I had a doctor’s appointment so I had a long day. My afternoon nap turned into an early evening snooze. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, as I’m big on naps in general.
Anyhow, we are locked, stocked, and ready rock now, so let’s get to it. First off before we get too deep in the big muddy, Kelly Loeffler conceded today, which means Raphael Warnock’s got her seat in the U.S. Senate. Along with Jon Ossoff’s victory over David Perdue, this gives an even 50-50 split in the Senate and, hypothetically this gives the Democrats control of the Senate for at least the next two years.
Of course, nothing in American politics is simple and there are plenty of conservative Democrats who can still throw monkey wrenches into the work. West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, for example, is pretty right-wing and is suddenly thrust into a position of being somewhat important. That being said, it’s still not certain. Biden announced a package to deal with COVID-19 today, which included $2,000 stimulus checks, which Manchin objected to.
Of course, his objection lasted just long enough to cause a drop in the Stock Market plus some heavy push back from his constituents. This led the Distinguished Gentleman from Farmington to walk back his objection in short order. That’s politics, baby, and I imagine there’s enough bipartisan support – and desperation among the citizenry – for the two grand to come across. Time, as always, will tell, though.
Okay for that. The rest of the day – that past 48 hours, actually – has been dealing with the fallout from MAGA Spring Break Wednesday when a bunch of Trump-loving chowderheads stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to push water uphill. Vice-President Mike Pence and both houses of Congress were going through the purely performative action of tallying the registered electoral votes from the November election.
I can’t emphasize enough that things were a done deal by this point and barely very specific circumstances, neither Pence nor the Republican Congressmen could do diddley to change things. This didn’t sink into the mess of Trump loyalists protesting at the Capitol – which, at the time, was perfectly within their rights as U.S. citizens – so the goobers decided to storm the building. They overwhelmed the police, halted the vote, engaged in some property destruction, and caused the congress folks to batten down the hatches for their safety. Considering some pipe bombs were found and these yutzes had done plenty of big talking on social media, that probably wasn’t a bad idea.
The whole affair lasted six hours, after which the Congress went through the motions and Biden’s the next President anyway. A few folks still tried to pretend there was something to the various monkeyshines Trump has been spreading about getting his ass beat, sure, but there wasn’t much life in it. Eighty-plus people got arrested, and more arrests are happening across the country because these dipsticks live-streamed the whole thing and didn’t think to wear masks.
Yesterday evening, Trump gave a rather perfunctory speech, not exactly admitting he’s done for, but promising an orderly transition to the next administration. This came after a previous speech where he didn’t exactly tell the rioters to cut it out but did say he “loved” them. Today has been one of heavy repercussions and since I don’t think I can lash them together into a coherent narrative, we’ll just address them as they come to me. WordPress doesn’t seem to allow bullet points or I’d use those, because who doesn’t love bullet points?
Except for the nuttiest, the GOP seems to have dropped Trump like a bad habit. He’s been criticized by a mess of him and some more centrist types, like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, have signed on to the possibility Democrats are floating concerning impeachment. Oh, yeah, the Democrats say they’re more than likely going to impeach him next week, which would make him the only president in history to be impeached twice. It’s purely ceremonial by this point since he has just under two weeks left in his term, but there’s no reason not to twist the knife.
His cabinet and various lackeys have been jumping ship like the proverbial rats they are. It’s gone as high as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, and all contact with VP Pence has been cut off. Secretary of the Treasury Stephen Mnuchin has floated the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment as Trump’s no longer fit to hold the office.
Most of the Congress critters who were all for overturning the election took a quick look at how unpopular Wednesday’s shenanigans were with the non-Trumpist majority and are trying like hell to distance themselves from the whole affair. North Carolina’s baby-faced Nazi Madison Crawford went from “it’s time to fight” to “it’s time to heal” in less than 24 hours. Most of them are still catching the shit they deserve, but the most opprobrium is being launched at Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both of whom put themselves as leaders as the rebellion going into the vote. Hawley’s lost a book contract with Simon & Schuster, had both major dailies in Missouri call for his resignation, and had his main campaign contributor regret his decision to back the pencil-necked geek.
One thing that really turned the country off was the riot caused five deaths, four insurgents, and a police officer. The cop has his head stove in by people trying to get in the Capitol while a revolutionary was shot by Capitol police as she tried to crawl in a window. The rest were health-related exacerbated by the stress. One doofus had a heart attack after he accidentally tased himself in the nuts. No, I’m not laughing.
One of the more puzzling aspects of the whole affair was the incompetence of the various law enforcement groups in the area. Despite a couple of months’ worth of bragging on social media and the rioters having merch ready, the fuzz said they were unprepared. Even worse, Trump took an active measure in slowing down response from the National Guard, which took over an hour to get to the scene. This follows on the heels of a gutting of civilian leadership at the Pentagon which Trump loyalists put in their positions, all of whom have been silent the last 48 hours. This has led to the Democrats wondering out loud if the whole shebang was planned within the White House, riot and all.
As I said, arrests are going down and they’re opening up several cans of worms. Some red-state attorney generals have been caught out financing the insurgence through dark money. There’s also evidence of Trump and Giuliani getting in contact with besieged Congress folks to encourage them to continue objecting to the big nothings he claimed proved he was totally the winner. The different fascist dingbats who claim to lead such things are calling for a return on January 20, for the inauguration because they’ve failed to realize the rest of the country is tired of their shit. How they’re going to organize it is a question, as right-wing echo chamber Parler is under threat from various app store services unless they clean up the fruit juice and Twitter is cracking down on folks calling for revolution.
Ah, Twitter. That may be the best of all. After giving him a 12-hour time out, the service permanently banned Trump’s Twitter account, as well as the account connected to his campaign. That’s got to be chaffing him something fierce. A number of other wingnut nobodies closed their accounts in solidarity for a guy who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Trump has said he regrets making the transition video nor will he resign, and people are actively worried about his next move. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has taken steps to make sure he can’t get to the nuclear codes, for example, and she’s being taken seriously.
Next week is going to be wild, y’all.
Dear Y'all 