamala Harris. And Joe Biden won the presidency, notwithstanding whatever the nut-cutlet guest-hosting for Dennis Prager this week has to say about it.

Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead his party to losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate all in a single term. Along with being the first president to be impeached twice and the first game-show host elected to the office, that’s Trump’s claim to the history books. Well, that and 400,000 dead Americans and the failed coup d’état business.

The title is a callback: In 2015, Williamson wrote a piece titled "Witless Ape Rides Escalator."

Does having possible defendants having been pardoned limit how investigations can go or would it remove the efficacy of the pardons.
Just wondering if there is a protocol about how close one can get to a person with a pardon i criminal investigation or anything.
Hoping that it is just something taht can be overlooked if the evidence points squarely at an individual but could see an establihment institution wanting to tread carefully.

do I recall seeing that if you've been pardoned you can't plead the fifth?

yeah have heard that several times over the last few weeks

congrats on the pardon steve

Re: that Williamson piece— once again, and sorry to repeat myself, but it is simply *dangerous* to relegate QAnon, Trumpers, and etc. to the realm of "Cletus"-esque hillbillies, because for the most part, they're not.

yep, they are rich white suburbans

did having them be possibly marginalised disguise how dangerous they could appear and if so was there any benefit in that. Other tahn to disguise how they were the them ion an us and them with working class GOP supporters.
LIke was teh Cletus/hillbilly/great unwashed thing purely external projection or was it partially disguise

Kevin Williamson has a history of sneering at the poor. He also wrote this paragraph:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

But table is OTM that his characterization of the Capitol Rioters is off-base.

This Adam Serwer piece is good:

They were business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, stay-at-home dads, and, I assume, some Proud Boys.

The mob that breached the Capitol last week at President Donald Trump’s exhortation, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was full of what you might call “respectable people.” They left dozens of Capitol Police officers injured, screamed “Hang Mike Pence!,” threatened to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and set up a gallows outside the building. Some were extremists using the crowd as cover, but as federal authorities issue indictments, a striking number of those they name appear to be regular Americans.

And there’s nothing surprising about that. Although any crowd that size is bound to include people who are struggling financially, no one should be shocked to see the middle classes so well represented among the mob.

The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.

The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.

God, that first Williamson 'graph you quoted is execrable.

That Kevin Williamson piece is terrible, like all his work, and it wasn’t better the second time it was posted here.

yeah, it's a lot of privileged people cosplaying an underground, street level role. which they're ill-suited for mentally but compensate for with heavy artillery and weaponry.

I don't know that the military component of the insurrection neatly Venn diagrams with QAnon - a lot of them are just folk with hard-right wing beliefs that tend to lack critical thinking skills and want to believe their guy was cheated because, well, he said so.

It’s fun to scapegoat the poor for the crimes of extremists and millionaires. Feels good like OxyContin.

I’m all for moving the qanon cesspool stuff to another thread but table otm that sneering at cleetuses doesn’t work (well, it probably works for Kevin Williamson, I’m sure he did very well out of the never trump grift).

fuckin' christ. is he a libertarian by chance? (Williamson)

a lot of privileged people cosplaying an underground, street level role

They're here to embody the voice of the voiceless, don't u see?

Has anyone checked on dilbert guy

I’m sure he also blames mass incarceration and generational poverty on the “culture” of urban black communities. Same attitude, different target: he is finding a group of underprivileged people to blame for the failures of the Republican party.

really the face of the QAnon, even though they weren't really QAnon, are Mark and Patricia McCloskey, affluent asshole lawyers holding hand cannons they weren't even using properly and waving them in the faces of minorities who weren't threatening them

Has anyone checked on dilbert guy

― zydecovid (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, January 21, 2021 11:10 AM bookmarkflaglink

went back to Melmac

The real face of QAnon is Donald Trump’s face.

Donald Trump's ass more like

Highlights asks:

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

That Williamson piece is a cogent reminder that, while never-Trumpers are able to see what a piece of shit he is, they only hate him because they're stumping for a different but equally shitty piece of shit.

NRO keeps Williamson around because he better express their contempt for the poor who will never ride on the NRO cruise.

*expresses

Has anyone checked on dilbert guy

You know, I was reading the Sunday paper a week or so ago and I was struck by the fact that Dilbert guy just goes on putting up normal "isn't office life amusing" comics through it all, which, I guess, why not? The real estate agents who stay up all night feverishly parsing Q probably go on selling houses every day in a normal way.

As for the class status of the Capitol insurrectionists; it seems to me that this particular strain of greivance politics cuts across class lines, and in the crowd were well-heeled suburbanites and working-class people Kevin Williamson would consider hopeless yokels, and that neither of these groups represented a "well in any big crowd of course there are a few" afterthought, they were both really there!

xpost There's cognitive dissonance and then there's maintaining a comfortable upper-to-middle class existence while actively attempting to destroy the facets of society that allow you to maintain that particular existence. It's a state of mind that I'm completely incapable of wrapping my head around.

Re: that Williamson piece— once again, and sorry to repeat myself, but it is simply *dangerous* to relegate QAnon, Trumpers, and etc. to the realm of "Cletus"-esque hillbillies, because for the most part, they're not.

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Thursday, January 21, 2021 10:45 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yep, they are rich white suburbans

― Überschadenfreude (sleeve), Thursday, January 21, 2021 10:47 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Why can't they be rich white hillbillies? You can take the hillbilly out of the hill, etc.

Existential boredom is a helluva drug.

xp

the entire concept of hillbillies is not helpful in any way

Apologies, and certainly agree that they were not rural working class whites.

JETHRO IS Q!