Don't ask me to take the Jan. 6 insurrectionists seriously
They're the sorriest pack of Decembrists you ever saw.
My latest, for the New Republic, is a confession that, try as I might, I can’t bring myself to fear the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on the Feast of the Epiphany. I deplore them for sure. I want them to be punished harshly for their crimes. But fear them as the leading edge of incipient fascism? For Christ’s sake, just look at them. They start bawling and apologizing the second you slap handcuffs on them. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees? Tell that to the QAnon Shaman, who dishonored revolutionaries through the ages with his pathetic self-justifications yesterday before he was sentenced to 41 months in the slammer. Or Kevin Fairlamb, who also got 41 months, to whom it never seems to have occurred that if you punch a cop in the face you’re going to do hard time. They’re spoiled idiot children who when they get caught apologize immediately and say they were deceived by the crap they saw on social media.
Read it here.
Earlier this week, I disputed the untruthful published claim of Mark Meadows’s lawyer that top White House aides never appear before Congress without a fight. Meadows would be the fourth White House chief of staff to testify before Congress in modern times. Two of them made no attempt to claim executive privilege and the third did so very half-assedly.
The thing is, these spoiled idiot children still are scaring good people out of serving in politics, and emboldening people who are trying to hollow out democracy and occupy its shell, like some horrifying parasitic wasp. Crazies are _successfully_ shutting down meetings of city governments and school boards, and they've created pretty drastic disruptions of state legislatures in places like Michigan. It's a "Schrodinger's Terrorist" situation. The vast majority of them are too chickenshit to actually do anything, but you only need one of them every few years to actually commit some murders, to maintain the sense of menace -- and they know full well what they're contributing to. They _enjoy_ the fact that they're intimidating their enemies, driving them from the public square.
Brad Raffensperger is not going to be in charge of elections in Georgia anymore, because he respected the will of the voters. Every state where the GOP has control is going to get just as gerrymandered as Wisconsin, where Repubs can win a super-majority of the legislature while winning a minority of votes. We are at risk of becoming a country like Hungary or Russia, where we pantomime the _forms_ of democracy, while a narrow minority actually maintains a stranglehold on power. And while our modern brown/blackshirts are considerably more ridiculous than the original version, the clownshirts are no less of a problem.
Spot on. What a crew of cowardly knuckleheads. We shouldn’t fear them. I almost, ALMOST, reserve a pittance of pity for them. I’ll reserve my fear for the Kochs and myriad other treasonous money-shovelers digging under the foundation of democracy in the shadows.