these threads move so fast I can’t keep up. You write a response, 5 minutes later it’s a hundred responses above what you are responding to. Your initial response seemed to me to be a criticism of the officers standing on those steps. If I was wrong about that I am sorry.
That’s ok Mike. That sort of just happened in DC. Regarding how fast things can happen. And I was not criticizing the officers. I wasn’t there. Video and audio does not tell the entire story. BUT they being the powers that be could/should have had their backs with better back up.
There were undoubtedly many fine LEOs just trying to do their jobs and make the best of a bad situation.
However, there were failures and pro-Trump collusion at many levels of law enforcement here, not just at the top. Let’s not kid ourselves - we know that MAGA sentiment is overrepresented in law enforcement. It’s clear that Trump was using his direct authority and indirect influence through his cronies to minimize security at the Capitol to enable this insurrection. And I think it must surely be true that some elements in senior law enforcement colluded with this, or it just could not have happened. It will probably be impossible to prove, and they have resigned anyway, but incompetence is just not sufficient to explain it. The narrative that they could not possibly have expected this is obviously complete bullshit. The narrative that they wanted to go softly because of prior criticism of aggressive tactics againste BLM protests is also complete bullshit. And this wasn’t solely a failure at the top. There were off-duty police with the riotous mob.
Man. I keep clouding the water. Yes things happen very fast. My position is that the powers that be surely did know what might happen, and did not provide the proper back up. But I also think parking a bunch of National Guard around the Capitol would have been a bad choice, and other measures could have been taken.
Well, maybe Lisa Murkowski will switch over.
I agree with all that you say, especially this. But I stil don’t understand what the overall strategy was, let’s assume orchestrated by Trump. Or not
Mob puts congress people on trial. How does this lead to Trump still being President? The only possible way would be that Trump declares a national emergency and calls in the military and then enforces it county-wide.
This was not a Trump led coup attempt to take over the Capitol by invasion. It was a Trump led attempt to delay Biden being finally and forever elected President, while Rudy and his idiot minions coud find yet another way to get a case to the Supreme Court. Trump wanted thousands of demonstrators outside the Capitol, pressuring Repubs to vote against Biden. The very last thing you would want is a mob invading and desocrating the Capitol
If there was anything that could be called a “plan” (and I doubt they had one) this was probably what they were intending.
The plan of the rioters - I think you’d have to understand their alternate reality to make any sense of it.
I think your description of Trump’s plan is right.
The reason I think it needs to be called a coup attempt is not because there was a coherent well though out plan to actually take over the government as an immediate consequence, it’s is specifically because of Trump exerting influence on law enforcement and elements in DoD etc., and their collusion, and the part that played in what happened.
Check this video out (cued to proper spot) and tell me again that white and black people (and conservatives and liberals) aren’t treated differently by the police. I have NO fucking idea why these officers didn’t just start mowing people down.
Dumbfucks are whining that Trump lied to them and betrayed them. 
He was only supposed to lie to and betray other people!
I’m friends with a guy who is involved with organizing media conventions, like various city-based comic-cons. He says it’s common, at any large event, to have some number of National Guard troops assigned to the location. They are placed on standby, out of view, like in the hotel basement or an unused convention hall, somewhere on site where they can respond quickly but won’t be seen until activated. The number of them varies depending on the scale of the event and the current alert level for national security, but they’re almost always there.
You don’t have to put the Guard in a ring around the Capitol. It would have been very easy to have them twiddling their thumbs in, say, the cafeteria. Any professional site-defense and crowd-control specialist would have known this.
The fact that it wasn’t done tells you that this was, almost certainly, actively coordinated by authorities loyal to Trump who were trying to set the stage for the invasion of the building.
Well, the ones who opened the barricades and waved them in- some fault lies there, unless they were ordered to do that.
Current speculation suggests this was a tactical retreat: “We are outnumbered in the open 500-to-1, so fall back to the building’s choke points and prioritize defending the people instead of the perimeter of the property.” We’ll see if this turns out to be the case.
Social media companies are… eventually… starting to wake up a little.
Yep, Twitter can be counted on to do the right thing once they’ve tried everything else and after the damage has been done.
Ded.
You reap what you sow, but this? Revoking Sean Hannity’s Lifetime Pasta Pass? Olive Garden, you go too far!
(This is satire, just fyi. It’s been a long week.)
Viscous attack? I’ll admit the attackers were slimy but they looked pretty mobile.
I once was holding up a fence to keep up a riotous crowd (it seemed of 1000’s strong) with -100 people at a large metal festival (Dynamo in Eindhoven) We were only just holding the line. At some point we got backup from a small squad of an “arrestatie eenheid” (ununiformed SWAT) they ordered us to let the fence drop. With drawn weapons 3 of them stood there as if they dared the crowd to step over the fallen fence. There were no takers.
When law enforcement is losing a shoving match they still have plenty of options.
I was watching the video above and I have questions: Why were the cops equipped with gas masks and why didn’t they use gas? That would send the whole crowd (literally) crying to their mommies.
Why was the crowd allowed to close to the officers decked out in riot gear? Usually if someon gets into reach of a cop in riot gear with a baton they will feel that baton. Why were those cops just standing there? Why was someone allowed to touch the front cops mask? Normally that person would get pulled over the line and get a seeing to they won’t forget in a hurry. Those cops looked like that was their first time in riot gear. Not using batons? Not using their shields in any effective way?
Who are these clowns?
My ideas of how cops in a crowd control role should look/act were formed at dozens of little riots at football (the kind where you use your feet) matches where I was to build/remove fencing to ease the task of the police. After the match we had nothing to do until we got the all clear so we watched a lot of little and larger confrontations between hooligans and police.
Before that I worked as a bouncer and there I also have seen plenty of police in action— the passive stance of the police in the video seems really strange to me. My observations would suggest that the whole point of training in formations for crowd control would be to avoid/end the kind of situation we are seeing.
Just giving up also really doesn’t jive with what you expect to see from police.
The idea that there was no orchestrating from higher law enforcement officials to let this coup succeed is ridiculous to me.
Oh, I’m absolutely confident that this was orchestrated. That includes “put up a very thin front line which will be easily overwhelmed.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that the front line itself was in on the plan. And I can accept that the cops on the front line choosing to fall back would have been a strategic choice in the moment. Of course, I can also accept that those cops did open the gate and allow the crowd inside. All I’m saying here is, there are multiple possible explanations, most of them well within the bounds of plausibility, and we should keep our minds open for the time being.
Can anyone summarize what is planned by the Magaheads on the 17th? MSNBC mentioned something about the potential for a larger “army” with “more weapons”.
As crazy as what we experienced this week, I still think that it was very close to being so much worse. With just a bit more planning, organization and coordination by the terrorists (the media stops needing to call them “domestic” terrorists), many of the nation’s leaders could have been tortured or killed. Yes, many people were traumatized or injured, and some sadly died, but we got lucky. Looking at the size of the insurrection and the (potentially related) lack of resources, and plotting out the range of outcomes, the result was on the less severe end.
And hopefully this leads to better preparation for whatever is planned on the 17th, and certainly for the Inauguration.