Trump Could Maybe Refuse To Accept A Loss in 2020

Lawrence O'Donnell was basically repeating the same news of the day that Rachel had just covered, so I switched over to Fox Entertainment to see how they were spinning the devastating developments.  Got there just in time to hear Laura Ingraham defend her texts to Mark Meadows on January 6.

OF COURSE, she said, her imploring Trump to call off his MAGA-bubbas and end the assault was the right thing to do.  OF COURSE she displayed Twit messages calling the whole attack counter-productive and dangerous.

Nobody disagrees that on January 6 most Republican congressmen and even the Fox hosts (the ones that actually set Trump's policies) were horrified by what they'd wrought.  On that day the condemnation was nearly unanimous.

THE PROBLEM is the very next day, January 7, the Fox and Trump bootlickers started putting a different spin on events.  "They were just tourists."  "They were ANTIFA wearing Trump  clothing."  "The Capitol Police caused all the violence."

Laura, it's not what you said on the sixth that's the problem.  It''s the fact that you did a 180 as soon as Trump called you.  It's the gaslighting over the whole year since then!

The duplicity and hypocrisy on the right is just staggering.

After Laura's feeble defense, she put up a graphic on inflation, which she claimed was 9% (wasn't the real number 6.2%?) and then cut to Tom Cotton, another lying cocksucker.  Cotton said, "We're in the second year of the COVID crisis now, and we didn't see any inflation under Trump in the first year of the crisis."

My head just about exploded.  Yes, when the economy was in the toilet, when the country was shuttered, when death tolls were skyrocketing, yes we did not see inflation.  Inflation only happens when the economy opens up again and starts recovering.

And using last year as the basis for measuring inflation is INSANE.

The "Sedition Caucus" strikes again.

Is this serious enough to merit federal execution?  I don't think there can be any doubt. Especially since, as a Congressman, he swore an oath to the Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Caucus?wprov=sfti1

You wouldn't have to execute all 146 of them to make the point. Just decimate them.

Quote :

Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious he might be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.

The former president in recent weeks has complained more about the investigation, demanding why his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, shared so much material about 6 January with the select committee, and why dozens of other aides have also cooperated.

Trump has also been perturbed by aides invoking the Fifth Amendment in depositions - it makes them look weak and complicit in a crime, he has told associates - and considers them foolish for not following the lead of his former strategist Steve Bannon in simply ignoring the subpoenas.

When Trump sees new developments in the Capitol attack investigation on television, he has started swearing about the negative coverage and bemoaned that the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was too incompetent to put Republicans on the committee to defend him.

The former president’s anger largely mirrors the kind of expletives he once directed at the Russia inquiry and the special counsel investigation when he occupied the White House. But the rapidly accelerating investigation into whether Trump and top aides unlawfully conspired to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory at the 6 January joint session appears to be unnerving him deeply.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/20/capitol-attack-investigation-closes-in-trump

Question: What will a batshit crazy narcissistic paranoid despot do when faced with certain jail time?

1. Sue everybody
   
2. Attack everybody online
   
3. Create some kind of major distraction
   
4. Leave the country for a non-extradition destination
   
5. Send his loyal militias to physically attack his perceived enemies
   
6. Try to "burn everything down"
   

Here's a darn-good fact check on the counter-narrative being spun by the GOP.  Expect the details of these competing narratives to form the backbone of the next 16-40 months.  Without some strong evidence, pushed forcefully by the Earth-1 folks, the competing narratives of Earth-2 will not die before the 2024 elections.

This needs to happen, because the Earth-2 lemmings own all the guns.

Merrick Garland apparently thinks the issue of motive is relevant.

That, and the fact that the insurrectionists were white.

But I don't think "motive" matters at all. We should be prosecuting ACTIONS, because in this country it is still not illegal to have thoughts, even seditious thoughts. It's the ACTIONS that are illegal.

Here's what I mean. Trump had been saying for months, leading up to the election, that the election would be rigged, unfair and stolen, before a single vote was cast. Because of the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, states all over the country were making it easier to vote, with absentee ballots, same day registration, extended hours and additional polling stations. These accommodations are, at a very basic level, party-neutral. Both Democrats and Republicans were affected by Covid, and making voting easier theoretically benefited all voters of both parties.

But traditionally, Democratic voters have had a harder time voting, due to lack of transportation, long working hours, caring for children or elderly parents, etc. Trump (or his handlers -- by "Trump" I don't mean the moron bearing that name) knew that easier voting would advantage Democrats by a small margin, and the election was already polling as close.

