Governor Abbott is Who He Is

 

I could write rather a lot about what pardoning a man who said he was thinking of killing people on his way to work, who did plow into a crowd of peaceful protesters who were exercising their 1st Amendment rights, and then fatally shot someone in the crowd who was lawfully exercising his 2nd Amendment writes would mean: the sanctioning of murder based on whether you agreed with the choice of victims--

But let's face it, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas choosing to do just that based on Fox News and the opinions of no less an intellect and subject matter expert on this than Kyle Rittenhouse is very, very on brand, And saying more just feels like a waste of words, in a way. 

Nothing New Under the Sun

There has been some discussion about whether there is a post-Rittenhouse embrace of violence on the right, as evidenced by the folks who want to now claim that Club Q patrons got something they deserved. I note that Trump attorney and sometime fart-snuffer, Jenna Ellis, wants to let us know that the real tragedy isn't so much that they were murdered, but that they probably died without the grace of Jesus entering into their hearts. They are just burning away in hell, and you know what?

Jenna Ellis does not mind that. She is sure enough of her own salvation that she doesn't think judging is a bad look for her--even if she has born false witness regarding an election. She wouldn't know how to start the day if she didn't know who she wanted to watch burn if she was given an all-access seat up yonder, to you know. Watch folks burn.

What other reward is there? 

Tim Pool was accusing everyone at Club Q as being "groomers" because that word is nearly as beat to hell as "woke". Instead of meaning a single individual who courts and isolates victims for their own gratification, it in his usage is "anybody who lets kids know queer people exist" which is really weird, because queer people do exist and knowing that isn't harmful. 

Sure--why don't you go storm a Southern Baptist church, tough guy Tim?  Go talk to some folks at the Vatican. Speak out about why the words "GOP politico" and "child porn" go together like peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. (Look, you go search some links yourself and get as sick as you need to be. But let me suggest Ruben Verastegui, Ralph Shorty, Charles Young, and Dennis Hastert for a start.) 

It's Like an Alternate Universe

 

Kyle Rittenhouse is introduced at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit as the ideal catch for a husband: “I want to talk a lot about what kind of man you should be attracted to .. Men’s #1 goal is to protect your family .. and Kyle Rittenhouse is a man who does that.” pic.twitter.com/WLjIdQhc6d

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 5, 2022

I've wondered about these echo chambers for RW yahoos to yodel in before, especially the Pepto Bismol Pink ones, but Kyle Rittenhouse is a potato with issues. I also wonder about what "Young Women's Leadership" has to do with catching hubbies. Also, nothing the boy did has anything to do with protecting a family.

It has to be trolling.

UPDATE: Wow. So the entire thing was like that--we're young, we're edgy, we're not the old conservative party, so please go to church and figure out how to be a Stepford Wife. People paid to go there and be told what their granny would have told them. If their granny was really conservative and churchy.

UPDATE: From the Strangely Blogged Archives: 

The GOP Strategy for the War on Women? Irony, I think.

It took me a little bit to sort out what it was reminding me of.  Same war on women, same lipstick on the chauvinist pigs. Now with more handmaidens.

Would You Believe--Satan?

 

Now, when Kyle Rittenhouse went on Tucker Carlson's show to tell the world that his first counsellor, Lin Wood, was a goddamn money grubber, it was almost worth the attempt at reputation resuscitation being attempted right there on ye olde tv screens. After all, Lin Wood was the guy who decided that the election system was so corrupt that he basically sabotaged the Georgia Senate runoffs to ensure Democratic control of the Senate, and that's no small deal. But shit has gotten terribly real now, because Wood's injured pride has him diming out the other Q-associated grifters, and yes, this is glorious. 

Now, I obviously don't love Mike Flynn, so we are gonna start with him, because how can we not, since he is the Russian-connected goon whose digital warriors furthered Pizzagate and assorted racist memes back in 2016. Yes--goon. He thinks he's a general, but since his forced retirement he's a catspaw for whoever's paying because this chicken-chested little very much fired from the military fuck for brains doesn't understand that he sold his credibility, his honor, and damn nearly sold out his country, but is getting the unique opportunity to sink into ignominy before getting properly keelhauled. 

Where I Defend Kyle Rittenhouse

 

Let me take a departure for a minute from what you know are my stances to acknowledge a handful of things: the overlap between justice and the law is not a perfect circle. A judgement can be legally accurate while still being ethically or morally disappointing at best and supporting a dangerous or untimely precedent at worst. We don't have to love the outcome of the Rittenhouse decision to come away with the idea that the right to self-defense, even if it is broad and subject to conjecture about state of mind on the part of a person who has taken life, isn't something that should be denied someone just because their background doesn't comport with our ideas of the ideal self-defense scenario. 

