Are They Still Proud?

 

The House 1/6 Committee has shown us the path that Donald Trump--who unquestionably lost the 2020 election--took that led to the events of January 6. They started by demolishing the Big Lie--Donald Trump was told that his weird theories about how the election was rigged against him were bullshit--and by his own Attorney General no less!  They went on to demonstrate how that lie was used to radicalize people to move against the government--even while they called themselves patriots. They demonstrated that the violence that day was not some mild set-to amongst angry tourists, but an actual insurrection attempt, involving known violent shit-stirrers who had stock-piled weapons in the hopes of making whatever horrific display we saw (and it was--if you have the wit to only pay attention) even worse.

We saw a riot. We may have narrowly missed a massacre. 

As it was, Capitol Police recount slipping in the blood of their injured comrades. It was a battlefield more than a regular police effort at crowd control. 

This was Trump's fault (the failure to call in the National Guard was his--was he not President, even if only for the next couple weeks?), but he certainly had every bit of help from the usual suspects, didn't he? Like the GOP congress-creatures who asked for pardons--consciousness of wrong-doing? Like Fox News, who aired their prime-time opinion "talent" without commercials in fear that some enterprising souls might change the channel to discover that the Big Lie was a lie and that the insurrection was an insurrection. 

The US Senators who didn't convict Trump in his second impeachment, because they were complicit?

Trump knew that he lost and he violated the trust that was put in him to uphold the Constitution. Maybe his rabid fan-club didn't understand what that trust meant. Much as I have disagreed with him many times, Vice-President Pence understood it. Rep. Liz Cheney understands it. The failure to have a peaceful hand-over of power in response to the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box was a breach of trust in our institutions; the resulting and engineered national security threat was domestic terror. I would consider it treason--it weakened the United States and revealed a soft underbelly to the watching world. 

Donald Trump planned an assault against the homeland, on US ground we consider nearly holy. 

He belongs the fuck in prison, but I would settle for exile. And the same for his accomplices. Maybe not after the manner of the fictional Lt. Philip Nolan (although Trump himself should live out his life and be interred on a garbage scow), but the kind where they can not touch politics, not to run, to fundraise, to so much as paste up a poster for dog catcher, so long as they live. The kind where they never grace or disgrace the public airwaves again with any lie, big or small. 

I have remained sick at heart for what they tried to do to this country I love--and this hearing touched that part of me again. The scoundrels knew it would be moving and feared it would be persuasive, and so belittled it and warned people away from it as "boring".  The shame is theirs. The disgrace is theirs. They have nothing to be proud of.