When you are the president of the United States, you don't get people who follow you to disband by telling them that you love them, that they are special, that their cause is just, but "to go home."
Blue ostriches on crack float on milkshakes between the sidewalk titans of gurglefitz. --YTown
100% Trump and every sycophant politician that before the violence enabled Trump to continue to stoke the flames of hate and division by lying about a stolen election that Trump lost in a landslide.
100% Trump and the media that cow-tows to him and spins the lies that he spews.
I was wondering last night if there is a chance Trump is truly, truly insane. I've always assumed and credited him with lying and spinning these hate messages and enabling the xenophobia while at the same time believing that he didn't believe what he was saying, he was just playing a part and manipulating the media and his base .... I'm honestly not sure any more.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
The short, accurate answer to your question is the obvious one. But let's say that somehow Trump is actually held accountable for his actions (remember... the people who would actually execute on this have absolutely no motivation to begin setting the expectation of accountability)... then what? Let's say he's paraded around Circi-style (SHAME!) and then thrown in prison. Then what? The divide that allowed him to rise to power is still there; and in that there is much more shared responsibility.
Ideally, though... what would happen when something shocking like this occurs is everyone.... every single person... takes a good long look inside to see what they could have done differently that would have helped prevent the whole thing (from the leadup to 2016) from happening.
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
For years, there has been a mantra that Republicans have recited to comfort themselves about President Trump — both about the things he says and the support they offer him. Trump, they’d say, should be taken seriously, not literally. The coinage comes from a 2016 article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito, in which she complained that the press took Trump “literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
For Republican elites, this was a helpful two-step. If Trump’s words were understood as layered in folksy exaggeration and schtick — designed to trigger media pedants, but perfectly legible to his salt-of-the-earth supporters — then much that would be too grotesque or false to embrace literally could be carefully endorsed at best and ignored as poor comedy at worst. And Republican elites could walk the line between eviscerating their reputations and enraging their party’s leader, all while blaming the media for caricaturing Trumpism by reporting Trump’s words accurately.
On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Vice President Mike Pence offered a classic of the genre. As Trump declared the election stolen, in terms as clear as a fist to the face, Pence tried to take him seriously, not literally; to signal solidarity with Trump’s fury while backing away from the actual claims. “I stand with President @RealDonaldTrump,” he tweeted. “We must count every LEGAL vote.”
But Trump did not want every legal vote counted. He wanted legally counted votes to be erased; he wanted new votes discovered in his favor. He wanted to win, not lose; whatever the cost, whatever the means. And every day since, he has turned up the pressure, leading to the bizarre theory that took hold of Trumpists in recent weeks that the vice president was empowered to accept or reject the results of the election on Jan. 6; that Pence could, single-handedly, right this wrong. And so, after years of loyal service, of daily debasements and constant humiliations, Trump came for Pence, too, declaring him just one more enemy of the people.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump raged, torching whatever rapport Pence had built with his base.
On Wednesday, at the Capitol, those who took Trump seriously and those who took Trump literally collided in spectacular fashion. Inside the building, a rump of Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, were leading a feckless challenge to the Electoral College results. They had no pathway to overturning the results and they knew it. They had no evidence that the results should be overturned and they knew it. And they did not act or speak like they truly believed the election had been stolen. They were there to take Trump’s concerns seriously, not literally, in the hopes that his supporters might become their supporters in 2024.
But at the same time, Trump was telling his supporters that the election had actually been stolen, and that it was up to them to resist. And they took him literally. They did not experience this as performative grievance; they experienced it as a profound assault. They stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, shattered doors and barriers, looted congressional offices. One woman was shot in the mayhem and died.
If their actions looked like lunacy to you, imagine it from their perspective, from within the epistemic structure in which they live. The president of the United States told them the election had been stolen by the Democratic Party, that they were being denied power and representation they had rightfully won. “I know your pain,” he said, in his video from the White house lawn later on Wednesday. “I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it.” More than a dozen Republican senators, more than 100 Republican House members, and countless conservative media figures had backed Trump’s claims.
If the self-styled revolutionaries were lawless, that was because their leaders told them that the law had already been broken, and in the most profound, irreversible way. If their response was extreme, so too was the crime. If landslide victories can fall to Democratic chicanery, then politics collapses into meaninglessness. How could the thieves be allowed to escape into the night, with full control of the federal government as their prize? A majority of Republicans now believe the election was stolen, and a plurality endorse insurrection as a response. A snap YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the storming of the Capitol; 43 percent opposed it.
