The Adenauer solution.

 

I honestly believe that we need a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to the one that was instituted in South Africa after Mandela came to power. It was necessary at the time to heal the country after the crimes of the previous Apartheid regimes were coming to light. 

I watched those specials on CNN about the attempted coup of the American government by all those trump cultists, and I honestly don't see how I could ever find common ground with those people. Frankly, I want them as far away from me as possible. But I can't deny that there are millions of them out there, and now, thanks to a republican party that is becoming crazier by the day, they are gaining real power in Washington as more and more of these crazies are being elected to national office. 

One has to wonder, then, how do we cope with these people? How do we deal with this segment of America's population? 

Here is an article written for Mother Jones by Benjamin Carter-Hett with a suggestion for how the country can deal with them moving forward.  

"In 1954, Eugen Kogon worried that the “the silent gradual, creeping, unstoppable return” of the ex-Nazis seemed to be the “fate” of Germany’s new democracy. Kogon, a Christian socialist intellectual who had been imprisoned in concentration camps, was not alone in his concern. For years after the 1949 founding of West Germany, liberal-minded Germans worried the transition to democracy would end with a rebound to authoritarianism. No one would ever think it’s easy, making the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Especially when the dictatorship has been a particularly brutal and murderous one. But for Kogon, and others yearning for democracy, a basic problem presented itself. What do you do with the people who ran the old regime? And what do you do with the masses of the old regime’s followers? Aren’t they all waiting for restoration—and maybe not just waiting, but actively working toward it?

At the end of the Trump era, we face a similar question. Trump’s post-election attempt to subvert democracy was no surprise. And the raiding of the Capitol was the sort of uncomfortable shock we knew might occur. It was, as I’ve written, our Beer Hall Putsch. This makes aggressive punishments for those involved an obvious need. If we do not do this, our democracy could spiral into dictatorship. Especially insidious has been the Republican Party’s reluctance to stop Trump, even after this attempted coup. Hundreds of Congress members still voted to overturn the election and against impeaching the insurrectionist-in-chief. The lesson is clear: One political party is committed to authoritarianism. We need a harsh reckoning now with those who directly supported the coup attempt.

But, as we look beyond this, there is still a broader issue: the willingness of Trump’s 70 million voters to believe the whole charade up to this point. And, if polls are to be believed, even after the events of January 6.  What about the voters who actively supported all this? What do we do with the aides, lackeys, flacks, and bureaucrats who helped his administration violate the norms of our democracy and bring myriad forms of grief to countless Americans? What about those who felt comfortable looking the other way while pocketing their tax cut? Comparisons between Trump’s regime and Weimar Germany, or Nazi Germany, have been done many times during his reign. Of course, the comparison is partial—Trump the person is a very long way from being Adolf Hitler 2.0. But if Germany’s pre-Nazi regime provides a lesson on how to counter a putsch, post–World War II experience also provides a lesson, on how to recover a democracy.

Kogon thought the return of the Nazis—back into the courts, the schools, the upper reaches of government—was going to be a “fatal” blow to democracy. The funny thing is some of the ex-Nazis Kogon feared so much actually agreed with him. One of them was Rudolf Diels, who had been the first chief of Hitler’s Gestapo. In the same year as Kogon’s lament, Diels complained about people who called him “a top Nazi” when “I only worry that they are coming again” and, when they return, “they will not start again at ‘33 but at ‘45”—meaning with the full, brutal radicalism of the end-stage Nazi regime.

Propaganda, then as now, was also a problem. An American diplomat reported in 1954 on the “loss of public confidence in leading Berlin officials, connected with internal political attacks and external propaganda directed to [the] unreliability [of] West German leadership generally.”

And yet we know that somehow democracy prevailed. The 1950s became known in West Germany as the age of the “economic miracle.” The parties of the democratic center extended their reach. The political extremes of left and right melted away. The country joined all the military, political and economic organizations of the democratic West. Gradually it became indispensable to all of them. In the 1970s a stronger democracy could fend off the challenge of domestic terrorism. In 1989–1990, the eastern Communist twin collapsed and Germany was triumphantly reunited. Since 2015, the rise of the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) and neo-Nazi activists in the Germany army and security forces has drawn media attention. But we need to remember that support for the far right is heavily concentrated in the former East Germany, more a legacy of the Communist German Democratic Republic. In recent years, global surveys have routinely found Germany to be the most admired country in the world.

In 1949 these later successes were all but unimaginable. The new West Germany hardly looked like a promising infant democracy. Among its 50 million people, over 6 million had been members of the Nazi Party, and millions more had belonged to Nazi-affiliated organizations or served in one of the many Nazi police or security forces. During the war, Germany had mobilized eighteen million men for service in one or another of the armed forces (far more than the United States, although Germany had only half the American population). A staggering number of them—a little over five million—had been killed in action, leaving countless millions of grieving family members. Around two million civilians had been killed as well, in allied bombing raids, or mass deportations near war’s end at the hands of liberated and vengeful Poles or Czechs. The luckier of those deportees reached West Germany, especially Schleswig-Holstein in the north and Bavaria in the south, owning only what they could carry. For years they constituted an embittered and reliably far-right voting bloc.

After 1945, Germans who had been victims of the Nazis—Jews, Communists, and other political opponents—were mostly dead, in exile, or in East Germany. There had always been more people who just kept their heads down and tried to get along. By war’s end they were all that was left.

