most of us on the sdmb, including you, not what you’d expect, would have done due diligence, not taken things at face value. i believe that we would need a lot more facts. although… once in a crowd or mob, behaivour that you would do individually does erode.
I was/am a pretty big fan of Barack Obama – but that’s because of Obama’s positions and his behavior. If he started acting like Trump, I wouldn’t say “It’s Obama so it must be right!” I’d say “What the hell happened to Obama? I’m not a fan of his anymore!”
Which is, effectively, what my father and a lot of other Republicans, including many of the ones in Congress, did about Nixon when they found out about Watergate. What seems to be happening now is a different reaction entirely.
Admittedly, if an Obama who had in all other ways been behaving like Obama had announced that he’d discovered a conspirancy to undermine the vote and we all needed to do something to stop it from succeeding – I’d have taken that seriously, though I’d have investigated before trying to break into any buildings. But not if he’d been behaving like Trump for years.
Having said that – if I’d been getting all my information for ten or twenty years from highly biased sources, I don’t suppose I’d have had any remotely accurate idea of how Obama, or anybody else, had been behaving. I try not to do that, though I mostly can’t stand to read the wingnuts. – how much of the different reaction to Nixon had to do with everybody getting basically the same TV channels at the time is hard to tell; but I bet it was at least some of it.
Is there a scorecard somewhere for the January 6 mob that stormed the Capital that shows
Number of guilty pleas
Number of trials
Number of found guilty at trial
Number found not guilty (any?)
Number of years in prison (total)
Thanks for that link. Bookmarked (NPR is keeping track).
Nice! 0.24% of people were acquitted of all charges in final disposition. 2 out of 833.
Only 333 cases left to go - either pleading guilty or going to trial. And the odds are not with them if they go to trial. 2/151 people have gotten off via this method. That’s a 1.3% chance of full acquittal.
In the 2016 election I kept my mouth shut about the people who were swayed to vote for Trump. After all he is a consummate con-man telling the rubes what they want to hear. That forbearance disappeared in the 2020 election when after four years exposure to his… administration more people voted for him than in the previous election.
Either the new ones had spent those years with their heads firmly up their ass buried in the sand, or they embrace Trump and his policies. I don’t know which aspect is more horrifying.
If Obama had announced that he’d unearthed a conspiracy to rig the vote and we needed to take drastic action to stop it, but his handpicked heads of the FBI and DOJ and other security agencies all said there was nothing to his theory, and he lost 60+ legal actions because judges said his theory was bullshit and if instead of believing all that Obama doubled down and started hanging out with a bunch of wild-eyed and sometimes intoxicated crazies who believed in his theory and he started doing increasingly stupid stuff like strong arming government officials en masse in an effort to hang onto power and calling on his supporters to come out to help block the transfer of power…….I would assume he’d had a serious mental breakdown and not only would I not answer the call, I’d advocate removing him from office via the 25th Amendment, because it’s cruel to let the mentally ill publicly embarrass themselves for spectacle.
Yeah. I think that would come under my concept of acting like Trump instead of acting like Obama. And noticing all of that would come under my concept of investigating before breaking any doors down.
You make a really good point that somebody sensible who at first believed Trump (if such a thing could happen) should have switched gears somewhere in those 60+ legal actions. I’d think it would be hard to miss, whatever news you paid attention to, that he kept losing them.
That’s the difference between being a supporter and being a cultist.
You support someone because of what they do. A cultist will worship someone no matter what they do.
I believe that a number of people who stormed the capitol that day were (and may still be) cultists.
And will deny that they were ever in a cult.
Yep. And they’ll fire back at the accusation by saying “No. You’re brainwashed. By the MSM!” There’s just no reaching some people. They will need some serious deprogramming to get back to reality.
Not a problem as long as you believe what’s been dinned into your ears for years: that everyone in government except for Dear Leader and his entourage is part of the Deep State and is out to get him.
Yeah, Judge Chutkan noted during a previous Jan 6 sentencing that there was an individual responsible who had not been charged. I hope that someday we find this person and sentence them to prison.
What I found amusing was that Trump’s lawyers tried to use that comment as a basis to have Judge Chutkan disqualified, and her response was essentially, “I didn’t name any names. Why are you assuming that I was talking about Trump?”
Of course.
But Trump didn’t need a mental breakdown. He started in the basement and started digging.
Well said.
Everyone involved in the J6 uprising could be considered to have been acting “corruptly” - including Trump.
Apparently, some of the J6 crowd that have been convicted are a little salty that one of the people who flim-flammed them into prison has gotten off so light:
Attorneys for Jan. 6 Inmates Furious About Sidney Powell’s Breezy Sentence (msn.com)
The justice system does treat certain crimes worse than others: namely, violent crimes that risk harm to other people will get more serious sentences than crimes that do not pose a direct risk of physical harm:
That’s always been the way it is: the justice system is most concerned about risks of physical harm.
And, first offenders will almost always get a more lenient sentence.