All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[The Cool Thatguy]

I hope Biden forms a taskforce to hunt every last bastard down

[DrNewGod]

Yeah, remember how Trump had been replacing people at the Pentagon with his unqualified lackies?

Maryland Governor Says Pentagon ‘Repeatedly Denied’ Approval To Send National Guard To Capitol

After the massive investigations I sincerely hope these people are tried for treason.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think they could make treason fly as there's no enemy foreign power (as far as we know) in the mix. Treason under our laws requires "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." While oaths about "...all enemies foreign and domestic" sworn by DoD folk would seem to cover it, you'd probably have to establish that the MAGAssholes were part of an organization federally recognized as domestic terrorists, or criminal separatists to make it work.

That's an awful tall hill for a prosecutor to climb, especially at the risk of tangling his own case in knots. Sadly, the best we can hope for is sedition. More likely, it's going to be some kind of administrative dereliction of duty or incompetence charge.

At least Biden's new SecDef should find the cleaning out A Lot easier.

[Robotman]

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think they could make treason fly as there's no enemy foreign power (as far as we know) in the mix. Treason under our laws requires "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." While oaths about "...all enemies foreign and domestic" sworn by DoD folk would seem to cover it, you'd probably have to establish that the MAGAssholes were part of an organization federally recognized as domestic terrorists, or criminal separatists to make it work.

That's an awful tall hill for a prosecutor to climb, especially at the risk of tangling his own case in knots. Sadly, the best we can hope for is sedition. More likely, it's going to be some kind of administrative dereliction of duty or incompetence charge.

At least Biden's new SecDef should find the cleaning out A Lot easier.

Ok, I'll rephrase. I hope these seditionist bastards spend the rest of their life in prison.

[DrNewGod]

Ok, I'll rephrase. I hope these seditionist bastards spend the rest of their life in prison.

I'd love that. I don't like our odds there either.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I hope Biden forms a taskforce to hunt every last bastard down

That will be down to his Justice Department headed by Merrick Garland who prosecuted the McVeigh for the OKC bombings.

Biden in his speech said that he and Garland talked about the history of the Justice Department and how it dated to the Grant Administration during Reconstruction, formed originally to hunt down the KKK and so on.

So that's a promising hint. And for Garland, there's the motivation of good old fashioned revenge. He gets to prosecute justice with good cause on the very forces that denied him his nomination.

In the words of Homer Simpson, "It combines my love of helping people with my love for hurting people."

[PwrdOn]

Well, thank you so much for that.



No it's fine. It's just that it's the first time it's happened here and it didn't seem clear to me why it was the case. Just wanted to ask.

I didn't mean to be admonishing if it came that way. We're cool.



Mitt Romney is a typical conservative right-wing guy but definitely not an extreme figure, and while a bit of a coward, he's able to take a stand on certain things. And his speech after the Capitol attacks was genuinely a good one. So I'd say it's Romney, maybe Murkowski, and Collins and that's it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The fact is that Biden invoking that as President is to be expected, and not something that others before him like HRC and Obama wouldn't say. Though I will admit that "We need the Republican party" is not something that either would phrase that way.

I don't think we need the Republican Party as it currently exists certainly. We certainly need a political system that's more representative of America.

A true popular vote electorate with rank based proportional representation that gives people bigger options than big tent super-parties like the GOP and the Dems which are more coalitions of the right and left spectrum than actual parties. I don't think partisanship in and of itself is such a bad thing, and I don't think the centrist fantasy of ending politics altogether via technocratic takeover is fruitful, feasible, or realistic.

It's always weird that people are always complaining about partisanship and polarization, when those are nothing more than a reflection of the underlying reality that the country is composed of groups of people with diametrically opposed interests and governing necessarily involves picking a side and enacting policies that benefit one group at the expense of another. Even if people like Biden got their way and all Americans could just come together and sing kumbaya, that would just amount to putting a lid on all of that tension because nothing he proposes will address the material issues that are at the root of all of our problems. And quite frankly, I have a hard time seeing any kind of electoral reform happening in our lifetimes, because it would require the people who hold the levers of power to give up that control, and why would they ever do that?

[Kirby101]

The letter that all 10 living S of Def signed last week. That was not out of the blue. The were reacting to people they knew at the Pentagon telling them that Trump was looking to use the military for a coup. And he had been putting people there to implement it. When that was stopped, he tried it with his supporters on the 6th. He is a traitor.