These surviving, hungry Germans, in their ruined cities, with Allied occupation troops everywhere, thought that they were the real victims of Hitler and the war. They complained about the “self-righteous” allies. They didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the sufferings of people in the countries Germany had invaded or occupied. A palpable anti-semitism lingered and kept them from any feelings of remorse about the Holocaust. Quite the contrary: newspapers and magazines filled their pages with sensationalized stories of unscrupulous Jews making huge profits on black market coffee, or venturing forth from their “DP” (displaced person) camps to commit violent crimes against unsuspecting Germans. As the Cold War emerged in the later 1940s, the number of Germans willing to tell pollsters the Nuremberg war crimes trials had been “unfair” shot upwards.

It was in this atmosphere, in August 1949, that West Germany experienced its first free national election since 1932. Some scholars have called it “the last Weimar election”—referring to the Weimar Republic of 1919-1933—because, like in that earlier experiment in democracy, the 1949 contest revealed a bitterly divided country voting for a wide range of parties, from the Communists on the far left to the “German Party” and “German Conservative Party” on the extreme right.

The center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), edged out the expected winners, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), by a narrow margin: 31 percent to 29.2 percent. A few weeks later the newly elected Bundestag confirmed by one single vote the administration of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the leader of the CDU.

Adenauer seemed as unpromising a democratic leader as his country was an unpromising democracy. He was seventy-three years old when he entered the chancellor’s office, a dry and cautious man with no gift for oratory. In a television-saturated age he could never have risen to the top.....

 Adenauer was a committed democrat and anti-Nazi. He had been mayor of the city of Cologne for many years, until the Nazis, who hated him, drove him from his post. He endured the Third Reich in forced retirement, occasionally in prison, sometimes in hiding or on the run.

Now fate had given him a huge chance. For the last act of his life he could give his country a new beginning. He reassured his younger, ambitious rivals: he would just be there for two years or so. At his age how could he do more? He would hold the stirrups for them. Their time would come very soon.

In fact, Adenauer would be chancellor for fourteen years. He would triumph in election after election. In 1957, he would do what no other German leader has ever done: win an outright majority of the popular vote in a free election. The new Germany and its democratic success was as much his doing as anyone’s.

Let’s go back to the cool and un-illusioned eyes. Adenauer had watched as his countrymen and women fell prey to the Nazi demagogues. He was a democrat who had little faith in the democratic commitment of his fellow citizens. So, he thought, better not to test it too much: better to ask as little of them as possible.

This applied above all to those who had been active Nazis. The dry and correct Adenauer would never have said, like Lyndon Johnson, that he would rather have them inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. But he would have understood the point immediately. It was how he worked, too.

Adenauer talked about “drawing a line under the past.” One of the first bills the new Bundestag took up was an amnesty for Nazi criminals. It was followed by such measures as the “131er law” (passed under article 131 of the West German constitution) that allowed civil servants and even military personnel of the Nazi era to get their old jobs back. Such people were known for years as “131ers.”

In 1945, the victorious Allies had set out on an ambitious campaign of “denazification” in Germany. Although American, British, and French procedures were all somewhat different (Soviet procedures were unrecognizably different) the basic idea was to identify active Nazis, remove them from any possibility of public influence, and punish the most guilty with fines or imprisonment.

But by 1946 the western Allies found that examining millions of people was too much. They also realized that almost everyone who had lived in a dictatorship came out tainted—including the police, the firefighters, the engineers, the teachers, the doctors. You could have justice for Nazism’s victims or you could have a functioning society. You couldn’t have both. The Allies handed the procedure over to German tribunals, who predictably let almost everyone off the hook. Adenauer knew how much ordinary Germans detested the denazification system. As his administration took up its work, the whole increasingly pointless process was brought to a halt – though only after many of the worst Nazi criminals had been tried, convicted, and in many cases imprisoned or executed.

Of course, the emerging Cold War worked to Adenauer’s advantage—and he played brilliantly the cards it dealt him. The British and Americans wanted West German soldiers for deterrence or defense against any Soviet attack. But rearming was unpopular in Germany: the right opposed supplying soldiers to the same countries that were still imprisoning German commanders from World War II, while the left fought any use of Germans as cannon fodder. Adenauer pushed through rearmament, but extracted a high price for it. With every move toward a new army, he demanded and got concessions from the Allies—the end of prosecutions, the release of war criminals from prison, eventually the end of the occupation and the restoration of full sovereignty to West Germany.

Building up West Germany’s defense establishment meant bringing back the army officers, intelligence experts, police officials, and diplomats of the Nazi era. There was no other way. When the new army, the Bundeswehr, was created in 1955, its officers were overwhelmingly Hitler’s officers. West Germany’s foreign intelligence service was led by Reinhard Gehlen, who during the war had headed up intelligence on the Red Army. The courts were filled with judges who had handed down Hitler’s draconian sentences. Police officers had arrested Jews and Communists. Professors had taught the supremacy of all things German.

This went right to the top. Adenauer’s Chancellor’s Office was managed by Hans Globke, who in the 1930s had written the official commentary to the infamous antisemitic Nuremberg laws. In the 1960s one of Adenauer’s successors as Chancellor was Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had been a Nazi Party member and had worked in the propaganda department of the Nazi Foreign Office.

None of this was morally attractive. The reintegration of former Nazis came at the expense of those who had fought Hitler’s regime, or been its victims. Resistance fighters, including the conservative officers of the famous Valkyrie plot, were widely reviled as traitors. A 1954 opinion survey found that nearly 40 percent of respondents thought that anti-Nazis who had gone abroad should be barred from holding any high governmental office in West Germany. Nor was postwar Germany a comfortable place for surviving or returning Jews. In 1950 a carpenter named Max Fürst returned to Germany from Israel. At first the only job he could get was delivering mail. One customer angrily protested that he could never accept his mail “from the hands of a Jew.”