Trump’s great virtue, as a public figure, is his literalism. His statements may be littered with lies, but he is honest about who he is and what he intends. When he lost the Iowa caucus to Cruz in 2016, he declared that “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” When it seemed likely he would lose the presidential election to Hillary Clinton, he began calling the election rigged. When he wanted the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden, he made the demand directly, on a taped call. When he was asked, during the presidential debates in 2020, if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of a loss, he refused. There was no subterfuge from Trump leading up to the terrible events of Jan. 6. He called this shot, over and over again, and then he took it.
The Republican Party that has aided and abetted Trump is all the more contemptible because it fills the press with quotes making certain that we know that it knows better. In a line that will come to define this sordid era (and sordid party), a senior Republican told The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” What happened on Wednesday in Washington is the downside. Millions of Americans will take you literally. They will not know you are “humoring” the most powerful man in the world. They will feel betrayed and desperate. Some of them will be armed.
The Trump era has often come wrapped in a cloak of self-protective irony. We have been asked to separate the man from his tweets, to believe that Trump doesn’t mean what he says, that he doesn’t intend to act on his beliefs, that he isn’t what he obviously is. Any divergence between word and reality has been enlisted into this cause. That Trump has failed to achieve much of what he promised because of his incompetence and distractibility has been recast as a sign of a more cautious core. The constraints placed upon him by other institutions or bureaucratic actors have been reframed as evidence that he never intended to follow through on his wilder pronouncements. This was a convenient fiction for the Republican Party, but it was a disastrous fantasy for the country. And now it has collapsed.
When the literalists rushed the chamber, Pence, Cruz and Hawley were among those who had to be evacuated, for their own safety. Some of their compatriots, like Senator Kelly Loeffler, rescinded their objections to the election, seemingly shaken by the beast they had unleashed. But there is no real refuge from the movement they fed. Trump’s legions are still out there, and now they are mourning a death and feeling yet more deceived by many of their supposed allies in Washington, who turned on them as soon as they did what they thought they had been asked to do.
The problem isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.
Oh stop. Trump and his lunatic base did this all. There was nothing we could have done to prevent this. Only trump could have prevented this. Stop directing this back on US! This is an act of treason and if it isn’t handled like treason it will happen again. We need to prosecute this to the full extent of the law. Everyone involved, trump and trump jr. including the senate cronies like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham and others who have enabled and elevated trump into this position of authoritarian leader.
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. – Jackie Robinson
The short, accurate answer to your question is the obvious one. But let's say that somehow Trump is actually held accountable for his actions (remember... the people who would actually execute on this have absolutely no motivation to begin setting the expectation of accountability)... then what? Let's say he's paraded around Circi-style (SHAME!) and then thrown in prison. Then what? The divide that allowed him to rise to power is still there; and in that there is much more shared responsibility.
Ideally, though... what would happen when something shocking like this occurs is everyone.... every single person... takes a good long look inside to see what they could have done differently that would have helped prevent the whole thing (from the leadup to 2016) from happening.
Yeah, I agree. Trump is acutely responsible for the situation that happened yesterday, but he's the tip of the iceberg. The visible part that you see, while 80% of the overarching problem lies beneath the surface.
Blue ostriches on crack float on milkshakes between the sidewalk titans of gurglefitz. --YTown
Oh stop. Trump and his lunatic base did this all. There was nothing we could have done to prevent this. Only trump could have prevented this. Stop directing this back on US! This is an act of treason and if it isn’t handled like treason it will happen again. We need to prosecute this to the full extent of the law. Everyone involved, trump and trump jr. including the senate cronies like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham and others who have enabled and elevated trump into this position of authoritarian leader.
I don't mean to speak for oober, because he is totally capable of speaking for himself, but I think you read his statement wrong. I think he agrees with the despicability and culpability of the parties you mention.
He is also talking about a clear divide though that is underlying the situation. Trump, Graham, Cruz, Hawley, etc. are all opportunists. They took advantage of the divide and the dynamic for their own self gain.
What he is saying is basically that, if you take the head off the snow man, the torso and the body are still there. Somebody else can still come by and put a different head on top.
The base is the problem. Hopefully, after the events yesterday, those who are part of the base, who are not beyond hope already, do some soul-searching about what the eff is behind what just happened.
