By the way, I was a former registered Republican (loved Governor Kean, not Christie).
The Republican media (from Rush to Hannity) have spent decades cultivating an insult comedy style (think of Feminazis per Rush). They also crafted a very simplistic us/them narrative of flag waiving real Americans vs soft, latte drinking, community organizing liberals who have ruined America. The MSM crafts no such narrative to oppose the right.
Trump may have been the ideal person to weaponize the GOP culture but GOP voters had already been groomed. And at campaigns (remember McCain trying to defend Obama) the GOP base was already ready to believe the worst about Obama (or whoever ran).
For example, HRC was perhaps as qualified a candidate as ever in our history, but she was demonized through the Benghazi hearings, which had little to do with fact finding but a lot to do with creating a future campaign narrative.
So the environment of self serving GOP lies was ready and Trump simply was the right man to use the system to his advantage. Sadly, the template is now ready to go, and the GOP base eats up the appeals to violence.
Just as conservatives in Germany thought they could control Hitler, so the GOP thought it could use Trump. But now we see the Trump-ism is the GOP.
At this point, Garland has to demonstrate the same convictions that these state officials have shown. This isn't a "BENGAZI" show trial at all. It is exhaustive attention to the details of a sociopath plotting a coup. Garland needs to prosecute Trump, Giuliani and Eastman at the least. The members of congress who aided and abetted the effort should be expelled from their positions.
The classic line was that this was a coup in search of a legal theory, but I thought that the quote from Giuliani said it best:
“My recollection, he ( Giuliani) said, ‘We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence,’” Bowers said.
'All of this harassment, her (Shaye Moss) life upended, simply because she was caught doing her job by one "important" man who needed a scapegoat to soothe his wounded ego. '
That is a perfect summation of how petty and vile our 45th president is.
Obviously, these hearings expose a lot of criminality, treachery, despicable behavior, unpatriotic behavior, immoral and amoral behavior, and there is a portion of America that is evidently willing to go to great lengths to defend the man at the center of it. But it's crystal clear already that there must be accountability. This cannot be tolerated. Trump needs to pay. Eastman needs to pay. Giuliani needs to pay. I don't think they serve morning scotch where he belongs.
Do what needs to be done, and let the chips fall where they may. We can't surrender to the authoritarians, the Trump cult, the 2A cult that intimidates on Trump's behalf, without a fight.
Re: Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss It wasn't just the reaction of Trump's devotees that was racist, the whole gambit was racist from the start, when Giuliani described suitccases full of ballots being delivered in the dead of night "like packages of heroin or cocaine." He might as well have thrown in something about welfare and food stamps... .
Whoever came up with the bright idea that the good guys need to act restrained in the face of unrestrained bad guys needs to reexamine their priorities.
While I admire Speaker Bowers for standing up the pressure campaign from Trump and his minions, the fact that he says he'd vote for Trump again in 2024 takes some of the shine off his halo.
After being a first-hand witness to Trump's coup attempt, being subjected to death threats by Trump's mob including against Bowers' own dying daughter, after watching Trump eagerly wait to see if the 1/6 insurrectionists would succeed in killing his own VP, Bowers STILL thinks voting for Trump would be a better option than voting for Biden.
I'm gobsmacked. The on-going campaign of destruction of our democratic republic won't succeed only because of armed, violent mobs. It will take place because even otherwise decent people can't see past their worst tribal instincts.
AZ resident here. Already the head of the AZ GOP is screeching she going troll hunting for Rusty Bowels. I'd like to see all these wingnuts drop kicked through the goal posts of hell, starting with TFFOG( that fat, fucking orange guy). All those lawyers with their fancy law degrees who participated in trying to overturn the will of the voters should be immediately disbarred from their respective states to practice law. This is so much worse than Watergate and I've already lived through that.
Here is my concern: in 2020, Trump’s team consisted of a group of drunk morons. What happens when we have a smart, energetic, authoritarian who has good political sense and smart minds trying to do what Trump did in 2020? Our fate will be much more precarious.