But this was the material out of which a new democracy had somehow to be made. Adenauer understood this. And so he worked slowly, coolly, pragmatically. He steered West Germany toward membership in NATO and to what would eventually become the European Union, tying the unpredictable country to wider and more stable structures. He made things easy for ex-Nazis so that their secure life and career prospects would reconcile them to the new state. His reward came in three decisive re-election victories.

His country’s reward is the Germany of today: prosperous, solidly democratic, its citizens much more concerned with social justice and the environment then are those of most other countries. Success came at a price: the cost to victims and opponents of Nazism in the years just after the war, and later on, the radical extremism and even domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and 1970s that arose in reaction to the lingering Nazis and Nazism in all corners of the Federal Republic.

The final tribute to Adenauer’s work was ironic. By 1962, like many long-serving leaders, he had grown arrogant in power. In October of that year the news magazine Der Spiegel published an article highly critical of the new West German army, based on information which Adenauer’s administration claimed was classified. Der Spiegel’s editor in chief Rudolf Augstein and several of his reporters were arrested and charged with treason. An unprecedented and widespread outcry from a newly-energized democratic citizenry forced Adenauer to back down and, a year later, to leave office.

Then and since, some have argued that all Adenauer did was lead a “restoration” of the old, authoritarian Germany. But politics, as Bismarck said, is the art of the possible, and what were the other possibilities for a post-Hitler Germany? The radical right lurked just the same in the 1950s as in the 1920s: in veterans’ groups, revived versions of the Nazi Party, the embittered expellees. Adenauer’s policies drew the poison from them and brought them into the tent. The shortest and clearest response to the “restoration” claim is the Spiegel affair. Democratic outrage forced the old man from office. The system worked, even against its architect.

There are lessons for us in this experience. Just as West Germans in 1950 ranked Hitler second after Bismarck as the greatest German statesman ever, a large share of the American electorate still thought it was a good idea to vote for Donald Trump after four years of seeing what he was. As we have seen, ever more dangerous extremism is growing among the Trumpers. Those people will be with us a long while yet. For the sake of our democracy’s long-term health, they need a viable path back to the political center, not roadblocks of exclusion and retaliation. Those who have spent four years in rage at all of Trump’s abuses of human rights, the rule of law, and basic decency—and I count myself very much among them—will need to think hard about where political wisdom really lies. The cool, unglamorous figure of Konrad Adenauer offers a way to do that." [Source]

I disagree with the author's premise. A "cool unglamorous figure" would never cut it in 2021 America. There is too much social media, cable television, and 24 hour news to compete with. 

Moving to the political center won't work, because these "Trumpers" will never come there with us. They are, in my opinion, going to be forever locked in their extreme right-wing echo chambers and spaces. They are there for many reasons. Primarily for racial self-preservation, power, and sense of belonging with like-minded individuals. 

This has now gone way beyond just politics and political ideas. This has morphed into something else. As we can see from what transpired on January 6th. It's become darker, more baleful and way more  menacing. 

*Pic from qz.com

American terrorist.

 

The worst thing that the American people can do right now is to forget what transpired on January 6, 2021, and then fail to hold ALL the people responsible for it accountable. 

There are now very credible reports that the night before the insurrection republicans and trump cultists were meeting at the trump hotel in Washington to plot the takeover. 

If this turns out to be true, I do not know how we can ignore it and pretend that it didn't happen like republicans are attempting to do. 

Anyway, what Mr. trump has been doing is not new, and there is actually a term for it: "Stochastic terrorism". 

The following article is from Mother Jones magazine.

"In the waning days of his presidency, Donald Trump is engaged in a deliberate campaign of terrorism aimed at Americans who oppose him politically. That description of his actions is neither a metaphor nor hyperbole—it is the assessment of veteran national security experts, whose view of the political violence being stoked by the outgoing president is echoed by law enforcement and political leaders. As Trump has pushed a litany of lies and conspiracy theories claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him through “massive fraud,” he has stirred his most extreme supporters to menace public officials, election workers, and his Democratic and Republican critics alike. Over the past four years, numerous perpetrators of threats and violence have directly invoked the president and his rhetoric, and recent gatherings by far-right groups in support of Trump’s efforts to reverse his election defeat have led to beatings, stabbings and a shooting. 

Trump is using a tactic known as “stochastic terrorism,” says Juliette Kayyem, a national security expert and former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a method of political incitement that provokes random acts of extremist violence, in which the instigator uses rhetoric ambiguous enough to give himself and his allies plausible deniability for any resulting bloodshed. Violent threats or attacks linked to the rhetoric usually generate muted denials and equivocal denunciations, or claims to have been “joking,” as Trump and those speaking on his behalf have routinely hidden behind.

Previously discussed in obscurity among counterterrorism specialists and national security wonks, the concept of stochastic terrorism first drew wider attention in 2018 when Kayyem cited it in reference to Cesar Sayoc, a fervent Trump supporter who sent mail bombs to CNN and nearly a dozen Democratic figures, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Since then—and particularly since Trump’s defeat in November—the president’s willingness to encourage violence for political purposes has become only more evident, according to Kayyem. She says Trump’s behavior should be called out for what it is: “He is promoting terrorism.”

Among national security experts, Kayyem is not alone in this view. “It really matters that the president of the United States is an arsonist of radicalization,” said Kori Schake, who served in leadership posts at the National Security Council and State Department under President George W. Bush. “It will really help when that’s no longer the case,” she added, speaking in a recent online panel discussion about the danger fueled by Trump and his enablers.

“We are stuck parsing Trump’s words…Meanwhile his supporters know EXACTLY what he means.”