[DrNewGod]

That will be down to his Justice Department headed by Merrick Garland who prosecuted the McVeigh for the OKC bombings.

Biden in his speech said that he and Garland talked about the history of the Justice Department and how it dated to the Grant Administration during Reconstruction, formed originally to hunt down the KKK and so on.

So that's a promising hint. And for Garland, there's the motivation of good old fashioned revenge. He gets to prosecute justice with good cause on the very forces that denied him his nomination.

In the words of Homer Simpson, "It combines my love of helping people with my love for hurting people."

Y'know, I wonder if there will be a ton of recently-ex-Justice and recently-ex-DoD people banging down doors volunteering for fumigation duty?

Faults tho our institutions undeniably have had, there are good people that spent all their lives serving their country who left because they couldn't stomach what was happening, or were even forced out. Seems like State got hit especially hard on that. I imagine some of them would really like to see the institutions where they spent the work of their lives restored to some semblance of dignity.

[Amadeus Arkham]

Is the insurrection the worst thing Trump has ever done? Even over his handling of Charlottesville and COVID-19?

[Mister Mets]

What all your talk of legal and "what could be done" proves is that we had to accept that Al Gore really won the election by every objective standard, but we had to accept the results because the process failed us.

Difference between being found not guilty and actually being innocent, there is a difference.

I would disagree with the idea that Gore won by every objective standard, since he lost according to the standards of what votes can be counted according to election law.

With an overcount you can't tell which of the two candidates someone really voted for. It makes sense that the courts never considered those.

The distinction between being found not guilty and being innocent is a fair one here, as it's unsettling that voter error/ ballot design altered an election. But it is incorrect for someone to suggest that the 2000 election was stolen from Gore, or that Gore would have succeeded based on the standard of the Florida Supreme Court.

There would have to be some kind of standard that hasn't been articulated (IE- that it be important that someone doesn't win on a technicality) to have allowed the court to make a different decision, or to pressure George W Bush into forfeiting an election he legally won.

Maybe the dumbasses posting that they were going to storm the capital, maybe Trump who said they were talking back the government and cheered while these terrorists murdered a police officer, maybe Rudy who told people to engage in trial by combat to take back the government. You dont think these people met the bare minimum of identifying what would happen when they have planned and encouraged it?

And I am sure it will come out that that police were understaffed and the guard not turned out before hand on purpose. This is not a failure of the police not to be able to identify what was going to happen. it was a deliberate order to stand down. How long did it take to get approval for the guard. And it was pence that called them in. Not Trump who cheered these criminals on and told them he loved them.

My impression is that you think Hawley and Cruz should have anticipated that it would go beyond a standard protest, and that they should be criticized for not expecting it to go worse, or treated as if they knew that it would be that bad.

If this is true, it would have to have been common knowledge. That would mean that so many people who weren't on the side of the rioters saw it coming that they don't get any credit for being right; they're only absolved of the blame that goes to those who people who failed to anticipate it.

I just don't think that it meets that standard.

But for sheer stupidity, The Nazis would have conquered Britain by 1941 at the latest.

Even assuming a disconnect between vitriolic social media rhetoric and will to action, the last couple of months in the upper Midwest should have given any reasonable soul a bit of the shakes: a capitol invasion, and even a conspiracy to kidnap Michigan's governor. Even if Hawley and Cruz didn't anticipate a terrorist assault, they had to know they were juggling nitroglycerine, and simply didn't care. Or more likely, they thought any consequences insignificant when weighed against their potential gain.

That's a fair distinction.

Thing is, when the whole clusterfuck started, I would've probably been mostly in your corner on the subject..........Then the news came in about the pipe bombs discovered on site. Quite the red flag, if you ask me.

What does this change? Do you think senators should have been aware of someone bringing pipe bombs to DNC and RNC headquarters?

Remember, Cruz and Hawley kept up the same rhetoric AFTER the attack. So talk of what they might have foreseen is obfuscation.

Not quite.

Your standard was their rhetoric after the attack. Babyblob focused on their rhetoric before, and the way it encouraged people who went on to do bad things.

[DrNewGod]

The letter that all 10 living S of Def signed last week. That was not out of the blue. The were reacting to people they knew at the Pentagon telling them that Trump was looking to use the military for a coup. And he had been putting people there to implement it. When that was stopped, he tried it with his supporters on the 6th. He is a traitor.