So the Republican operatives went into high gear, exploring ways the Democratic vote could be restricted, exploring ways the American people could be convinced a Democratic victory would be illegitimate. They tried several shenanigans leading up to the election to try to swing it Republican, and after the president lost by 8 millions votes (not even close) they tried to delegitimize and overturn the vote. Note, however, that many Republican candidates other than president retained or gained their offices; nobody is disputing those....

When all of the various pre-election maneuvers failed, all of the post-election court challenges failed, all of the Roger Stone dirty tricks to pressure election officials into changing their slate of electors failed, Trump was left with only one last-ditch effort: overturn the election by force.

Not that that ill-conceived and amateurish cosplay TV event had any hope of succeeding. It was, like most of the alt-right's actions, feeble and far-fetched.

But -- and here's the point I'm trying to make -- feeble or not, ill-intentioned or sincere, the actions taken, all of them, were aimed at one thing: subverting democracy. An unsuccessful bank-robber isn't let off with a misdemeanor because his gun was fake or his note to the teller was illegible. In this case motives DO count, because the actions taken were illegal in support of an illegal aim. It doesn't matter, it shouldn't matter that the bank robbery was ultimately too amateurish to succeed.

All these people -- particularly the president and the plotters of this coup like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Jim Jordan, Tom Cotton, Madison Cawthorn, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks, Lauren Bohbert, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and all the rest need to be prosecuted.

Not just as trespassers at the capitol. As insurrectionists, as seditionists, as enemies of democracy. That, I remind you, is a capital offense, with federal execution as the penalty.

Jim Wright agrees with you.

Stonekettle Station

Here we go.  Madison Cawthorn is ineligible to hold public office due to participating in an insurrection, per section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Hopefully this will stick, and hopefully this will be the first of many.

Heard a report on the radio, Thom Hartmann Show (so take it with a grain of salt) but apparently CNN is reporting that Stephen Miller was recommending to Trump that he allow Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence to be killed by the rioters on January 6th, which would give him cover to declare martial law and invalidate the election.

If it was anyone else, at any other time, I'd dismiss this as a batshit-crazy conspiracy theory. But it's not.  In fact, it's eerily plausible and fits with the available facts... specifically, the use of Pelosi's and Pence's names as people the infiltrators ("infil-traitors"?) should go after, and the 3-hour window where Trump watched the unfolding events on TV, waiting for something to happen.  When it didn't, he called off the crowd.

It also elevates the insurrection from a spontaneous uprising by Trump supporters to an attempted coup by paramilitary members embedded with the rioters.  If this bears out, the consequences for the plotters will be dire.

Tonite Ari Melber had on Peter Navarro, Boris Epshteyn and Dustin Stockton, three figures pushing the "stolen election" scenario and heavily involved in efforts to count alternate electors on the 6th.  They all repeated their allegations of election fraud due to changes in the way the elections were administered in 2020.

If the widespread use of mail-in ballots and absentee ballots, due to COVID, resulted in fraud, they should have to show it.

If they can convince the country that these extraordinary measures in an extraordinary circumstance actually caused the election results to be, not just skewed toward the Democrats (which pretty much everyone agrees) but actually not representative of the electorate at large -- which IS NOT commonly agreed to -- then all of their efforts to overturn the certification of the 2020 election become not only understandable, but laudable.

SHOW ME THE FRAUD.

So far nobody has found any evidence of fraud, any evidence that the election was not the will of the majority of the people.

The fucking talking heads on TV -- left, right and center -- are not hammering this central issue.  Where's the fraud?  Where's the fraud?  Multiple states conducted multiple audits, hell even the Cyber Ninjas conducted an extensive partisan audit in Arizona, and even THEY couldn't find any fraud. Why isn't anyone talking about this central issue to the whole January 6 insurrection???

The prosecution of DJT and his minions depends on their trying to overturn the election despite knowing they lost.  We need to delve into that last point, and prove or disprove it. Nothing else matters.


---------------------------------
Except, Tish James and Fani Willis will hang Trump's ass on state charges.

Yay, people are FINALLY talking about jail time for the insurrectionist Republicans.  'Bout fuckin' time!

Now somebody needs to float charges against the 147 who voted against certifying the duly-authorized electors.

NoCoPilot wrote:

SHOW ME THE FRAUD.

I keep coming back to this.  Nowadays, when I see somebody wearing an American flag coat, like I did this morning, I immediately wonder if they're of the insurrectionist stripe.  That shouldn't be so.