Elizabeth Neumann, who until early 2020 served as a DHS assistant secretary focused on counterterrorism and threat prevention, asserted in a Washington Post op-ed before the election that the president has been fomenting violence. “Language from campaign materials and Trump’s extemporaneous speeches at rallies have been used as justification for acts of violence,” she wrote, emphasizing that Trump “has repeatedly been confronted with this fact.” His “inconsistent and muddied” denouncements of violence and white supremacists, she said, only exacerbated the problem: “Extremists thrive on this mixed messaging, interpreting it as coded support.”

Trump has long pursued a campaign of incitement with impunity, unchallenged by Republican leaders in Congress and met with tepid press coverage. “Until recently mainstream media were unwilling to say explicitly that Trump was lying,” Kayyem notes. “In the same way, there is a reluctance to identify the kind of violence that Trump is propagating, maybe because it seems too close to calling him a terrorist. You can call him whatever you want, but the tactics he’s using are clearly a form of terrorism.”

Trump’s nods and winks to far-right extremists began with his 2016 campaign and came to a head in August 2017 when he suggested that the torch-wielding white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people.” His demagoguery as president was initially focused on “the other,” whether it was his attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States or his incendiary rhetoric about Mexican “rapists,” migrant caravans, and “shithole” countries. He also attacked the news media as “the enemy of the people,” sparking violent threats and plots against journalists. “What’s happened now is that he has clearly turned it against Americans,” Kayyem says. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is focused on American political leadership that is not behind him.”

The danger escalated in the spring when Trump urged supporters to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” in response to public health restrictions ordered by the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, for battling the coronavirus pandemic. Trump targeted the governors of Virginia and Minnesota with the same message and sided with armed protesters in Michigan while tweeting criticism of Whitmer: “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!” By early October, the FBI and state authorities announced they had arrested 13 people plotting violent attacks in Michigan and elsewhere, including plans to storm the Capitol and kidnap and execute Whitmer. Far-right extremists also allegedly targeted Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, whom Trump had blasted as “crazy” for his pandemic policies and for supposedly planning to take away Virginians’ guns. When pressed in a fall presidential debate to denounce the violent far-right group known as the Proud Boys, Trump infamously responded that they should “stand back and stand by.” 

Trump’s post-election incitement has manifested in new and alarming ways. By early December, after the president unleashed a wave of false claims attacking the election results in battleground states including Michigan, a group of armed Trump supporters gathered outside the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson as she and her young son were putting up Christmas decorations. They chanted “Stop the steal” and shouted “You’re a felon and must turn yourself in immediately.” Less prominent officials and election workers around the country have been harassed for doing their jobs processing votes, menaced with nooses and death threats, and stalked online or at their homes. On December 14, state electors faced with “credible threats” in Michigan and Arizona were compelled to take extraordinary security measures—including locking down buildings and meeting at an undisclosed location—as they convened to certify Biden’s presidential victory.

Kayyem reiterated in a series of tweets how Trump had perfected the technique of provoking random but predictable violence. “We are stuck parsing Trump’s words, forced into textualist debates about what he meant by ‘Liberate Michigan’ or ‘Stand Back and Stand By,'” she wrote. “Meanwhile his supporters know EXACTLY what he means.”

“The level of concern is about as high as I’ve ever seen it,” a senior federal law enforcement official told me in early December. “Threatening activity based in this kind of rhetoric or anger is always there, but that said, it has been a very active year and it’s kept us and our [state and local] counterparts very busy.” The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to offer any specific assessment of the president’s role in provoking violence, but acknowledged in broader terms that the post-election conspiracy mongering led by Trump “is undoubtedly big fuel on the fire.” 

The president’s tactics have been imitated by his operatives and political allies. Recent comments from Trump campaign lawyer Joseph DiGenova were a textbook example: After the president fired DHS cybersecurity director Chris Krebs, who had described the 2020 elections as the most secure in history, DiGenova said in an interview that Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot.” DiGenova later claimed his comments “were sarcastic and made in jest.” As electors in Arizona prepared to certify Biden’s win, state Sen.-elect Wendy Rogers, a backer of Trump’s false claims about the election, tweeted: “Buy more ammo.” When Arizona Democrats criticized Rogers for using incendiary language on such a consequential day, she tweeted repeatedly that she was simply cheerleading for Second Amendment rights. “She knows exactly what she’s doing & wants plausible deniability,” responded Rep. Jennifer Longdon, an assistant Democratic leader in the Arizona House. Longdon’s tweet described Rogers’ own as a “clarion call to lone wolf extremists.”

Longdon, a gun violence survivor, knows well the danger of fringe actors who go on the attack over a political cause, including those who threatened, stalked, and assaulted her over her work on gun safety. Trump’s allies, she says, “have ramped this up to a level that’s beyond irresponsible.” If violence follows, Rogers and others “will just shrug their shoulders and walk away from it. But someone is hearing that call, and that call is coming from someone they consider to be a responsible voice of leadership.” Longdon added that the targeting of conservative Republican state officeholders who deemed Arizona’s election results fair and credible was telling. “This is a really dangerous and cynical attempt to whip up a base for what comes next,” she says. “At what point does this become sedition?”

Both Kayyem and the federal law enforcement official I spoke with suggested that recent commentary about the possibility of a brewing “civil war” has been overblown. They said that fringe elements who would act violently remain small in number. Kayyem also sees the coming change at the White House as pivotal. “We’ve gotten pretty immune to the sort of everyday racism of the current president and how he has nurtured it from the top,” she says. “But I think Biden will be able in his way to shame that, and a lot of it will start to go away. There will still be a threat of violence, but it’s not existential. I think we’ll see that when nonracists control the levers of law enforcement and communications, that these fringe groups will find themselves adrift and more isolated again.” [Source]

The writer is a lot more optimistic than I am. I suspect that these "fringe groups" are not as "fringe" as most people think. 

