This, kids, is why freedom of the press was part of the First Amendment to America’s generally crap-tacular Constitution. What the journalists of the NY Times have assembled here, boiling down thousands of hours from police body-cam recordings and the myriad videos posted all over the internet by the empty-headed rioters themselves, is not merely masterful; it’s essential viewing. There has never been such a clear and comprehensive account of exactly what happened on January 6, detailing not just the precise sequence of events, but identifying the perpetrators, often by name, and supplying so much specific and incontrovertible evidence that it ought to be enough, all on its own, to send hundreds of these MAGA Morons up the river for years to come. These idiots were so intent upon proudly documenting their own crimes that the task now facing the authorities is to gumshoe-style investigating what going to the supermarket meat counter is to hunting Bison on the open range.
I watched this with the headphones on at three this morning, struggling not to scream at a volume that would wake my long-suffering wife. God knows I don’t need any extra stimulus to make me angry these days, and it’s probably bad for my health to be dwelling on the event, but dammit, once it starts to roll you can’t tear your eyes away. It’s mesmerizing. Best viewed under the influence of a stiff bourbon laced with THC and Lorazepam, sure, but absolutely engrossing, and full of cold hard facts that everybody needs to know. They should take all those lying GOP seditionists who continue to insist that nothing akin to an insurrection occurred that day, (no, no, it was just a bunch of tourists behaving themselves), stuff socks in their yaps, strap them into chairs in front of an IMAX screen, then live stream the whole sordid bunch being forced to watch this again and again, hour after hour on a continuous loop, Clockwork Orange style.
As to the rioters themselves, well, you’ve never seen such an infuriating, ludicrously brainwashed biomass of Caucasian imbeciles in all your life, as they march towards destiny, believing themselves to be an avenging army of citizen soldiers bent on righting one of history’s most sinister wrongs – all because Donald told them so, which is good enough for them, brainstems that they all are. The way these Confederate flag-waving cretins chant “USA! USA! ” while they launch their ham-fisted coup attempt gives me the same sort of teeth-being-drilled-without-anesthesia feeling that always attends videos of jihadists hollering “Allahu akbar!!” while they load mortar shells into tubes, or throw LGBTQ victims off the tops of apartment buildings – and by God, if it had been up to me that day, the Trumpist bastards would have received the very same JDAM/cluster bomb treatment that’s usually, and I can’t help but feel misguidedly, reserved for their opposite numbers in ISIS and al Qaeda. Swear to God, watching this, my visceral reaction was to weep at the magnitude of the opportunity that was missed that day. There were thousands of them, all in one place. I’m sitting there in the wee hours, vibrating with rage, thinking God damn the idiots who signed the 1993 Convention on Chemical Weapons – we could have lobbed a couple of M687 rounds in there and nerve-gassed the whole fucking nest!
Oh, just kidding. Just a joke, ladies and gentlemen.
One thing that becomes painfully clear is the pathetic degree to which Capitol Police were unprepared for what was coming their way, and how differently things would have gone if anything like an appropriate force posture had been adopted on the basis of the ample intelligence that went largely unheeded in the run-up to Donald’s rabble-rousing rally on the Ellipse. Once reinforcements finally arrived, hours into the fiasco, it took them less than 20 minutes to clear the hollering numbskulls out of the building. The National Guard, sitting at the ready only a few minutes distant, didn’t move until 5 PM. Hell, there should have been no need to move at all – they should have been pre-deployed. Instead, the rioters were met by a sparse and under-equipped contingent that makes “thin blue line” sound like the sheerest overstatement. I found this image, which really says it all:
There’s more to learn, clearly, about how it all went down, and who was complicit, as opposed to merely incompetent. Maybe the House Select Committee, appointed at last, will get to the bottom of a few things. This time around, the frigging Dems had better not sit there looking pouty with their thumbs up their asses, doing sweet F/A while those smirking Republican scofflaws flip them the bird and refuse to obey their subpoenas.
There is no way at all, to my mind, that anybody involved in this travesty will ever get the smallest measure of what’s deserved. I’m just going to have to make myself comfortable with that. We could, though, go some distance towards dispelling the lies and GOP whitewashing that are on the cusp of making January 6 a non-event that never happened. Look, I know, we’ll never persuade everybody. The hard core MAGA Monsters will believe what they want. Still, there remain millions upon millions of low-information voters out there in the squishy middle who’ll accept whatever GOP narrative they’re selling on Fox and OANN only if nobody else yells the truth just as loudly. They’re the ones that must be reached, and soon. The mid-terms are just around the corner. It would sure help if this monumental piece of journalism from the NYT was widely viewed. Too bad we can’t force Zuckerberg to cram it into everybody’s Facebook Fake News feed.
Anyway, I insist that you watch it, not because I think anybody who might read this post needs the education, but for the usual reason: I want you to hurt like I do.
It’s only fair.
the needlefish 