Blue ostriches on crack float on milkshakes between the sidewalk titans of gurglefitz. --YTown
For years, there has been a mantra that Republicans have recited to comfort themselves about President Trump — both about the things he says and the support they offer him. Trump, they’d say, should be taken seriously, not literally. The coinage comes from a 2016 article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito, in which she complained that the press took Trump “literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
For Republican elites, this was a helpful two-step. If Trump’s words were understood as layered in folksy exaggeration and schtick — designed to trigger media pedants, but perfectly legible to his salt-of-the-earth supporters — then much that would be too grotesque or false to embrace literally could be carefully endorsed at best and ignored as poor comedy at worst. And Republican elites could walk the line between eviscerating their reputations and enraging their party’s leader, all while blaming the media for caricaturing Trumpism by reporting Trump’s words accurately.
On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Vice President Mike Pence offered a classic of the genre. As Trump declared the election stolen, in terms as clear as a fist to the face, Pence tried to take him seriously, not literally; to signal solidarity with Trump’s fury while backing away from the actual claims. “I stand with President @RealDonaldTrump,” he tweeted. “We must count every LEGAL vote.”
But Trump did not want every legal vote counted. He wanted legally counted votes to be erased; he wanted new votes discovered in his favor. He wanted to win, not lose; whatever the cost, whatever the means. And every day since, he has turned up the pressure, leading to the bizarre theory that took hold of Trumpists in recent weeks that the vice president was empowered to accept or reject the results of the election on Jan. 6; that Pence could, single-handedly, right this wrong. And so, after years of loyal service, of daily debasements and constant humiliations, Trump came for Pence, too, declaring him just one more enemy of the people.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump raged, torching whatever rapport Pence had built with his base.
On Wednesday, at the Capitol, those who took Trump seriously and those who took Trump literally collided in spectacular fashion. Inside the building, a rump of Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, were leading a feckless challenge to the Electoral College results. They had no pathway to overturning the results and they knew it. They had no evidence that the results should be overturned and they knew it. And they did not act or speak like they truly believed the election had been stolen. They were there to take Trump’s concerns seriously, not literally, in the hopes that his supporters might become their supporters in 2024.
But at the same time, Trump was telling his supporters that the election had actually been stolen, and that it was up to them to resist. And they took him literally. They did not experience this as performative grievance; they experienced it as a profound assault. They stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, shattered doors and barriers, looted congressional offices. One woman was shot in the mayhem and died.
If their actions looked like lunacy to you, imagine it from their perspective, from within the epistemic structure in which they live. The president of the United States told them the election had been stolen by the Democratic Party, that they were being denied power and representation they had rightfully won. “I know your pain,” he said, in his video from the White house lawn later on Wednesday. “I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it.” More than a dozen Republican senators, more than 100 Republican House members, and countless conservative media figures had backed Trump’s claims.
If the self-styled revolutionaries were lawless, that was because their leaders told them that the law had already been broken, and in the most profound, irreversible way. If their response was extreme, so too was the crime. If landslide victories can fall to Democratic chicanery, then politics collapses into meaninglessness. How could the thieves be allowed to escape into the night, with full control of the federal government as their prize? A majority of Republicans now believe the election was stolen, and a plurality endorse insurrection as a response. A snap YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the storming of the Capitol; 43 percent opposed it.
Trump’s great virtue, as a public figure, is his literalism. His statements may be littered with lies, but he is honest about who he is and what he intends. When he lost the Iowa caucus to Cruz in 2016, he declared that “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” When it seemed likely he would lose the presidential election to Hillary Clinton, he began calling the election rigged. When he wanted the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden, he made the demand directly, on a taped call. When he was asked, during the presidential debates in 2020, if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of a loss, he refused. There was no subterfuge from Trump leading up to the terrible events of Jan. 6. He called this shot, over and over again, and then he took it.
The Republican Party that has aided and abetted Trump is all the more contemptible because it fills the press with quotes making certain that we know that it knows better. In a line that will come to define this sordid era (and sordid party), a senior Republican told The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” What happened on Wednesday in Washington is the downside. Millions of Americans will take you literally. They will not know you are “humoring” the most powerful man in the world. They will feel betrayed and desperate. Some of them will be armed.
The Trump era has often come wrapped in a cloak of self-protective irony. We have been asked to separate the man from his tweets, to believe that Trump doesn’t mean what he says, that he doesn’t intend to act on his beliefs, that he isn’t what he obviously is. Any divergence between word and reality has been enlisted into this cause. That Trump has failed to achieve much of what he promised because of his incompetence and distractibility has been recast as a sign of a more cautious core. The constraints placed upon him by other institutions or bureaucratic actors have been reframed as evidence that he never intended to follow through on his wilder pronouncements. This was a convenient fiction for the Republican Party, but it was a disastrous fantasy for the country. And now it has collapsed.