*Pic from thedailybeast.com

 

 

? Of The Day.

 

Should Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley be expelled from the Unites States senate? 

 

Testing our democracy.

I must confess that I am not as bullish on America as most people. I am somewhat of a cynic when it comes to this American experiment and the whole "more perfect union" thing. I just don't believe that most Americans in the majority population share the same vision of America as the men who sat down and drew up the Constitution that hot summer day here in my hometown back in 1787. 

Still, there are those who are more optimistic than I am, and so I want to share an opinion piece written by one such optimist. 

His name is Larry English, and he is a lawyer in Louisiana who penned this article for The Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge. 

"Whenever I visit Washington, D.C., I head to the Jefferson Memorial late at night. The first time I visited I was moved to tears by Jefferson’s words, sent across the ages as a roadmap to a more “perfect union.” I read every word written on the rotunda and then sit and contemplate the meaning: “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

I paid another visit a few months ago with my wife who is an immigrant. As we walked out of the rotunda, she turned to me and said, “I now understand why you come here.”

Jefferson was a horrible human being. A slave owner and rapist that kept his own children enslaved even after his death. But I am able to separate Jefferson the man from Jefferson the founder. Just as I can separate Bill Cosby from Cliff Huxtable. Cosby is a rapist. Cliff Huxtable is the role model who inspired me to go to law school and develop a love of African American art that hung on the walls of his Brooklyn brownstone.

I have an admiration for the men who founded this country, despite the fact their human flaws led to the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of my family: because they created the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known.

They knew one day we would elect a talented autocrat; that his seductive siren to the dark side would attract millions. But they protected us from ourselves by dispersing power among the three branches of the federal government and to the states. And over the last few weeks, the system they created held.

Some members of the U.S. Senate and House attempted a legislative coup on Jan. 6. Their colleagues, historians and great-grandchildren will debate whether they are freedom fighters or insurrectionists.

However, our democracy was tested and we came through with flying colors. After the mob attacked the Capitol, Joe Biden did not go into hiding; the autocrat did. Conservative Republican state officials across the country refused to go along with the lie. Conservative Republican judges, many of whom abhor Joe Biden’s policies, nevertheless honored their oath to the Constitution.

For most of Black Americans’ history, we were subjected to state-sponsored terrorism. In 1870, in Caddo Parish, white mobs turned on newly freed slaves with such vengeance it became known across the world as “Bloody Caddo.”

The first time I saw a condom was the Sunday morning I went with my older brothers and grandparents to clean up our sanctuary, the Mt. Sariah Baptist Church in Cotton Valley. A White mob had spent the night before fornicating on its grounds and then broke into the church, trashed it and defecated on the offering table. I was 7 years old.

James Baldwin said for “black Americans the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke.” At any point before 1963, Black Americans could have taken up arms and stormed the United States Capitol and history would have recorded them as patriots.

They placed their faith in a system created by slave owners two hundred years earlier. As a child I watched then-Gov. Lester Maddox, of Georgia, stand in the state capitol holding an ax handle, spewing hate against Blacks and Jews. On Jan. 5, Georgia elected a Black preacher and a Jew to the U.S. Senate.

Juxtapose that against a group of affluent, well-educated white men and women sitting in the Capitol, attempting to block the peaceful transfer of power because their guy lost the election. They did so even after the mob had stormed the building.

What Jefferson, Washington and Hamilton knew was that the biggest threat to our democracy would not be from foreign actors, but from a mob seduced by an autocrat. It was not the Russians, Chinese or Muslim extremists who trashed the Capitol and went looking to hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. It was our neighbors, inflamed by the lies of some of our elected leaders, who crashed through the doors.

Our democracy will be tested in the future. But as long as a majority of us choose the peaceful transfer of power over the mob, we can attain that more perfect union. And then we can all declare in the words of that old Negro spiritual '“Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.”' [Article]

The fact that folks with all the comforts and privileges that life has to offer, still choose to do things like what we saw on January 6th, should scare all of us. We might be in the majority now, but we all saw what happened four years ago, and it almost  ended up destroying us. The next time we might not be so lucky.  

Hang on just a little longer.

There are just a few hours to go before America's long nightmare is over. The last four years have been pure hell for those of you who value democracy and believe that America might have been on the right track to fulfilling her dream of becoming a perfect union before this train wreck came along.  

Donald J. trump has been a disaster in so many ways that just trying to list them all in one blog post would be pretty much impossible. He has fractured the country in ways not seen since the Civil War, and he has emboldened racists to act out their darkest tendencies in unimaginable ways. Is anyone surprised, then, that he is going out with the lowest approval rating of any other president in history? I know that I am not. All of you who held your noses and voted for him because of his tax cuts and deregulations should be looking at yourselves in the mirror. You should be asking yourselves: Was it worth it? I know what the families of 400,000 dead Americans will say: It was not. 

But before we go all in on Donald trump, let's not forget that he could not have done all of this without the help of the weak spineless republican politicians who allowed him to exercise his power unchecked. They sold their souls to be close to power, and this is where it got us. Now, incredibly, they are all trying to jump ship and pretend that we weren't paying attention to their slavish sycophantic behavior over the past four years. Today, Mitch McConnell declared on the senate floor, that Mr. trump is pretty much responsible for the invasion on the nation's capitol by a bunch of thugs and insurrectionist on January 6th. Where has this kind of bravado been for the past four years?  Watch as  republicans now pretend that the last four years never happened. Good luck with that. I, for one, will be here to remind them every single day that it did.  

