Military birthday parades

Politics & Elections
41

Even Republican senators find they have some other pressing business to attend to on the day of Our Glorious Leader’s parade:

On Wednesday, over three-quarters of the Senate Republican Conference told Scripps News they would not attend this Saturday’s military parade in Washington.

Scripps News reached out to all 52 Republican senators. 41 said they did not plan to be in town for the event. Nine others have declined to comment, while at least two more say they are still undecided.

So far only one Republican senator, Sen. Roger Marshall from Kansas, has confirmed that he will attend the parade.

As of Wednesday night, Scripps has reached out to all GOP Senators.

Other senators told Scripps News they planned to attend family or constituent events elsewhere or said they were traveling overseas.

42

This triggered a memory. Umberto Eco - not wearing his fiction-writing hat, but his very sensible political sociologist one - also wrote of 14 characteristics of fascism in 1995.

There’s a good summary article about them - with the basic text here - Umberto Eco's List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism | Open Culture

Wasted all my lunchtime reading this so haven’t compared them to Britt’s, which means I don’t know if they are the same 14, or we have 28 signs of fascism [that’s a lot by any standard. Far too many if you ask me - someone should take charge and sort that out].

43

55% chance of rain in DC on Friday. :folded_hands:

44

I hope it includes lightning.

45

I’ll repeat what I said on another thread. What are the odds President Bone-Spurs shows up in a military uniform?

46

Will he be able to hold a salute for as long as it takes for the marching formations to pass him? They say, trump wanted Kegbreath to have the troops learn to goosestep, but there wasn’t enough time.

47

On the same technicality as the Army – which should have been honored last week – the Navy and Marines also celebrate this year but I’ve not seen any reports of parades being scheduled for them.

48

See, if the parade was to honor the Navy as well, we could have seen aircraft carriers on parade.

49

Have you ever had to back one of those things into the water? Forget about it!

50

I find it remarkable that they are treating Trump with such disrespect, but only for something utterly trivial. Why couldn’t they go to Trump’s birthday parade and then vote against the big beautiful bill?

51

Give symbic pushback on parade attendance but substantive support on bill passage & deafening silence on executive overreach of Congressional powers?

Sounds lkke people who approve of the know-nothing agenda. Or who are deathly afraid of the MAGA voting block.

IOW, IMO this is the polar opposite of “remarkable” or “surprising”.

52

Yes.

But it then raises the question of whether the MAGA crowd, the senators are afraid of, care more about issues, or more about loyalty to the caudillo. The reaction to the silly parade, and the MAGA reaction to Trump’s flip-flopping on Israel bombing Iran, both suggest they care more about policy than they care about Trump. This in turn suggests that MAGA won’t weaken much when Trump is out of office..

I suppose there is a middle ground. Maybe a lot of them only care about the policy because Trump championed it, but once Trump convinces them of the policy, they then care about the policy more than him.

In any event, I doubt they care about this parade per se. If they care at all, it will be about the protests.

53

So how many of them ended up attending?