Again, Seditionist, not Traitor. You'd have to prove he did this for somebody like Putin's benefit, and in with direct collusion with him. Or you'd have to establish these MAGAssholes as Enemies Of The State (there's a warm fuzzy feeling in that one, but we haven't done it yet).

Kirby101: I'm with you; there's nothing bad enough in The Darkest Imagination Of Humanity for this guy. We're just never going to be able to legally call him traitor.

[Robotman]

The letter that all 10 living S of Def signed last week. That was not out of the blue. The were reacting to people they knew at the Pentagon telling them that Trump was looking to use the military for a coup. And he had been putting people there to implement it. When that was stopped, he tried it with his supporters on the 6th. He is a traitor.

Yep. The letter came after Trump's meeting last month with advisers and Michael Flynn about the possibility of using the military to "rerun" the election.


Retired brigadier general says Trump loyalists in military need rooting out


One of my bigger concerns is that there has long been a strong Trump following in the military. People in the military have every right to be conservative or extremely conservative. But Trump’s supporters in the military who think that what happened [on Jan. 6] was a good thing need to be managed out of the military as soon as possible. That probably won’t happen until the Trump loyalists are out, but that needs to be done. We’re not talking about half a dozen people. We’re probably talking about thousands across the Department of Defense. Many of them will have already run their mouth, put things on social media. But this was an insurgency, a crime against the state. And it’s a duty obligation of the defense leadership to make sure that there are no, essentially, sleeper cells, people in the military who, for whatever reason, think an insurgency is a good idea or justifiable.

So now that a large portion of the US military are members of the cult of Trump, we will always have to be on the lookout for rogue agents with access to large armaments.

[Kirby101]

And I am saying they should resign for both before and after. Not playing your semantics games.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Is the insurrection the worst thing Trump has ever done? Even over his handling of Charlottesville and COVID-19?

Politically the two worst things he has done in terms of magnitude, audacity, and destruction is
-- COVID-19 and his lying and misleading which led to the fourth greatest mass-death crisis in America's history (after the Spanish Flu, World War II, the Civil War). 400,000plus people will die in numbers that need not have been that high and that constitutes an act of beyond criminal negligence and institutional mass murder of a section of the citizenry all for entirely nihilistic reasons.
-- The coup attempt on January 6. The COVID-19 pandemic would have happened no matter who was President. Had HRC won in 2016 it would have been up to her. She would not have let it be so damaging. However January 6 Coup, that was all done by Trump. Nobody else other than him would have done it. It killed five people, more than Benghazi, more than JFK's assassination and it broke something that can't be unbroken or entirely fixed again. It can never be said that there wasn't a Presidential candidate in US History who didn't attempt a coup d'etat.

These two things are on a scale above every other evil thing he has done as a sitting President in the last 4 years.

The Charlottesville thing wasn't incited and planned by him directly. January 6 was.

The Charlottesville was a typical right-wing march and rally of the kind that's not new in American history and is basically the Tea Party but taken a step further (or the Tea Party without the dog whistles). But January 6 for a President was beyond anything that anyone has done.

The only way Trump can excede this is if he nukes Iran or any other nation in his final days in office, and I think it's not an exaggeration to say that this could be a real possibility.

[DrNewGod]

Yep. The letter came after Trump's meeting last month with advisers and Michael Flynn about the possibility of using the military to "rerun" the election.


Retired brigadier general says Trump loyalists in military need rooting out


One of my bigger concerns is that there has long been a strong Trump following in the military. People in the military have every right to be conservative or extremely conservative. But Trump’s supporters in the military who think that what happened [on Jan. 6] was a good thing need to be managed out of the military as soon as possible. That probably won’t happen until the Trump loyalists are out, but that needs to be done. We’re not talking about half a dozen people. We’re probably talking about thousands across the Department of Defense. Many of them will have already run their mouth, put things on social media. But this was an insurgency, a crime against the state. And it’s a duty obligation of the defense leadership to make sure that there are no, essentially, sleeper cells, people in the military who, for whatever reason, think an insurgency is a good idea or justifiable.

The good news is, after the 1/6 Debacle, the SecDef is probably going to have a lot of leverage to flush The Pentagon.

Now, outside the official channels, I would recommend that Justice and Defense (especially the latter) dedicate some Black Bag resources to castrating both Flynn and Prince.