It frankly still amazes me that Americans elected this man. He was too boorish and incompetent to be a  dog catcher let alone the president of the United States. And yet he pulled it off. He was shielded in part by his whiteness, his gender, and the perception that he had wealth and power. Barack Obama could only dream of doing the things that he did and got away with. 

Mr. trump and his birther wife will not be attending the Biden inauguration, and that ought to tell you all you need to know about the character of the man and the woman he married. Try and remember how they were both treated by the Obamas when they were transitioning to the White House. Even after the vicious and racist birther lie that they fomented against him. They Obamas were still gracious and respectful to them. trump and his birther wife are so petty and vindictive that they will not show the same type of grace and courtesy to the Bidens.

Honestly, I just want them gone. The less we see and hear from Mr. trump and his family over the next few years the better. I don't know what the republicans will do, because he is still very much a part of their party, and his cult members and followers have their own ideas about what the republican party should look like. The others will do what  Mckay Coppins writing in The Atlantic say they will do. 

"People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of “healing” and “moving forward,” but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory. Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist..... responded with a litany of episodes to memory-hole. “Republicans will want to forget the constant chaos, the lies, the double-dealing, the hiring of family, and the escalating rhetoric that incited hate for four years [and] directly led to what happened at the Capitol,” Basically, any of those things that we never would have let an Obama or Clinton get away with, but constantly justified to ourselves in the name of judges.” 

 Just a few more hours to go. 

I can see the light already. 

 

Caption Saturday.

 

 

Please give me a caption for this picture. 

No remorse.

"We will never give up, we will never concede...."After this, we're going to walk down there, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down... to the Capitol and we are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women...."  ~Donald J. trump~

 As the traitors and insurrectionist from the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 continue to be rounded up and arrested, their ringleader and puppeteer- in- chief continues to be defiant. 

Make no mistake, Donald J. trump should be doing a perp -walk along with the rest of his minions, because he is just as culpable as the hooligans who smashed windows, urinated, and defecated in the capitol on that tragic day. Five people lost their lives because of Donald J. trump's ego and recklessness. And yet, from all accounts, all he really cared about was the optics of the riots and the fact that he was recently booted off of twitter. (He had to be begged before he ordered the flag flown at half-mast for that capitol police officer who was beaten to death by his supporters.) Republicans, to their everlasting shame, are just as culpable. They made a Faustian bargain with Donald trump four years ago, and they are now keeping their part of the deal. Rather than come out and condemn the president for his actions, people like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio have been looking everywhere for straw men to detract from the real issue at hand. They, like the rest of these republican politicians, have been using false equivalence to compare the black lives matter movement to the rioters and insurrectionist who tried and failed to overthrow the government.

As we get closer to inauguration day, the FBI is warning us of more possible danger from the trump loving domestic terrorists. Now, incredibly, they have their eyes set on various state capitols as well, and their goal appears to be to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from their Dear Leader to Joe Biden. 

I wish I could say that they won't be successful, because, sadly, they have their tentacles in various law enforcement agencies across the country, and these individuals are just as committed as the rest of their MAGA cohorts. After the events of January 6th, a few of the capitol police were suspended because of their actions on that day. Apparently they were taking selfies with the rioters and opening doors for some of them to come in to the capitol and commit felonies. This is all way too scary. I hate to say it, but we are in a civil war right now. 

Today, for the first time since encouraging this supporters to riot in Washington, Mr. trump made some statements about the current state of affairs.

 “Free speech is under assault like never before.....The 25th Amendment is of zero risk to me but will come back to haunt Joe Biden and the Biden administration.....As the expression goes, be careful what you wish for.”   ~ Donald J. trump~

Right back at ya, big guy. 

Unfit!

 I have been ringing the warning bell about Donald J. trump for the past four years. And, to be fair, so have many of the regulars who visit this website. We knew what we were dealing with and how dangerous he was. Still, it took the events of January 6, 2021 to finally make America stand up and take notice. 

We all will keep our fingers crossed and hold out breaths for the next eleven days, because lord knows what this crazed lunatic will do next. It has gotten so bad that he has been banned from damn near every social media platform. Can you imagine, the president of the United States has been banned from Twitter, and yet he has the nuclear codes at his fingertips? You will be excused if you don't sleep too well for the next eleven days or so.  

Everyone who defended and enabled this clown should be ashamed of themselves, and people like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio should be shamed out of public life forever. They will try to backpedal  and jump ship, but it's too late. They all should have said four years ago what they are trying to say and spin now.  

The following article is from CNN's website, and it pretty much sums up  how I am feeling about this man and his minions right now. 

"When the history of the 45th presidency is written, Wednesday, January 6, will go down as the day America realized how dangerous President Donald Trump really is.

In the span of hours, the country finally witnessed the price of its five-year experiment turning its election process into a reality show that produced an unhinged megalomanic as commander-in-chief who amassed so much power through his lies and fear-mongering that he was able to engineer an insurrection as a final act that left democracy dangling by a thread.

Wednesday's siege at the Capitol marked the culmination of Trump's years-long quest to cultivate a fiercely loyal base that would do anything for him by playing on their fears and resentments as he lured them into believing his incessant lies about the sinister motives of government, election fraud and his own conduct.

 The consequences were deadly: five people have died as a result of Wednesday's riot, including a Capitol Police officer. Some of Trump's supporters were armed and ready for war: an Alabama man allegedly parked a pickup truck with 11 homemade bombs, an assault rifle and a handgun two blocks from the Capitol hours before authorities discovered it, according to federal prosecutors. Another man allegedly showed up with an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, telling acquaintances he wanted to shoot or run over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pipe bombs were found near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee as authorities tried to dispel the mob and secure the Capitol. 

