Sunday, Time to Relax [DOT 11/1/21]

LOL

10/1/21 MegMegMcGee 61

Guess it didn’t work.

Woman trampled in Capitol riots had ‘don’t tread on me’ flag
https://www.9news.com.au/world/rosanne-boyland-trampled-dont-tread-on-me-gadsden-flag-donald-trump-us-capitol-riot/5d5c7251-e17c-4961-88a8-a906f38d7b54

‘Brian did his job’: Family remembers fallen Capitol officer
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-kyrgyzstan-police-saudi-arabia-new-jersey-2769e96644739357e47098a242d9f018

This was wholly preventable and here is how I knew he was at least an alright guy: “A biography issued by his family says Sicknick cared for rescued Dachshunds in his spare time…”

Apple removes Parler from App Store in wake of U.S. Capitol riot
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/09/apple-removes-parler-from-app-store-in-wake-of-us-capitol-riot.html

I’m guessing this joke tweet has more likes than any tweet of Trump’s ever received. He must be apoplectic at this point.

Efforts to remove Donald Trump from the White House gathered pace on Saturday, as Democrats announced that at least 180 members of Congress would co-sponsor an article of impeachment they intend to introduce in the House of Representatives on Monday.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/09/donald-trump-impeachment-resignation-capitol-riot-republican-senator-murkowski-twitter

The mental image is priceless!

Have a great day Deadsplinters!

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61 Comments

  1. The John Barron twitter concept and its avatar is a work of genius. 
     
    I read this morning that @potus has also been suspended. I still think that’s kind of weird, but on the other hand as the madness descended over the last six months or so the networks did stop broadcasting his unhinged monologues, except to show the absolute worst excerpts, as a matter of public interest I suppose. 
     
    Ten more days. May each one get progressively worse for Trump and his mob of co-conspirators and the unwashed masses who slavishly follow him. What if someone told you two years ago that Joe Biden, of all people, would be the real one to Make America Great Again? 

  2. now…i know im sposed to have some empathy as these people have families some of which i assume care about them……but im actually just going to laugh
    play stupid games win stupid prizes and all that jazz

  3. …I don’t know the actual number but I think the only tweet from the @realdonaldtrump account that got anything like that number of likes was the one where he announced he’d contracted covid

    …I do know that was his most liked tweet ever…which ought to have told him something…but I’m guessing he wouldn’t get it?

    • …there’s a lot of reasons to be sad & angry about that guy’s account of his experience & observations on the day but there’s one aspect of it that I’m increasingly feeling seems like a classic example of burying the lede?

      …I’ve not run across a link to anything that has a good record of the phenomenon as such but when I was watching this “live” I remember clearly seeing some among the crowd who (like the ex-air force guy with the zip-ties photographed in the rotunda or the one that turned out to be a judge’s kid) very clearly came prepared…they had helmets & flak-jackets/vests & in some cases (like that judge’s kid) actual riot shields

      …now I can accept that after the treatment the BLM protestors got it’s possible to make an argument that these racist, bigoted, deluded assholes might have expected to have been facing the kind of riot-control that included tear gas & rubber bullets & other stuff that led to those protestors learning to improvise ways to protect themselves from such things…not one I’d buy but at least at a pretextural level…but seeing them among a casually-dressed & largely directionless crowd that clearly had no such expectation…even at the time my first thought was that they were visibly better prepared than the capitol police…& that the probability seemed to be that those preparations were part of a premeditated intent to force their way past the officers on duty

      …I don’t spend time in the right places online to have known in advance how right that was…or the shameful extent to which those officers were to all intents & purposes deliberately denied the option to have been suitably prepared or backed up on the day…but in the course of the last few days I’ve found that for the most part the coverage of this stuff seems (to me) not to adequately convey that beneath the superficial dumbassery of the majority of participants there was clearly a core of deliberate coordinated actors without whom even the underprepared state of the capitol police would likely have proved sufficient to keeping the crowd out of the building

      …much like the asshole with the gas-mask/umbrella combo busting windows at an autozone during the BLM protests (who I believe turned out to be a biker-gang member) these agents provacateurs seem like they should be getting more limelight than some idiot in a horned fur hat or the fuckwit that stole a lectern or whatever other example you choose that effectively undersells the whole thing by making it seem somehow laughable…to quote (or at least paraphrase) eddie izzard…it’s not the idiots we need to be worried about…it’s the organized idiots

      • Honestly the explanation that makes sense is that the secretary of Defense and the heads of police for the Capitol Police were in on the coup. 