I'd love a graphic with a list of these Republicans that recount their resistance but then end with the answer "Yes, I'd vote for him if he were the GOP candidate..". Barr comes to mind first but I want to see each and every Republican recount all this then conclude with ...yep...still vote for him. Until the answer to that question shifts hope for a change is still elusive.
Shaye Moss, a person with a job to do, has accomplished what Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and countless other GOP “leaders” who are cloaked in power have not been able to do:
1) she did her job
2) she stood up to the festering stain on the USA
And Ron Johnson, will this be the moment where we finally wake up to the fact that he’s a blithering idiot and actually do something about it? Probably not. Come on Wisconsin, is this dopey ass lying turd the best we have?
Trump is ONE of the people who did this. A big part of it yes, but not the only one. It wouldn't have happened without his allies and co-conspirators throughout Magaland who helped develop and spread the lies, the hate, the intimidation and the threats. They ALL need to be called out and held accountable.
Yet today I read that Bowers would vote for Donald Trump again if he was the candidate in 2024. How can I have any sympathy for him? He is willing to put the country through another 4 years of a man who he knows was willing to break the law to stay in power, disrupting 200+ years of orderly transitions of power.
Firstly: GREAT newsletter! Wonderful that everyone weighed in. They each spoke for all of us, I suspect! (with one tiny but niggling exception...)
When I was a child, society began shifting from using the term "colored" to using the term Black, as in Black is Beautiful. One day my brother referred to someone as "Colored" and my father corrected him, and said it's better to say "Black". My brother asked why he couldn't say "Colored" anymore. My father replied, "Because they don't like it. We don't need any more reason than that. It's how we demonstrate our respect for them."
True enough. My name is DeeDee... I had a gym teacher who called me "Dandruff" because she thought it was hilarious. I began feigning my period to get out of PE because, who wants to be insulted all the time? Once might have been funny... repetition was deliberately insulting and cruel.
Using the word "woke" is now like the "N" word. It's offensive. Stop using it. English is rich with words that you can use instead. Try finding an inoffensive synonym for "woke"... I challenge you to... I suspect all the synonyms you find will be clearly insulting and perhaps you'll understand why It's a word best dropped. It's a word used only by Bullies on the Right. If that's who you are, keep using it.
Depends on the purpose of The Bulwark though. If you want to unite the nation behind your views, you can do that by being inclusive. If you just want to get rid of trump, and still "own the libs", then carry on with effing "woke", and I will feel sorry that you couldn't find any real words to use.
@BillKristol: the Never Trumpers meant what they said. The rest of Conservative Intelligentsia (TM) were just cashing a paycheck that happened to jive with their prejudices.
Seems the simplest answer to me. Occam wouldn't even get out of bed.
The elephant in the room: if you or I, aka Everyday People, did anything near this involved against our government, what would our fate be? What consequences would we be forced to accept? Who would make excuses for our bad behavior and enable us? The answers write themselves. We are held to a higher standard, because it is the right thing to do. Or conversely, we have lowered the bar for what constitutes acceptable public service at taxpayer expense and performance metrics of those who work for them. Either way we are being willfully betrayed by too many elected officials who feel that they are above the justice that would be meted out to their employers and are unrestrained by the moral foundations that serve as its glue.
These hearings and their supporting documentation will be fantastic evidence for history. But unless there is accountability now, they will serve no purpose other than to tell future generations what we did wrong and hope that they learn the right lessons from the experience. A lack of accountability inevitably will serve as a green light for a next time that might well be populated by perpetrators who are smarter and better organized than the collective doofuses who put together this scam on the fly.
The Department of Justice needs to treat this like a hungry pit bull that has spotted a big, meaty bone. Screw the political considerations. Do what's right. Send a message to those future observers that in our hour of crisis, we stood up for what our Founding Fathers believed in and what our own forefathers fought and died for. Anything short of that dishonors their memory and betrays the responsibilities that they entrusted to us to safeguard. We owe it to them. Now is the time to pay it back.
Can we take this out of being just about Trump?
By the way, I was a former registered Republican (loved Governor Kean, not Christie).