But three days later, Trump appears no more aware of the consequences of his actions than on the day of the riot when he delighted in the mayhem. Bunkered at the White House with an ever-shrinking circle of aides, he has offered no remorse for inciting the crowd and offered only a forced denunciation of their actions. Aides, weary and disgusted, refuse to come near him. His central line to the outside world, Twitter, was severed Friday night. People who admired him, worked for him and followed him down dark paths before now say he has crossed into a delusional place, entirely detached from reality.

Wednesday's shocking events can be traced to the inception of Trump's candidacy. From the earliest days of the 2016 presidential race, his rallies crackled with tension and anger -- a testament to his skill in finding the fault lines on issues of class and race and exploiting them to draw in followers who felt marginalized and wronged by their leaders. His supporters had hungered for a charismatic leader like him who would empower the "silent majority" and serve as a voice for their grievances. He thrilled them as he blasted through societal norms and the guardrails of democracy, while offering safe harbor to White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, anti-government renegades, racists and anti-Semitic activists who fell in line behind a political figure who would channel their rage in exchange for their fealty. 

As he lurched from one shocking maneuver to the next, Trump commanded the constant attention of the press, broadening his universe of followers as he used Twitter as his megaphone. By threatening to punish his critics and by firing civil servants who tried to check his thirst for power, he cowed members of the Republican Party and his own aides, who became complicit in his unraveling of democracy. Meanwhile, much of America grew numb to his circus act, shrugging off the magnetic power of Trumpism as though it was a passing fad.

 That all changed Wednesday as the country watched the mob encouraged by Trump scale the walls of Capitol, beating back police officers as they smashed through the historic building's doors and windows, shattering glass to force their way in bearing metal pipes, sticks and other weapons. Lawmakers from both parties were forced to cower below the seats in their respective chambers before being evacuated to secure locations, as the insurrectionists ransacked congressional offices and attempted to occupy the nation's seat of government on the day Congress was affirming President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. The barbarism of the day was underscored by chilling reports that some of the Trump faithful were on the hunt for Vice President Mike Pence — who had refused to accede to the President's demand that he overthrow the election results and was presiding over the counting of the Electoral College votes.

As the horrifying riot unfolded in the "people's house," it became clear that Trump had finally gone too far. His political capital was already weakened by the Republicans' defeats in two runoff races in Georgia that were poisoned by the President's lies about voter fraud — with some in the GOP openly blaming Trump for their resulting loss of the Senate majority.

And the breach of the barricades that put the lives of the nation's lawmakers in danger began to break -- at least for now -- the spell that Trump has cast over his party. When order was restored some outraged Republicans condemned the President for his role in inciting the violence; others signaled it was time to move on and rebuild the Republican Party after four years in which the President has tried to bully them into submission.

With Democrats now poised for full control of Congress, Trump was now facing real consequences for his actions. During the overnight certification of results, which had been delayed by the rioters, the rumblings began among Democratic members of Congress about whether he could be ousted through the 25th Amendment or impeached for a second time to prevent him from holding office again.

 Momentum has only grown among Democrats for fast-track impeachment beginning next week, and the latest draft of the resolution obtained by CNN included one article of impeachment for "incitement of insurrection." Many Republicans, however, say that step is futile for a President who has less than two weeks left in his term.

Still as the glass was being swept up from the Capitol grounds, some GOP lawmakers considered supporting his impeachment. More than a dozen administration officials, including two Cabinet secretaries, have resigned citing their concerns with Trump's response to the riot.

"I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage," Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News in a report published Friday, making her the first Republican senator to call on Trump to resign because of Wednesday's riot.......

.........."We're gonna walk down to the Capitol. And we're gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women," the President said as he marshaled the crowd for action. "You'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong."

But as his supporters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and began their assault on the Capitol, Trump had returned to the White House consumed with his schemes for overriding an election that he lost with 232 electoral votes to Biden's 306. To the dismay of his aides, he delighted in watching the riot that injured dozens of officers and sent fears of a coup racing across the Capitol. Aides struggled to get him to understand how serious the situation had become. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the President's staunchest allies, had a "heated exchange" with the President as rioters overran the Capitol building, urging him to denounce the attack and try to quell the violence, according to a source briefed on the exchange. But Trump declined to do so. Asked on Fox whether he expected Trump to address the situation, McCarthy said only: "I don't know."

Trump did not even attempt to secure the safety of the vice president, even though several of his supporters who were part of the violent mob were heard shouting "Where's Mike Pence?" in the midst of their Capitol rampage. Those threats alarmed Pence and his family, a source close to the vice president told CNN's Jim Acosta, widening the breach between the President and Vice President.

In fact as the siege unfolded, Trump demonstrated the callous depths of his narcissism by trying to pressure senators to derail the affirmation of the election results, as they feared for their safety in the midst of a riot he had incited.

CNN reported Friday that Trump mistakenly called Republican Sen. Mike Lee on his personal cell phone as the rampage was unfolding while trying to reach Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a newly elected Republican from Alabama. Lee fielded the President's call shortly after 2 p.m. ET, at a time when senators had been evacuated from the Senate floor to protect them from the approaching mob. Lee handed Tuberville his phone, a spokesman for the senator confirmed to CNN, and the President proceeded to try to convince Tuberville to slow down the certification of the Electoral College vote. The call ended when the senators were moved to a secure location.