I'm going to perform a teeth-gritting exercise about what we can know from this case, and I don't think anyone will be happy with it, not even myself. Kyle Rittenhouse is an under-parented kid who thought he was doing something he needed to that he entirely did not. He was on the side, to the best of his teenage education, of law and order. The side where the cops were. He was not any more racist than the people he was surrounded with (you know, regular white folks). He considered the city of Kenosha his community even though he did not live there, because he had family there and had worked there. And he acquired an AR-15 because guns are for self-defense, and he was in a place he competently understood to be dangerous based on his understanding of what he had read and seen on the news, and wanted to also be dangerous. Because self-defense. The thing he went into danger to do. 

To be exact, even if no son of mine would ever, etc., Kyle Rittenhouse looks like he could be my kid. So I get what his sources of information were and the biases he grew up with. And this isn't a privileged kid in spite of his whiteness. He was only privileged in that our laws were so constructed to be very broad with respects to self-defense and the Castle doctrine has, over the years with the help of the NRA and other pressure groups, made the frontier logic of the Wild West, the duty to never retreat anywhere if you happen to be armed, the law of the land. In a gunfight, it privileges the one who lives and can take the stand to testify to his state of mind, As the survivor of a gunfight, Rittenhouse has emerged from a gantlet to arrive at another kind of challenge. 

His lionization by the actually worst people. Like the Proud Boys, the association with which, while Rittenhouse was out on bail, was something not viewed by the jury, and also, it was irrelevant to his case, having happened afterwards. 

The Driest Eye

 I'm obviously not the intended audience for Kyle Rittenhouse's time on the stand, because in my universe, I would never have entertained the idea that putting him on the stand would necessarily elicit sympathy, so it would have been best avoided. But it certainly happened, and somehow, news stories got written with "burst into tears" or the like in them. 

But I don't see any tears here. He looks like he swallowed a hot chip the wrong way. He looks like he tried for a snot bubble and it came up dry. He even looked over to see if anyone was responding to his "breakdown". And I feel very mean for saying this, and you know what? My eyes are dry, too. 

This kid was in a state that was not his, with a gun he had no right to carry, claiming he was offering medical aid which he wasn't qualified to render, in a place where he knew there was physical conflict which meant possible physical threat, but was scared even though carrying that gun. He chose all the things that put him in this circumstance, and his heavily and genuinely weeping mother helped.

The judge appears to be in Rittenhouse's corner. The farce was capped off by us hearing the ringtone of "God Bless the USA". And he also might have been doing some holiday catalog shopping during the trial. That's how much this guy seems to have already decided how the case should go. He doesn't see the people Rittenhouse slew as "victims"--they are the wrong kind of people to be calling "victims". Implying some people are, well. You know. Fine to kill. 

I wish this opinion was a bit more rare, but I see Supreme Court Justice Alito wondering why people shouldn't be armed on the "crime-ridden" city subways, because obviously, shit is just looking to go down in these big cities. Whoa.  We got us a Bernie Goetz fan here. A guy who doesn't miss an opportunity to watch "Death Wish" am I right? (This is a whole part and parcel of our national gun-toting religion.)

See, my problem with this scenario is when the so-called "law and order" people start waxing heroic about vigilantism and extrajudicial violence, when they are supposed to uphold the Constitution which is actually very much about due process and not--that sort of thing. This is why I wonder with a sinking heart how the nearly all-white jury will look at the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. Will they suppose this was a case of a fouled-up citizens arrest? Once again, we have people, with guns, making decisions they had no authority to make, that even duly constituted authorities can get entirely and regrettably wrong. 

I mean, consider this: in a political system built on a framework holding the innocence of the accused as a value until proven guilty, the fatal result of the Charlottesville free-for-all is that "poor" James Fields' fault lay in being the first to ram a car into protesters before elected officials tried to legalize such a thing. Regardless of those people's rights to do....anything at all, Express their First Amendment rights to speak freely or peaceably assemble.  

And so we get to the conservative/fascist problem: the idea that the the law protects some, but the others can have order. At any price. When do we universally acknowledge the price of order is too high if it comes with violent oppression and valorizes privileged lawlessness? 

Not a minute too soon, if you asked me.