        It literally makes no other sense to how “unprepared” they were and how they didn’t ask for help sooner and then how help was ultimately asked for (by Pence, by some rando Army dude who called the Maryland Gov, etc etc) and so forth. 

        By no means am I saying most of the Capitol Police was in on it. I think some where. I think most of the force was doing the best they could in a situation they couldn’t handle, because of their leadership. 

        And no, it wasn’t a failure of leadership. Leadership knew what they were doing.

        NBCNews is now reporting that the FBI and NYPD also warned Capitol Police that there was credible threat of violence at the protest. FBI is saying they also dissuaded some white supremacists from attending, so this should have been even worse than originally planned. 

      •  these agents provacateurs seem like they should be getting more limelight than some idiot in a horned fur hat or the fuckwit that stole a lectern or whatever other example you choose that effectively undersells the whole thing by making it seem somehow laughable

        Precisely! I posted something similar on the Backtalk blogspot. Someone texted me “Is it wrong that I find this humourous?” Uh, yes! Yes it is wrong!
        The same white privilege that allowed these wahoos terrorists to get into the Capitol building without first being shot or clubbed or tear gassed is the same white privilege that somehow resulted in the media making it look like it was nothing more than the MAGA-ly hillbillies acting like twits in Nancy Pelosi’s office and pilfering decor for the gun and trophy room or eBay. From early footage, you might be forgiven for thinking the largest threat was ideological. But cut to a couple days later, when programs like Chris Hayes’s showed officers being beaten and clearly in distress, and the contents of the Trojan horse became clear. So very different from the way media usually cherry picks the scuffles from mostly peaceful protest of any other kind, or highlights the opportunistic looters who show up later, more or less conflating them with the main demonstration. 

    • ““We were telling them to back up and get away and stop, and they’re telling us, they are on our side, and they’re doing this for us, and they’re saying this as I’m getting punched in my face by one of them … That happened to a lot of us. We were getting pepper sprayed in the face by those protesters, I’m not going to even call them protestors, by those domestic terrorists,” said the officer.”
       
      Every single day of this presidency has been like living in an abusive household. The gaslighting. The “I hit you because I love you.” The lying and narcissism. 

      • And just like an abusive relationship the most dangerous time is when you leave. trump and his supporters are doing the political equivalent of if. I can’t have you nobody can.

    • Read that one last night, when I got home from work.
       
      It’s a GREAT read, and heartbreaking, all at the same time.
       
      Buzzfeed gets SO much shit, for being a listcicle site, and for ripping off Twitter & Reddit allllllll the time.
       
      But it’s stuff like THIS, which is why I keep reading. Even though they’ve shot themselves in the foot, repeatedly, by just gutting their News staff, the folks who are still there do some incredibly great writing, and they manage to catch perspectivesthat the bigger news organizations seldom do.💖

  6. We had armed protesters at our Capitol yesterday carrying zip ties. They’re screaming about governor Andy Beshear,  communism, socialism, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell. So, I guess they don’t want communism,socialism, or capitalism? It would be funny if they weren’t actually dangerous. And our GOP legislators are trying to impeach Beshear who has done an outstanding job. 

    • …again I lack a suitable citation but I believe the long version is that she’s on the board of an organisation that paid for the buses rather than that she personally footed the tab as an individual…not attempting to quibble with the shorthand, though…as far as I’m concerned it’s “good enough for government work”?

    • I’m starting to draw some conclusions about this mess, and the conclusions I’m reaching aren’t very nice. 
       