The Republican media (from Rush to Hannity) have spent decades cultivating an insult comedy style (think of Feminazis per Rush). They also crafted a very simplistic us/them narrative of flag waiving real Americans vs soft, latte drinking, community organizing liberals who have ruined America. The MSM crafts no such narrative to oppose the right.
Trump may have been the ideal person to weaponize the GOP culture but GOP voters had already been groomed. And at campaigns (remember McCain trying to defend Obama) the GOP base was already ready to believe the worst about Obama (or whoever ran).
For example, HRC was perhaps as qualified a candidate as ever in our history, but she was demonized through the Benghazi hearings, which had little to do with fact finding but a lot to do with creating a future campaign narrative.
So the environment of self serving GOP lies was ready and Trump simply was the right man to use the system to his advantage. Sadly, the template is now ready to go, and the GOP base eats up the appeals to violence.
Just as conservatives in Germany thought they could control Hitler, so the GOP thought it could use Trump. But now we see the Trump-ism is the GOP.
And almost everyone who matters is going along.
At this point, Garland has to demonstrate the same convictions that these state officials have shown. This isn't a "BENGAZI" show trial at all. It is exhaustive attention to the details of a sociopath plotting a coup. Garland needs to prosecute Trump, Giuliani and Eastman at the least. The members of congress who aided and abetted the effort should be expelled from their positions.
The classic line was that this was a coup in search of a legal theory, but I thought that the quote from Giuliani said it best:
“My recollection, he ( Giuliani) said, ‘We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence,’” Bowers said.
I'm waiting for the perp walk.
From Tim Miller's blurb:
'All of this harassment, her (Shaye Moss) life upended, simply because she was caught doing her job by one "important" man who needed a scapegoat to soothe his wounded ego. '
That is a perfect summation of how petty and vile our 45th president is.
Obviously, these hearings expose a lot of criminality, treachery, despicable behavior, unpatriotic behavior, immoral and amoral behavior, and there is a portion of America that is evidently willing to go to great lengths to defend the man at the center of it. But it's crystal clear already that there must be accountability. This cannot be tolerated. Trump needs to pay. Eastman needs to pay. Giuliani needs to pay. I don't think they serve morning scotch where he belongs.
Do what needs to be done, and let the chips fall where they may. We can't surrender to the authoritarians, the Trump cult, the 2A cult that intimidates on Trump's behalf, without a fight.
Pulitzer Prize to the journalist who busted Ron Johnson for faking an important call, complete with gestures for emphasis.
"I'm on a call..."
"No you're not--your phone's not on."
Re: Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss It wasn't just the reaction of Trump's devotees that was racist, the whole gambit was racist from the start, when Giuliani described suitccases full of ballots being delivered in the dead of night "like packages of heroin or cocaine." He might as well have thrown in something about welfare and food stamps... .
Whoever came up with the bright idea that the good guys need to act restrained in the face of unrestrained bad guys needs to reexamine their priorities.
While I admire Speaker Bowers for standing up the pressure campaign from Trump and his minions, the fact that he says he'd vote for Trump again in 2024 takes some of the shine off his halo.
After being a first-hand witness to Trump's coup attempt, being subjected to death threats by Trump's mob including against Bowers' own dying daughter, after watching Trump eagerly wait to see if the 1/6 insurrectionists would succeed in killing his own VP, Bowers STILL thinks voting for Trump would be a better option than voting for Biden.
I'm gobsmacked. The on-going campaign of destruction of our democratic republic won't succeed only because of armed, violent mobs. It will take place because even otherwise decent people can't see past their worst tribal instincts.
AZ resident here. Already the head of the AZ GOP is screeching she going troll hunting for Rusty Bowels. I'd like to see all these wingnuts drop kicked through the goal posts of hell, starting with TFFOG( that fat, fucking orange guy). All those lawyers with their fancy law degrees who participated in trying to overturn the will of the voters should be immediately disbarred from their respective states to practice law. This is so much worse than Watergate and I've already lived through that.
Here is my concern: in 2020, Trump’s team consisted of a group of drunk morons. What happens when we have a smart, energetic, authoritarian who has good political sense and smart minds trying to do what Trump did in 2020? Our fate will be much more precarious.