IF there had been rampant fraud in the 2020 election, then the "patriots" who tried everything in their power to prevent the election from being stolen were acting in good faith, and though their methods were unorthodox (and doomed to failure) their hearts were in the right place.  They had a right to wear American flag insignias if they thought they were protecting American democracy from illegal corruption.

We don't disagree on the importance of elections being free and fair, Trumpists and me.

Which is why proving there was no fraud and publicizing the proof widely is even more important than prosecuting the nimrods who tried to take matters into their own hands.  Yes, their methods were counter to "the peaceful transfer of power" and yes there were financiers of the whole shenanigans who had NOTHING to do with free & fair elections, but without a commonly-shared knowledge that the election was won by Biden, the wound remains open and weeping.

It has been proved that the election was free and fair. But it doesn't do any good, because the cultists don't believe it anyway.

You have to remember that these are the people who still believe that Hillary was running a pedophilia ring from the basement of a pizza shop that doesn't have a basement.

"What if the person who got the most votes in the election won?"

This whole 2020 election/January 6 Commission isn't really focused on eliminating the Electoral College. Maybe they should be.

Coming out of a state-level inquiry, not the Federal investigation:

Colorado election official Tina Peters indicted as part of 2020 election probe

Wisconsin lawsuit accuses 3 GOP congressmen of insurrection

Quote :

Wisconsin liberals on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and two other GOP congressmen are insurrectionists in violation of the U.S. Constitution for their words and actions in support of Donald Trump leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Wait, wait, what is this bear doing behind the elephant?

The Republicans continue to fund-raise on false claims of voter fraud.  All yours for a mere twenty dollars!

Evidence?  "Millions of voters felt something went wrong."  "The energy at Trump's rallies was incredible, there's no way he could've lost."  People photographed dropping off bulk mailings (not ballots) in mailboxes.  Innuendo, out-dated data and minuscule numbers of mostly-Trump voter fraud.

The imagination it boggles.

It's becoming clear now that the failure of the Justice Department to prosecute ANY of the leaders of the 1/6 coup is not for lack of evidence.

It's because they fear civil war.

The Trump wing of the right tends to be heavily armed, and bereft of social conscience, and untrusting of the rule of law or the ability of reasonable minds to reach different conclusions. They're a small minority in America, but they still number in the tens of millions.

And with their military mindset -- and the Left's decidedly non-military mindset -- it's entirely foreseeable that the minority would win if elections are no longer the means of achieving and holding power.

So... will we lose our Republic to chickenshit politicians afraid to confront fascism?

NoCoPilot wrote:

SHOW ME THE FRAUD.
.

Mentioned again in the Jan 6 presentation on Tuesday was the report Peter Navarro prepared for the president, entitled "The Immaculate Deception," supposedly detailing the "overwhelming evidence" of voter fraud.  The one DJT kept waving around while screaming like a toddler.

It's easy to find online.  It's a 36-page compilation of untruths, misinterpretations, unsourced allegations and flat-out made-up shit.  One of his major points is that Trump was winning in several states that counted mail-in ballots last, until the absentee ballots changed the outcome.  Another is the Georgia ballot controversy that turned out to be a big misunderstanding.  Allegations of dead voters and multi-state voters without any evidence (all these were investigated by the states and found false).  Allegations that ballots were scanned multiple times (which they were when errors interrupted the count). There are multiple footnotes, about half of which are links to definitions of words used, and the other half to right-wing websites with zero credibility and even less evidence.

In other words, a big pile of steaming poo.

But for Mike Pence, this thing would have become the Archduke Ferdinand of 2021.

Unfuckingbelievable.  Navarro said on Friday that the indictment against him, and his arrest for defying the subpoena, are going to be blown sky-high because he will introduce his "Navarro Report" in the court as his defense.

That pile of lies and misunderstandings and conspiracy theories.  That laughable piece of utter shite. He's still standing behind it, even after it's been completely discredited.

What a fucking idiot.

Man crashes his car into the Capitol barrier, then shoots and kills himself.

On the bottom of this same page is a video about one of the Capitol police officers who killed himself shortly after January 6, apparently not aware that his concussion from being hit with a flying crowbar was affecting his brain.  During the video one of the rioters accuses the Capitol Police of working for child murderers.

The level of deadly misinformation, and the fervor with which Fox viewers are willing to avenge these lies, has not abated in 20 months.  I fear, no I'm absolutely certain that somebody somewhere -- probably a whole lot of somebodies -- are going to attack again, either buildings or individuals. Nobody has done anything to discredit the Fox/OAN/Truth Social spigots of lies.

I'm beginning to think DOJ putting away the ORC isn't going to be enough.