      I’m starting to feel that this is a criminal conspiracy that’s reaching into the highest levels of the Trump administration. Not Trump — he’s never been more than a useful idiot. But I think the goal was to wait to see legislators get murdered, and then declare martial law and void the election, creating a fascist regime with a stupid orange puppet in charge. 
       
      1. More and more evidence is surfacing that this was planned for a very long time. People were replaced for the sole purpose of hindering any cohesive response to any sort of riot. National Guard troops amounted to about 90 unarmed people who were ordered to assist the “protestors.” The Capitol Police department is clearly riddled with corruption and totally compromised. “Donors” paid to get these people to DC. I’m certain donors paid for weapons and body armor as well. The idiots in MAGA hats were a smokescreen for the real plan. Actual “mercenaries” (or whatever) were seeded into the protestors, and they had a job to do, to wit:
       
      2. Pence was going to be sacrificed for the “revolution.” Of course he’s in hiding now. His life is still in danger. They need a rallying cry and a precipitating event and it was supposed to be his death, along with however many other legislators the “protestors” could catch. 
       
      3. People were in on it. I don’t think this can be overstated. These cretins that we’re seeing resigning because of their “consciences” are trying to pretend they knew nothing was going on. DeVos, Chao, they at best knew something was up, and at worst they’d been promised positions in the Fourth Reich. They’re basically going into hiding now. Everyone Trump installed at the Pentagon was in on it. Everyone still around Trump was in on it. I can’t decide if Hawley and Cruz were complicit or just stupid and got played. They could have been killed too. 
       
      I think I’ve been viewing whole thing as “stupidity that got out of hand.” I don’t think like that any more. I think this was a serious, planned coup attempt that went wrong when resistance at the Capitol proved more effective than the planners thought. No, I don’t think Trump orchestrated this. But someone around him DID.
       
      This is why impeachment and an investigation are critical. We need that to root out the conspirators. And it needs to continue after Jan. 20. If I’m right, it’s too big to stay covered up. Some of these underlings will crack when they face federal charges. 
       
      So that’s my tinfoil hat moment for this week. But I’m not sure that I’m wrong. 

      • …I don’t know if my version of that is more or less tinfoil-laminated…but it’s pretty close to the one you went with?

        …basically I have a hard time not drawing parallels with known approaches that have been taken to the strategic application of misinformation for…oh, I dunno…at least decades…specifically by the likes of one v. putin (not co-incidentally the recent recipient of a pardon-for-life)…& the basic concept of the useful idiot as a pretext/casus belli

        …I can’t really argue with the wide-ranging & terrifying degree of deliberate maneuvering of people into/out of significant positions that enabled the events of wednesday to proceed as they did…but I don’t think anyone with more than half a functional brain really believed the people storming the capitol were the ones who could achieve a coup in the sense that many of those people themselves had clearly been sold on

        …it’s why I made that reference in another comment to the “umbrella guy” from the protests earlier in the year…if you can manage to sufficiently escalate a scenario (while preferably blaming the requisite bad acts on a group you want to disenfranchise) then you can often get away with escalating your response to a degree that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to get away with…& instead a significant plurality of people will not only accept it but support or even call for it

        …an obvious example would be the extent to which few were willing to call anything an over-reaction post 9/11 & yet swathes of people were shocked & appalled by the stuff snowden brought to their attention…not that I’m for a moment suggesting the terrorist act that day was any kind of false flag…I just mean the part about people going along with stuff they otherwise wouldn’t because of an extreme scenario

        …so in my mind the paranoid-seeming thing that I currently find hard to dismiss is that had things escalated further on wednesday then by claiming to be staving off a civil war or whatever bullshit pretext they framed it as it might have been possible to invoke some kind of state of emergency & get away with a whole lot of unconscionable shit…up to & very possibly including making out that questioning the legitimacy of the election result was a legitimate enterprise &/or that trump should continue to enjoy the immunity afforded him by his current position indefinitely

