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

[SquirrelMan]

While Republicans have diverse opinions (...)

It's true! They hate poor black people, but they also very strongly dislike rich black people.

[MajorHoy]

Kevin McCarthy should be charged with sedition or treason

whichever applies

it was probably someone in his office who gave these terrorists maps to the Capitol building

Couldn't they just do a Google search or something for that?

I didn't think the Capitol building was as hush-hush/Top Secret as, say, the Pentagon might be . . .

[MiddleMan]

Couldn't they just do a Google search or something for that?

I didn't think the Capitol building was as hush-hush/Top Secret as, say, the Pentagon might be . . .

public areas yes, but there are certain parts of the building, exits used for emergency and security purposes that are NOT public information

and reportedly, one of the people arrested had a full map on his person

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Timothy Snyder, a historian who I don't usually agree with, wrote a baller article about the Trump Putsch, and it's worth reading in full. But in terms of Mets' diagnosis of the Republican party, Snyder is more insightful:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/m...rump-coup.html

"Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it."

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

...

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

No, please, I'd rather like my country not to get dragged into this mess if I could, thank you!

Besides, France has nukes, (does it have retaliatory capacity). I am sure there would be a mentality in the case of US nuking France that a French general in some bunker looks at a portrait of Lafayette and Washington and go, "I brought you into this world, and I will take you out" in French, and then smokes a cigarette sadly and pushes the button while singing out, "La marseillaise" and especially the part of "contre nous de la tyrannie".

It's true! They hate poor black people, but they also very strongly dislike rich black people.

Gold.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Bernie Sanders gives his personal witness account of the Trump Putsch:
https://www.wcax.com/2021/01/07/sand...can-democracy/

Sanders' scoffing laugh at equivalencies by Republicans sells it.

[Korath]

No, please, I'd rather like my country not to get dragged into this mess if I could, thank you!

Besides, France has nukes, (does it have retaliatory capacity). I am sure there would be a mentality in the case of US nuking France that a French general in some bunker looks at a portrait of Lafayette and Washington and go, "I brought you into this world, and I will take you out" in French, and then smokes a cigarette sadly and pushes the button while singing out, "La marseillaise" and especially the part of "contre nous de la tyrannie".

I'm... actually not sure we have still capabilities to ripost to an assault because we are starting to use more and more US logiciels and the like in our defenses forces which can potentially allow for backdoors and the like. But yes, we have nukes and their tactical use has always been "we fire at ANY side who threaten us" even during Cold War, were some of our missiles and nuclear submarines were aimed at the US and the USSR alike.

But it's also a major point of contention here about whether we should expand the nuclear umbrella to all of the EU countries or not, and if we ought to give up our spot at the UN Security Council to the EU. For the record, I'm against both because neither with bomb nor veto you ought to wait for 27 damn countries to agree on something.

[Amadeus Arkham]

Wait...he hasn’t crossed a line already after what happened last Wednesday?

[Amadeus Arkham]

This brings the death toll to a total of 6.

[SuperiorIronman]

Yeah it's not the gross negligence that led to the death for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the mass internment of immigrants as well as legal citizens due to error and racism, the deaths that occurred in those camps, the gross incompetence of foreign policy, or the actual attempted coup on the 6th, clearly we have to wait on the 25th amendment.

Fucking load.

You wanna know what though, Pence is probably running scared. He probably thinks that should he oust Trump, rioters are coming for him and he's out of office in 10 days. He probably doesn't know what to think right now. Or really he knows he should do the right thing, but he also doesn't want to end up murdered by a mob or Trump (which at this point is the same thing).

Seriously, he incited an angry mob and had help on the inside to get congress murdered. He needs to be kicked out of office and thrown in a deep dark prison for this. Bush was awful but no, Orange Hitler is literally the worst President.

[babyblob]

And yet Trump and the law and order party could care less about the two dead officers. I would be surprised if Trump even knows there name. There are people on Fox News who are going on about these people being heroes ad how said it is that dumb bitch got shot with out cause. And there are still people who defend this and the people who caused this to happen.

Anyone who defends this in even the slightest way is a piece of human garbage pure and simple.

[Zauriel]

I have been following up on the latest comments of Kevin Sorbo, Leo Terrell and Terrence Williams on the social media.


Their recent and frenzied tweets made clear they are more loyal to Trump than to the GOP. They even defended Trump's actions that led to the Capitol riots. Sorbo claimed that antifa was behind the Capitol riots.


Lucy Lawless Slams ‘Hercules’ Co-Star Kevin Sorbo Over Capitol Riot Tweets

Does anyone here want to watch a rerun of Sorbo's old shows Hercules and Andromeda again after reading his tweets about Capitol riots?

Leo Terrell was a lifelong democrat who said he was happy to leave the "Democratic party Asylum" several months ago. but I am under impression he didn't switch parties. he left the Democratic party not for the GOP but for his master Trump.

[Zelena]

Why all this scaremongering? In few days, Biden will take the office…

[Joker]

I have been following up on the latest comments of Kevin Sorbo,

Good lord, whyyyyyyyyyy?!

[Amadeus Arkham]

This brings the death toll to a total of 6.

Unlike the first officer to do die, his death is apparently unrelated to the riots on Wednesday.

[Zauriel]

Good lord, whyyyyyyyyyy?!

Because I was a fan of his Hercules show. It was a good entertaining show. I tend to not care about an actor's political views as long as he has the ability to entertain us. I also watched John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger films.