When the literalists rushed the chamber, Pence, Cruz and Hawley were among those who had to be evacuated, for their own safety. Some of their compatriots, like Senator Kelly Loeffler, rescinded their objections to the election, seemingly shaken by the beast they had unleashed. But there is no real refuge from the movement they fed. Trump’s legions are still out there, and now they are mourning a death and feeling yet more deceived by many of their supposed allies in Washington, who turned on them as soon as they did what they thought they had been asked to do.
The problem isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.
Brilliant and true.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Her story is sad, but the moment she attempted to enter that hall she crossed a line the cop could not let her cross. It should be investigated at some point after the dust starts to settle, but IMHO she brought it on herself.
Your feelings and opinions do not add up to facts.
I’m curious as to how many of those in Congress that hid under their desks and scurried like rats when they thought armed hooligans had breached their confines took money from the NRA? I also wonder if they have a new perspective about telling school systems to have active shooter drills and what that might feel I like to the teachers and children?
I don't mean to speak for oober, because he is totally capable of speaking for himself, but I think you read his statement wrong. I think he agrees with the despicability and culpability of the parties you mention.
He is also talking about a clear divide though that is underlying the situation. Trump, Graham, Cruz, Hawley, etc. are all opportunists. They took advantage of the divide and the dynamic for their own self gain.
What he is saying is basically that, if you take the head off the snow man, the torso and the body are still there. Somebody else can still come by and put a different head on top.
The base is the problem. Hopefully, after the events yesterday, those who are part of the base, who are not beyond hope already, do some soul-searching about what the eff is behind what just happened
I was talking about this statement
Quote:
Ideally, though... what would happen when something shocking like this occurs is everyone.... every single person... takes a good long look inside to see what they could have done differently that would have helped prevent the whole thing (from the leadup to 2016) from happening.
I did not take his statement wrong and I know Obber can speak very well for himself. I respect his opinions.
This was my reply to his statement. Originally Posted By: PerfectSpiral Oh stop. Trump and his lunatic base did this all. There was nothing we could have done to prevent this. Only trump could have prevented this. Stop directing this back on US! This is an act of treason and if it isn’t handled like treason it will happen again. We need to prosecute this to the full extent of the law. Everyone involved, trump and trump jr. including the senate cronies like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham and others who have enabled and elevated trump into this position of authoritarian leader.
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. – Jackie Robinson
[color:#FFCC33]For this atrocious, sickening display in our Capitol Building, @realDonaldTrump should be tried for #sedition. As a former federal prosecutor, I refer our next US Attorney General to 18 USC 2384 & 2385. May God bless and bring peace to our nation. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/part1/chapter115&edition=prelim[/color
Former federal prosecutor. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo]
I blame the corporate pillagers who made a mockery of the democracy ages ago. Tie that with lousy governance during trying times and a fed up citizenry is bound to act out (and those on both "sides" have). Trump is the most disgusting/obvious symptom of the underlying disease, but blaming symptoms doesn't cure diseases.
You mess with the "Bull," you get the horns. Fiercely Independent.
I blame the corporate pillagers who made a mockery of the democracy ages ago. Tie that with lousy governance during trying times and a fed up citizenry is bound to act out (and those on both "sides" have). Trump is the most disgusting/obvious symptom of the underlying disease, but blaming symptoms doesn't cure diseases.
Excuse me but attempting a coup inside the pinnacle of democracy is not a symptom of the disease. It’s the cause of a disease. Be gone with that crap.
We all know that die hard trump supporters are going white wash this any way they can.
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. – Jackie Robinson
Were any of the protesters armed? This is the first I've heard.
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
All of the big theories behind the "rigged" election comes from people who believe satanic pedophiles who drink the blood of children are in control of the government. Every. single. "rigged". theory. is traced straight back to QAnon.
This nonsense is dangerous and deserves to be mocked to high heaven.
Were any of the protesters armed? This is the first I've heard.
Just heard on NPR that 25-50 law enforcement were treated - beaten with clubs ... one officer is going to lose and eye.
I don't want to imagine the death count by the police if BLM protesters had done that yesterday. Brings this atrocity to a whole new level of disgusting.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
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