I'd love a graphic with a list of these Republicans that recount their resistance but then end with the answer "Yes, I'd vote for him if he were the GOP candidate..". Barr comes to mind first but I want to see each and every Republican recount all this then conclude with ...yep...still vote for him. Until the answer to that question shifts hope for a change is still elusive.
Shaye Moss, a person with a job to do, has accomplished what Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and countless other GOP “leaders” who are cloaked in power have not been able to do:
1) she did her job
2) she stood up to the festering stain on the USA
And Ron Johnson, will this be the moment where we finally wake up to the fact that he’s a blithering idiot and actually do something about it? Probably not. Come on Wisconsin, is this dopey ass lying turd the best we have?
Trump is ONE of the people who did this. A big part of it yes, but not the only one. It wouldn't have happened without his allies and co-conspirators throughout Magaland who helped develop and spread the lies, the hate, the intimidation and the threats. They ALL need to be called out and held accountable.
Yet today I read that Bowers would vote for Donald Trump again if he was the candidate in 2024. How can I have any sympathy for him? He is willing to put the country through another 4 years of a man who he knows was willing to break the law to stay in power, disrupting 200+ years of orderly transitions of power.
Firstly: GREAT newsletter! Wonderful that everyone weighed in. They each spoke for all of us, I suspect! (with one tiny but niggling exception...)
When I was a child, society began shifting from using the term "colored" to using the term Black, as in Black is Beautiful. One day my brother referred to someone as "Colored" and my father corrected him, and said it's better to say "Black". My brother asked why he couldn't say "Colored" anymore. My father replied, "Because they don't like it. We don't need any more reason than that. It's how we demonstrate our respect for them."
True enough. My name is DeeDee... I had a gym teacher who called me "Dandruff" because she thought it was hilarious. I began feigning my period to get out of PE because, who wants to be insulted all the time? Once might have been funny... repetition was deliberately insulting and cruel.
Using the word "woke" is now like the "N" word. It's offensive. Stop using it. English is rich with words that you can use instead. Try finding an inoffensive synonym for "woke"... I challenge you to... I suspect all the synonyms you find will be clearly insulting and perhaps you'll understand why It's a word best dropped. It's a word used only by Bullies on the Right. If that's who you are, keep using it.
Depends on the purpose of The Bulwark though. If you want to unite the nation behind your views, you can do that by being inclusive. If you just want to get rid of trump, and still "own the libs", then carry on with effing "woke", and I will feel sorry that you couldn't find any real words to use.
@BillKristol: the Never Trumpers meant what they said. The rest of Conservative Intelligentsia (TM) were just cashing a paycheck that happened to jive with their prejudices.
Seems the simplest answer to me. Occam wouldn't even get out of bed.
The elephant in the room: if you or I, aka Everyday People, did anything near this involved against our government, what would our fate be? What consequences would we be forced to accept? Who would make excuses for our bad behavior and enable us? The answers write themselves. We are held to a higher standard, because it is the right thing to do. Or conversely, we have lowered the bar for what constitutes acceptable public service at taxpayer expense and performance metrics of those who work for them. Either way we are being willfully betrayed by too many elected officials who feel that they are above the justice that would be meted out to their employers and are unrestrained by the moral foundations that serve as its glue.
These hearings and their supporting documentation will be fantastic evidence for history. But unless there is accountability now, they will serve no purpose other than to tell future generations what we did wrong and hope that they learn the right lessons from the experience. A lack of accountability inevitably will serve as a green light for a next time that might well be populated by perpetrators who are smarter and better organized than the collective doofuses who put together this scam on the fly.
The Department of Justice needs to treat this like a hungry pit bull that has spotted a big, meaty bone. Screw the political considerations. Do what's right. Send a message to those future observers that in our hour of crisis, we stood up for what our Founding Fathers believed in and what our own forefathers fought and died for. Anything short of that dishonors their memory and betrays the responsibilities that they entrusted to us to safeguard. We owe it to them. Now is the time to pay it back.