        …try as I might…& I don’t want to but I apparently can’t help it as I try to understand what the fuck these people thought they were involving themselves in…I just can’t see any way that anyone could reasonably expect to overturn the election……least of all by interupting its certification…or achieve an outright coup of the sort we associate with military dictatorships & banana republics…but I can see a number of ways for the entire situation to have got completely out of hand to an extent that would make what actual happened appear tame by comparison…& several of those I think it might have come a good deal closer to than I find comfortable to contemplate…not the least of which being the siezure as hostages &/or killing of a member or members of congress or the senate

        …I guess what I’m saying is that I find myself agreeing to the part about there being an actual conspiracy…whether deliberate or “merely” in the de facto sense…that would absolutely constitute one with intent to commit acts of sedition & thusly ought to see all those involved barred from any position of public office for life & see them convicted & jailed for at least their immediate future

        …I just can’t swallow the part where there was ever a real possibility of trump retaining the presidency…instead I’m reminded that one of the hallmarks of that russian “active measures” playbook is to try to engineer situations where if the insane thing you’ve set in motion somehow succeeds then that fucks up your target in ways that benefit you…but importantly that if it fails that also ups the chaos & destabilization of said target in ways that likewise work to your advantage by disadvantaging them & increasing the relative effectiveness of your strategy

        …at some level I think for a long time this has been the thing I find the most galling in recent years…that the people who tell themselves they’re doing all this shit because they somehow believe in defiance of all reality they’re the ones who really understand what’s at stake & think it’s the only way to preserve the nation they claim to love have been engaged in something which explicity furthers the ends & interests of those who seek to diminsh that nation…& just plain couldn’t work out the way it seems like they think it could in their heads?

        • “which few were willing to call anything an over-reaction post 9/11”
           
          This one HURTS a bit, in light of what’s gone on this week, because it so very much  makes me miss my old Senator💔💖💞
           
          Wellsone was one of the very few calling it ALL out, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and who was constantly saying it was THE WRONG ACTION to take.
           
          And dear GOD, his voice would’ve been useful, since Trump announced, back in 2015–and Wellstone would’ve been one of the few with both platform and voice, who might have had some say, when it came to pushback on Trump’s racism & Antisemitism–amd who might’ve actually been listened to, rather than being dismissed–since he, TOO, was a boomer-aged white man.😔😕💔

        • Yeah, I kind of go back and forth on the “formal conspiracy” aspect. Was it orchestrated or did it grow somewhat organically? At some point though I feel that someone worked deliberately to get lots of these dominoes into place, thinking that something would start them toppling. 
           
          But the endgame I think is the most clear. Michael Flynn has been urging Trump to declare martial law and overthrow the election. That’s how he stays as president.  Just declare martial law and never un-declare it. 

          • …I maybe should have been clearer but I figured I was running long on that comment as it was…I do agree that the martial law gambit would appear to be the route they thought they could travel…I just can’t bring myself to believe that it ever really stood a chance of working out for them the way they seemed to think it could

            …admittedly that’s at least in part because it seems to me that enough people would have decided that was something they couldn’t let stand that it might have precipitated an altogether different sort of uprising…& that picture gets if anything even uglier pretty quickly…so I don’t know if that makes me an optimist or just a different kind of pessimist?

      • I agree with about 99.998% of your assessment.
         
        The ONLY thing I do disagree with, is this;
        “I’m certain donors paid for weapons and body armor as well.”
         
        Because there are TONS of folks who are on the right who have “Rambo” complexes, and who DO stock up on guns, among, and YES, have been buying high-grade military-style protective equipment–especially since all the “He’s gonna take our guns away!!!”  fear-based marketing the weapons industry did during the Obama administration.
         
        This insurrection largely wasn’t  conducted by poor folks–the “economical challenged”/ “economic anxiety” crowd, struggling to get by…
        It largely consisted of “reasonably well off,” if not very well-off folks. People with good jobs, time off, and money on hand *during a pandemic which has hit employment particularly hard!*–Meaning those folks HAVE the disposable income, to be able to buy weapons & gear “as a hobby”
         
        I’d BET, that we’ll eventually find that SOME of the “badge flashers” also brought their own work-issued gear…
         
        And there’ll probably eventually be understanding that mercenaries like Erik Prince probably let their “contract workers” use company gear if they wanted to attend….
         
