This is what I get for going off to bed with a song in my heart, voicing the happy thought that there was, after all, a limit to the cruelty of the Cosmos.
Yeah, not so much. Can you even believe this? Can you process what you’re seeing? I haven’t felt this way since 9/11. Fucking Donald finally got his white morons’ insurrection. The one he called for, openly and repeatedly. The one that should have been anticipated. The one that should have been met with the same pre-positioned shock troops that Donald himself deployed to crush the peaceful protesters who stood between him and his farcical photo op at St John’s Church.
What must people of colour be thinking right now? Maybe something like this sure as shit is a white man’s world? Just look at what these pasty Caucasian bastards are getting away with here! And it was just yesterday that the Kenosha DA declined to press charges against the cops who shot an unarmed Jacob Blake in the back seven times. If you’re black, this is what you get if you so much as raise your voice:
These mangy MAGA mock militiamen, meanwhile, are milling around unmolested in the Senate Chamber:
I’m sure they’ll be met with force before too long, if they don’t clear out, but still. On top of everything else, the optics of the apparent leeway being granted to Trump’s traitorous legions are just godawful. The Confederate flags that a lot of them are waving around don’t help.
It’s come to this: I was just on the phone with my dear friend Leonard, as we tried to figure out the legal, constitutional alternatives under the circumstances. DC isn’t a State – so whose National Guard gets called in, and who calls them? Congress? But Congress can’t sit – do they have to meet at the Capitol? Or could they legally reconvene at another venue, say down the street in a ballroom at the Trump Hotel? Could they invoke the Insurrection Act from there? You try to play catch up, you know? Somebody in some office in Washington has a binder for this contingency, right? Something that says In Case of Riot, Insurrection, and Breakdown of Civil Society on the spine?
Bigger question: what do you do with a President who himself calls for insurrection? He still has almost two weeks in power – can he be impeached on such short notice? Is it time to finally test the Justice Department memo that holds that a President can’t be charged while still in office?
Dumber question: how did it come to this? That’s a stupid thing to ask at this point, eh? Yet it’s impossible not to sit here, dumbfounded, posing just that silly question. I have to admit, despite my predilection for nightmare scenarios, and despite Donald openly calling for weeks for his forces to assemble to do just exactly what they did today, I was starting to believe that these MAGA idiots were mostly a spent force, that if they were ever going to do anything they’d have done it already. See what happens when you let your guard down? How did it come to this? Shit, man, it suddenly seems clear that it was always coming to this, from the moment the malicious idiot stood there and spewed his thinly-veiled white supremacist bullshit about “American carnage” at the Inaugural. Even before his “very good people on both sides” pronouncement. He’s spent his whole Presidency granting his pinhead followers permission to take it this far. Like he does wth everything else, he outright told us it would come to this. He tweeted it for God’s sake. Come to Washington on the 6th! Resist! Should be wild!
Now I wonder, just as foolishly: do these neo-fascist GOP dingbats in what’s being called the Sedition Caucus plan to reassemble in a few hours and start in again challenging the certification of the election? Are Cruz, Hawley and the rest planning to stay their rabble rousing course? Is it even possible that they understand that this insanity is their fault? Is it within their pinched and surly world view to think twice, now, about the forces they’ve unleashed with their complicity in supporting their sick and malignant President? Do they ask themselves, now, whether maybe it might have made sense after all to have removed him last January, when they all voted to acquit?
Take a wild guess.
It’s probably good I’m not in charge of the security response right now, because swear to God, I’d be ordering an immediate and massive application of lethal force. I’d give these assholes the civil war they think they want. I’d do more than blast them in the downwash of the military helicopters that nobody had any compunction about deploying to disperse the peaceful protestors in Washington last June. I’d go fucking full bore Roman on their fat asses, and then I’d send the troops to all their home towns to shoot their dogs and burn their damned houses down.
Swear to God.
As for Donald…well, you can guess my fantasy outcome for him. Something to do with a large cauldron, a roaring fire, and 200 gallons of canola oil.
Yes I’m emotional. You’re damned right I’m emotional. This feels like the end of something, like something finally died, and it’s hard to know what it means.
the needlefish 