Perhaps you could elaborate. Are you unaware of the technology that is available from Walmart? I said it is military grade, not that it exceeds the technologies of our military.
Also, it is always a mistake to underestimate the enemy.
The DoD can handily defeat any band of rabble of any size armed with whatever they can beg, borrow, buy, or steal. And as many such bands as one plausibly can imagine.
However the political implications of a single pitched battle, much less dozens of them around the country are sobering to say the least.
And, as has been so often demonstrated in the Iraq / Afghanistan theater, a DoD small unit can reliably defeat a much larger insurgent unit. But that doesn’t mean the individual US soldiers all come out unscathed. Your company will survive, your squad will mostly survive; you may not. It sucks being out at the pointy end of the spear.
Responding to “clam down” works? Really? What is your evidence of that? My personal experience, both as a law enforcement officer and in life in general, is that almost no one in a highly charged state calms down told to do so.
Trump is kicking “Puppy Dog” Pence? Outstanding!
ETA: How many times is Pence going to deny his Savior?
Huh, strange, I’m not turned on.
Before it gets to the point where Republicans actually get votes reversed, the seeds have to be planted first. These things don’t just happen. People who respect the rule of law and democratic norms don’t just wake up and change their minds out of the blue; they chip away at the structural integrity of it, bit by bit, but always going in one direction.
The Weimar Constitution didn’t just end; it was damaged with a relentless stream of lies and toxic nationalism and xenophobia. Once the Nazis actually began winning elections in the late 1920s, they began employing a strategy of misinformation and political obstructionism, which is not entirely unlike what we’re seeing now.
Once you have a Reichstag fire moment it is too late to panic then – the time to panic is very often the time when everyone else is telling you not to panic because the system still works.
In fact, the Wiemar constitution was never abandoned. It was technically the law until 1945.
I am not trying to pile on to the USA, but I think this is an important point; the biggest flaw in American political thinking is the persistent notion that the Constitution is some hard barrier to tyranny. It absolutely is not. It’s words on paper and nothing more, and there is nothing brilliant or special about the American constitution versus those of Germany or Norway or whomever. The only barrier to tyranny is a social contract, a common agreement that democracy and freedom and the rule of law have to be upheld. That’s why the UK, which doesn’t even really have a written constitution, is a free country, while any number of countries go through written constitutions - many of them quite well written - the way Larry King goes through wives.
Deeg - the “inane blathering” you talk about is not just some harmless rhetoric. It emboldens those who buy into the baseless claims and CTs being pushed by Trump and his ass-kissers. Whether or not these Republicans actually believe what they are saying or not, is immaterial. They are stoking the fires with their words and know that there is little downside for them, personally. Quite the opposite. Like Trump, they are in it for themselves, first and foremost. Which seems to be the most common trait of today’s Pubs.
This is an excellent point to make. You’re 100% correct: the Weimar constitution never actually ended; the Nazis were granted emergency powers, like those contained in the most extreme language and interpretations of the USA Patriot Act, and that was that. Germany was then essentially in a constant state of war and national emergency.
I am similarly skeptical that Trump and his current close associates are capable of grasping any actual long-term power, though I would never rule that out. But what seems more likely is that, down the road, there is a deepening sense of national despair, which leads to all sorts of “nutjobbery” and “fruitcakery” if I may use those terms. The government is viewed by enough people as ineffectual. Government doesn’t work for the people, so people stop investing their hopes in it and instead just work and try to find income. In this kind of economy, there are increasingly either winners and losers. From this, there are competing polemic groups. Some might incorporate religious extremism as its base; others might attempt to develop a radical brand of academic extremism. Remember that Nazism used scientific racism and tried to characterize itself as a scientific and academic model that was largely futuristic.
What made it possible for seemingly rational people to buy into these wacky ideas? Political and economic chaos, and the idea that something was stolen from them and that their place in society had been disrupted unjustly. The political faction that grew not only merely capitalized on these emotions, but they amplified them through an endless stream of completely baseless charges and lies. They created an alternative reality for those with grievances in which to live. That is what I am beginning to see right here, right now, and anyone with knowledge of the history of extremist regimes should recognize just how dangerous this is.
Maybe we’ll see that 25th Amendment invoked against Trump after all.
Jeebus, he really is having his Downfall moment. Everybody’s been asked to leave the room for the final screaming session except for Sidney Powell, Sean Hannity and a dye-streaked Rudy.
There’s a parallel here with people like Caligula, who lashed out at his underlings, calling them by insulting nicknames and suggesting they weren’t masculine enough. He was harsh to the Sensate, which won him no friends, and engendered assassination plots, one of which finally got him.
We don’t have a Praetorian guard to kill wayward emperors (thirteen emperors were killed by their own guard), but we wouldn’t want them to – the Guard didn’t restore the Republic, and instead put up new emperors. And the Secret Service isn’t the Praetorians. Some people are still calling for impeachment, which would certainly mess with Trump’s mind and maybe his ability to do mischief, but I think most people think it’s too close to the nominal end of his presidency to make a difference.8
Trump has been in office for three years and eleven months. Caligula ruled for three years and ten months.
Rudy, in the way of all these assholes, concedes that Biden will be President:
The GOP has sold almost half the country (probably not all their voters but a good portion of them) on the idea that all Democrats are crazy “socialist” nutbags who kill newborns for sport. Therefore, overturning an election that a Democrat won is not an act of tyranny but something you must do to save the country. That’s at least part of why they don’t see it as violating the constitution.
Classic projection.
“This is what we were going to do, so it is what you are going to do.”
You’re probably right for the vast majority. Most aren’t going to do anything. But, if even a handful do something (and it’s hard to imagine that they won’t) it’s going to be ugly. These people genuinely believe that the election was stolen, and genuinely believe that Trump will be inaugurated in a month. When that comes crashing down, something is going to break in some of these people.
Exactly. It doesn’t take a lot of people to do a lot of damage.
It’s the erosion of the very idea of objective truth that I find disturbing.
I have some old friends that are conspiracy theorists. They aren’t right-wingers, they’re more yoga hippie nut jobs. But they started listening to Alex Jones a long time ago, when it was mostly 9/11 truther stuff, before the grand alliance of conservatism and conspiracy theories. Then they got dragged along into the depths.
I posted about this in the Pit, but I wanted to mention it here. This couple had decided that the wife is channeling some sort of divine spirit. They made a You Tube video about it. I’m not going to link it but I’ll send it privately upon request. They are vague about who this spirit is, but basically this woman decided that her spiritual insights were so freaking awesome that they couldn’t be coming from her human self, and once she figured that out the spirit revealed itself and started speaking through her…or something.
It’s silliness, and I couldn’t figure out why this got in my head and kept pissing me off.
Then I figured out why. It’s because I’m watching a video that clearly and objectively contains only two people, that they are blithely insistent throughout that there are three people present, with constant references to “all three of us here” and stuff like that. And apparently some people believe them. It’s freaking maddening, sorry for going OT.
I wish. I don’t know if there’s anyone still there who would be willing and able to do it even if trump were literally setting the White House ablaze with real actual fire.