        But I’d bet that it was more work-issued gear, and self-purchased by the rambo-wannabees, than any donor-class purchase.

        • I saw that after I posted. Yes, it does tend to support my theory. Also the senators requesting no impeachment to “heal” the country. And the Capitol police chief bailing out early. The problem for me is that while all of this makes sense, I’m starting to feel like a QAnon nutjob (to call back to Boebert). Though there is more “evidence” for my theory than QAnon ever had. 
           
          There’s one other bit I really didn’t think about until this afternoon, and after seeing that and other stories:
           
          If I’m right, someone’s going to die. Someone “inside” the conspiracy, who can plausibly be blamed for everything. That’s the most effective way of wrapping all this up and shutting it all down. 

      • I hope Mother approved Pence being sacrificed for the plan. 

        I don’t disagree with much of this. I’ve been thinking much the same for a few days. 

        I think Hawley is in on it. He’s a better choice for protégé than Don Jr or Jared. 

        And I think Trump is in on it. He’s more than a useful idiot here. He’s not the mastermind, that’s Goebbels/Miller. 

      • While watching live on Wednesday,  my first thought was, “where is the national guard?”
        After watching for 2 hours, and they still hadn’t shown up, I could only think of that scene in JFK. Where Costner meets Sutherland, and he breaks down all of the security lapses during the parade. 
        It sure looks like the same happened here. That higher ups gave orders and they were followed. 

      • NBC News reported that the FBI dissuaded from going to DC (probably with cuffs) dozens of the hard-core militia types in the week leading up to Wednesday. This means that the plan was there, all online. Also FBI and NYPD warned the Capitol Police to no avail. And now another Capitol Police officer (Senate duty, son of a prior Sgt. At Arms) has died, rumored to be from self-harm.
        Observable events already indicated that there’s premeditation and intent to inflict greater harm that what did happen. I don’t know how much of this is conspiratorial and how much is idiots not thinking through the consequences of their actions.

  8. In another somewhat ironic death: the guy who tazed his balls and died of a stroke was trying to steal a Tip O’Neal portrait.  He self stopped before he got just the Tip.

    • I completely agree with this. The whole we just want to be heard  argument is bullshit. They’ve been screaming their ugliness and hate for years. We hear them, we just don’t like or agree with what they’re saying. They don’t only want to be heard, they want to be catered to, they want their voices to be given more value than our voices. They want to shout us down. 

      • Agreed.  In the remains of the Gawkerverse, I used to get a few greyed commenters giving me shit for whatever I said.  I didn’t even bother to engage them.  I didn’t get people who did.
        The only ones I kept were the ones who criticized me with some valid points.
        I don’t give a fuck about the opinions of know nothing morons.

    • Yes. If we go down that road again we’re falling into yet another trap. And we can’t do it. 
       
      I’ve written before about the “both-siderism” that’s infected the media. If they talk to someone who says gravity pulls objects to earth, they are obligated to find someone who doesn’t believe in gravity and give them an equal amount of airtime/column inches. 
       
      It is complete bullshit. We do not owe equal time to crazy fantasies and delusions. We never did. We don’t have any obligation to listen to Trumpers because they are demonstrably wrong and dangerous. Giving them space to “air” their garbage is enabling and emboldening them. 
       
      Other issues that suffer from the same shitty treatment include climate change and vaccinations. There aren’t two sides to these issues. There’s fact and falsehood. That’s all.

    • For the past few days I’ve been trying to figure out how to deprogram cult members on that huge a scale. Because I don’t know how to conceive of it. Are there history lessons we can get from Germany that will be useful? 