At the White House, Trump's daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump and chief of staff Mark Meadows tried to convince Trump to record a message that would direct the rioters to stand down.

But the resulting message satisfied no one as he ad-libbed, telling the insurgents who had stormed the Capitol: "We love you. You're very special."

On Thursday, the wave of administration resignations and condemnations of the President by former Trump staffers continued as shaken staff members cited real concerns about the stability and continuity of government. On Capitol Hill, GOP lawmakers expressed anger about Trump's role in that dark moment in the country's history.

Trump went about his business, including awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a pair of professional golfers in the East Room. His attempts to proceed as normal angered some aides even further.

With the President increasingly isolated, Trump's aides, including his daughter, Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, warned him that he was in real danger of being removed or impeached. Though reluctant to denounce his supporters, he agreed to record a second video released Thursday where he acknowledged a new administration is coming -- without congratulating Biden. (Cipollone is now among those who are considering resigning, two sources familiar with his thinking told CNN's Pamela Brown.)

But Trump's thinking hadn't changed.

"I think that video was done only because almost all his senior staff was about to resign, and impeachment is imminent," a White House adviser, who spoke with senior officials as the debacle was unfolding, told CNN's Jim Acosta. "That message and tone should have been relayed election night ... not after people died."

Later, Trump appeared to some aides like he regretted taping the spot, asking those around him whether it was being well received.

The arrests of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol began to pile up Friday including Derrick Evans, a West Virginia state legislator who is being charged with entering a restricted area and entering the US Capitol, and Richard Barnett of Arkansas who was photographed sitting at a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office during the Capitol siege. Barnett was charged with knowingly entering and remaining in restricted building grounds without authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds as well as the theft of public property, federal officials said Friday.

Lonnie Leroy Coffman of Alabama, who allegedly parked the pickup truck with the weapons cache near the Capitol Hill Club near the Capitol, told police he also had mason jars filled with "melted Styrofoam and gasoline" -- a combination that could have the same effect as napalm if it exploded, court documents said, because "it causes the flammable liquid to stick to objects that it hits upon detonation."

While the possibility of removal of the President through the 25th Amendment looks increasingly remote, in part because Pence has no interest in participating in that process, more Republicans are turning their attention to helping Biden transition into the job.

McCarthy rejected calls for Trump's impeachment Friday, but referred to Biden as the President-elect for the first time: "I have reached out to President-elect Biden today and plan to speak to him about how we must work together to lower the temperature and unite the country to solve America's challenges," the California Republican said.

After Trump indicated in one of his final tweets that he won't attend Biden's inauguration, the President-elect expressed relief at the prospect of his absence Friday, stating it was the one of the few things they had ever agreed on. Pence, however, would be welcome to attend, Biden said.

Wednesday's events, Biden argued, proved that Trump is "not fit to serve." If the nation were six months from inauguration, Biden said, he would be all for "moving everything" to get Trump out of office, including invoking the 25th Amendment. But with less than two weeks to go, the President-elect said he was focused "on us taking control" and would leave decisions about impeachment up to the Congress.

The President's encouragement of a mob Wednesday, Biden said, reminded him of what happens in nations with tin horn dictators. But he said the country's realization of the danger Trump poses could make his job easier as he attempts to unite a divided country -- though that remains an open question.

"I've had a number of Republicans who are former colleagues call me. They are as embarrassed and mortified by the President's conduct as the Democrats are," Biden said Friday. "What this President has done is ripped the band-aid all the way off to let the country know who he is, and what he's about, and how thoroughly unfit for office he is." [Source]

But we knew that four years ago. What took everyone else so long to see it? 

 

A MAGA coup attempt in Washington.

 

If you are surprised at what happened today in Washington, you haven't been paying attention to your country over the past four years.

America elected a racist crackpot to the highest office in the land, and now that his time is up, he will not go quietly. 

Today, Americans watched in shock, as Mr. trump's thugs attacked the U.S. capitol building and stormed the house and senate chambers while debate was taking place. This attempted coup took place while "normal" Americans watched in horror. They could not believe that this was happening in America. Sadly, these people are just as clueless as the thugs who stormed Washington today. Mr. trump and his enablers have been calling for this for weeks, and they have been encouraged by conservative media, elected trump puppets, and social media falsehoods.

As I watch I am struck by something else: The double standard when it comes to how these folks have been treated by law enforcement compared to how the black lives matter protestors were treated this summer. I am seeing way less police presence for much more serious offences being committed by Mr. trump's thugs. (Fine people on both sides.) You just know that if these had been young black and brown people acting out in this manner in Washington today you would be hearing about all the dead protestors in the streets. 

Mr. trump has been lying to these people for weeks that he won the election, and they have been all too willing to buy into the lie. They are willing because they share one thing in common: A hatred and fear of brown people. Make no mistake, what you are seeing playing out today in Washington is who we are as a country. If you didn't think this could have happened here, and that this kind of behavior only happens in Third World countries and banana republics, I have a bell to sell you here in Philadelphia. This redneck revolution is being televised, and now you see what folks like yours truly have been warning you about for years. 

I honestly think that the 25th Amendment should be invoked, and that Mr. trump should be removed from office before his remaining two weeks are up. Because, sadly, if you don't think that he could do even more damage, you don't know Donald trump. 

On another note, congrats to the people of Georgia for making Mitch Turtle McConnell senate minority leader. 

Two democratic senators from the state of Georgia. One black and the other a Jew. Who could have seen this coming? 

Well, maybe some of those thugs and rioters in Washington did, and that's just one more reason why they are so angry.

*Image from WYFF Greenville.

? Of The Day

Did Mr. trump commit a crime with his phone call  to that Georgia election official?