I could imagine accepting a position that impeachment is inappropriate, so long as there was SOME OTHER significant repercussion for Trump and his followers, and some significant steps to prevent this from recurring.
Instead, for the R Senators to just stick their heads in the sand and vote on their personal interest in re-election, is horribly reprehensible. Impressive how fucked their values must be.
As much as I’m sure that the Republicans would like to put this all behind them after Sunday, I don’t think that this will be the last word. I think there will (and definately should) be a larger/longer investigation into what went down that day why the Capitol police were son unprepared and why it took so long to get reinforcements. I realize that IOKIYAR still holds but the issues here are pretty much identical to the charges against Clinton that spawned ten separate Bengazi investigations, except rather than being a surprise attack on an isolated installation in a foreign country, it was an attack that was laid out on social media weeks before right at the heart of our government.
If the shoe were on the other foot, this would be somewhere around 100-0 to convict. There is no both sides. Republicans spent years telling us that moderate Muslims had no right to complain when they don’t speak out against radicalization in their midst. I’m sure that irony is lost on them.
Hence the wish that he still had it.
I’m hoping for campaign ads juxtaposing the violence in the Capitol with Congress Critter X doodling at his/her desk. Voiceover: “Congress Critter X doesn’t care about democracy. Is s/he just stupid, or deeply evil?”
And for the 270-ish congresscritters whose districts are largely composed of people who thought/think the only bad thing that happened on Jan 6 was that the mob failed to stop the steal? How will they react to that ad?
Theoretically, any bullshit can be argued. Credibly, not.
At the time of the post that was in response to, they had yet to decide to let him return or not.
For Republicans now, hypocrisy is actually more of a policy plank.
While the riots were happening, Trump tweeted out: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
I’m quite confident that Trump’s goal that day was to see Pence, Pelosi and others (who? he did not care) murdered. That was his plan - and then he could have declared martial law and ordered the military to lock the country down. My Pillow guy’s plan.
I don’t think that the hypocrisy of the Republican senators will have any sort of effect on future elections. If my (recently deceased) father-in-law is any indication, he considers ALL politicians to be corrupt. He had respect for my honesty, but said that if I were elected to Congress, I would become corrupt as well. He believed that there was no escaping it. Therefore, he always voted Republican because he believed he might as well vote for the people who were corrupt and supported his policies, rather than the people who were corrupt but supported policies he didn’t like.
He died two weeks ago and I really miss our nightly political arguments. We never agreed or persuaded each other, but we enjoyed the talk. I catch myself watching these proceedings and thinking “I’ve got to hear what Ralph thinks about that!”
New Lincoln Project ad pulls no punches.New
Uh, no. It was posted yesterday, weeks after Trump’s permanent ban. It expressed a wish that Trump was still on Twitter, objecting to his own lawyer. This only makes sense after the ban.
I have a half-brother who essentially believes as your FIL did. In his case, and I suspect in your FIL’s (no offense intended), I suspect that’s their cop-out, their way of excusing their attitudes. They know that they’re voting for a party that supports white Christian nationalism but they’ve got a mental block – I think intentional – that automatically categorizes democrats as “not us,” and that’s what counts.
My half brother’s not a bad guy and neither is your FIL, but that doesn’t change the fact that their worldview is shit.
Point is, they issued a statement this morning that they won’t let him back on even if he decides to run again.
I approve.
That’s pretty much it exactly. The intentional blindness to reality was very frustrating for me. His constant watching of FoxNews was also a problem for him – even his like-minded friends and relatives recognized that his watching so much FoxNews was not good for him. (He lived with us for the last three years of his life. The FoxNews logo is burned into the plasma TV screen in his room.)
This is an important point that I don’t think people on the left understand. There is a large chunk of Trump’s supporters who will never believe he lost. So they support the Senators and Representatives who are not going to convict him - they would actually suffer more if they stood up to be counted.
In trending purple states, it might matter for a Senator (if Hawley were closer to an election cycle it could just possibly affect him (but I doubt it)), but those folks know who their voters are.