      The most interesting thing for me in the past few months was when the Trump cult turned on Fox News over the election results. I had wondered if Fox News could be used to help deprogram since they watch it so much (I did not expect Fox News to want to do this, just me thinking about what could be used to get deprogramming to the masses on a scale like that).  But honestly, I don’t think there’s any large-scale way to get messaging to them that they will even listen to.

      I don’t know. For the boomers and up, it’s going to be a matter of waiting for them to die off due to old age. I think they’re a lost cause thanks to dealing with my parents. But the younger ones, fuck if I know. 

      • There’s no easy answer. As long as people willingly subject themselves to constant exposure to brainwashing content, you can’t help them. Couple of things to note — the first is a documentary of how an elderly parent was brainwashed by Fox News. 
        https://www.thebrainwashingofmydad.com/
        The second, and much more pervasive one, is conservative talk radio. Fox News gets most of the heat, but AM radio flies under the radar, even though it’s elevated cretins like Rush Limbaugh into the public consciousness. And I never seriously thought about it until I read an article about it, and the article mentions how at garages, and warehouses, and factories, this garbage is on all day, every day. There’s like 1900 stations pumping out this garbage 24/7. And blue-collar workers listen. 
        https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/talk-radio-conservatives-trumpism.html

    • Missing from the article is mention of THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY which RICHARD “DICK” NIXON used to peel off upset (over the enacting of CIVIL RIGHTS) Dixiecrats (read racist) and encourage them to join the GOPers.  These fuckers became the “Raygun Dems” and eventually the Teabaggers/Trumpanzees.
       
       

  13. I sent the free speech comic to all of my kids, since it’s a pretty succinct explanation of the 1st amendment. 
     
    And, omg, that tweet about the cat… I laughed until I wheezed… thank you for that! 
     
    (Why, yes, I am largely ignoring politics today…)

  15. Also, a name which needs to be known by more people: USCP officer Eugene Goodman.
     
    He was a fucking HERO during the siege, and if he isn’t  awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, it will be a travesty.
     
    He saved lives on Wednesday. The senate was secured at 2:15… Igor Bobic uploaded the footage at 2:16…
     
    Officer Goodman’s quick thinking, after he looks to the vestibule door and sees that there were no officers there–and then his touch of the man at the top of the stairs, and movement away from the vestibule drew vitally needed time, for the officers inside the Senate Chamber to get it secured…..
     
    He kept our Senators from getting invaded/dragged out of the chamber and probably saved their lives.
     
    This is extreme courage under pressure, and ABSOLUTELY deserves the highest honors our country can bestow.
     
    He’s probably not the only USCP officer who deserves this kind of honor, for their actions that day. But he’s the one so far, who we have visibly documented in action.
     


     
    More here, on the timeline;


     
    And here’s one, with the still shots from the video–where you can SEE him look, then take decisive action;


     

    • …I was literally just adding something about that to the DOT…he deserves more praise & considerably better reward than I suspect he’s going to get

      …& I kind of hate to even think it…but a part of me wonders if he might have been better served had his identity not been disclosed…at least not for a while…& yet I fully agree he ought to be celebrated for his actions

      • He definitely deserves more!
         
        Imo, the Congressional Gold Medal** would be a DAMN fine start–as would be the P.M.o.F.
        Promotion to “Sergeant at Arms” wouldn’t be too shabby, either.😉
         
        I dunno if you saw these for the DOT, but this video–even if he was only kicked off for mask non-compliance, and NOT being on the “no fly list” is pretty damn hilarious in a “snowflake/schadenfreude” way😆😂🤣😈


         
        And THIS ONE, on the whole Parlor fuckup is just evilly delicious!!!😈😈😈
         


         
        I *think* that’s the link anyway, I’ll add another comment, if it’s not!😉
         
         
         
         
         
        (**the medal Congress gives out, which is analogous to the Presidential Medal of Freedom/P.M.o.F.)

  16. JFC, i need a scorecard to keep up will all this shit.   I saw a pic over on the root, a wide crowd shot outside the capitol with dozens of cretins flashing that OK sign. 
    Protest? It was a white power rally. 

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