He could, or have the Minority Whip John Thune pick him. But he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty personally, so he won’t.
Perhaps. But will they have the courage to vote that abhorrence versus cravenly cave to the peer pressure of the crazies.
Not so many that are willing to say so out loud. I don’t trust any of them. They will be under tremendous pressure to protect the party. We’ve heard plenty of about this from McConnell but he just said he’d support Trump for president in 2024. These are politicians not people of character, they’ll cling to the side that butters their bread.
But they may know that you are here live and not a cat.
We’re long past the point where simply abhorring the insurrection is sufficient. If they don’t actually help Democrats take action to fight back against the radicalization of the main opposition party (i.e. the radical Republican party), then they’re not even remotely helping. In fact one could make the argument that they’re actually aiding the radical cause by giving people the impression that the Republican party has room for ideological diversity when that is really not the case.
The so-called moderates are actually giving strength to the radicals and the insurrectionists by basically siding with the party anywhere from 70-90% of the time when they know that siding with the party includes everything from economic policies that further polarize the country economically to confirming Supreme Court justices that wreck the judiciary, and that it very frequently includes undermining faith in elections.
Even if they don’t agree with that last part, the “moderates” are keeping that radical political party a competitive force in electoral politics when in the past they would have been shunned from the political system by mainstream forces.
McConnell’s support of Trump is basically a concession that he is powerless to rid the party of Trumpism. He was testing the waters the hours and days after the insurrection, feeling the sense of collective shock and anger in that moment. But the information cycles move on, and I think the collective psyche does as well. We’re past that moment.
We’re back dealing with economics and the pandemic again, and this is why Biden probably did not want to waste a lot of time on an impeachment. Biden and the Democrats have to be seen as the team that gets it done with the pandemic and with economic reforms in much the same way that the Republicans were seen as the ones who got the Cold War done, the way that FDR was seen as the guy who finished off the Depression and won WWII. If they fail, I think we’re looking possibly at the end of American democracy, at least the end of liberal, increasingly inclusive democracy as we’ve known it over the past 50-100 years or so; we’ll backslide into a majoritarian hybrid regime.
Yes, a vast majority abhorred it. The problem is that only 28% of the GOP believes it was a right wing insurrection:
I don’t understand this Blame Antifa thing at all. Antifa was there to stop Biden from becoming President? They were trying to stop Biden just to make Trump look bad even though Trump had been defeated and would soon be out of power? It doesn’t make sense.
Perhaps you could provide a list of all the things that Trump and his minions believe, do and say that do make sense?
I got that list right here:
Regret getting caught and having to face the concequences of their actions. Like most criminals.
Here’s another one that now claims regret; check out the other allegations in the story tho:
Yeah… you are a criminally minded person: you planned and committed crimes. Stop living in delusion.
Thanks for that. Interesting.
I hope that anyone convicted of any offence with an element of violence (against individuals or property), weapons or conspiracy gets considerable jail time.
You and me both.
Back in the innocent days of 2016-ish I knew a few Trump fans. They weren’t authoritarians, but they did buy into the narrative that the government had largely been captured by self-serving doubletalk-spewing elites of both sides. They looked mostly at Trump as an outrageous but mostly harmless prank to be played on the Establishment. I don’t deal with those people now, so I don’t know their post 2018ish or current take on Trump.
I suspect many of these self-styled revolutionaries are in an analagous state. Playing at being a revolutionary and playing at pranking the establishment sounds fun. Then they went ahead and did it and have now been awoken to the reality that this isn’t a narrative in a “reality” TV show. This is the real thing. Oops.
Anyone with a hand in the planning or the violence, and any supporters of any organizations needs to be found, properly convicted, and removed from society UFN. Pour encourager les autres. Failed coups have consequences. Even pitifully amateur coups.
I think that the federal criminal justice system is one the few good tools in our toolkit to fight back against right wing authoritarianism. I’m not advocating mass round-ups and incarceration just because we’re angry at the people who showed up at the rally and cried “fraud” - there needs to be due process. But if we can prosecute hundreds of these people, have a jury listen to the evidence and put most of them behind bars for anywhere from 5-20 years, depending on the nature of the offense, then that’s an important step past the Trump era.
It’s not the only step. Biden and the Dems must succeed in governing, and I think that means doing away with the filibuster and going it alone, all over the crying objections of Mitt Romney and Susan Collins (and Joe Munchkin while we’re at it). Dems must out-compete Republicans at the state level.
I think this is typical white conservative hypocrisy. The ones who scream “Pull your pants up” and advocate for police roughhousing of minority suspects are the ones who then sit before a judge and say "This was all just a big mistake. I don’t know how I got here. I’m really just like anyone else. Come on, your honor. Let me go. Please. Hey, come on, I’m white. "
They hate so much that simply hating blacks, Latinos, and Muslims isn’t enough. They had to bring back hating Asians to handle the excess.
I believe it’s more dire than that.
I see people who really believe that the bolsheviks are trying to destroy America.
For almost 100 years, the narrative in this country has been that communism is evil. Actually evil in the biblical sense. That it’s designed to destroy the freedom of humanity given to us by god and to replace it with the domain of man. They’ve been fed a steady diet of stories of the atrocities of the Soviet Union, and China and Cuba and Venezuela for generations.
And they hear terms like social democracy, and they hear Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez being called socialists, and they immediately flash on all those horror stories. And they vow to never let it happen here.
Nevermind that the American brand of social democracy is nothing like communist Russia or Cuba. Or that problems of Venezuela are the results of an extremely corrupt authoritarian regime. Or the fact that China is now the largest and most thriving capitalist society ever. They believe their way of life is being threatened and it’s their duty to protect it. Just because they’ve been temporarily abandoned by those they thought would lead them, doesn’t mean they don’t still believe that “their” America is being threatened. They absolutely do believe it. And now they won’t be so quick to follow paper tigers and false prophets.
Sure, they’re embarrassed that they were so easily led astray. Sure, they regret taking rash actions. But their belief that they are fighting for the soul of the nation is just as strong and deep as ever…