Category: Banana Republicanism

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 27, 2022

The public personas of three women: the late Madeline Albright, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Ginni Thomas were on display last week. Two of them seem destined for important places in history.

You know Albright’s story: A refugee from Hitler and Stalin. A naturalized American, the first woman US Secretary of State (fourth in the line of presidential succession), and a huge influence on US foreign policy in the 1990s. The New Yorker says that she was the first “most powerful woman” in US history.

They report a great story about Albright attending a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1998. She and the then-Russian Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, performed a skit for the assembled diplomats, despite growing tensions between Washington and Moscow over NATO expansion. They did a bit from “West Side Story”, with Albright playing Maria and Primakov playing Tony. To the tune of “America,” the two sang back and forth:

Albright: “America’s nobody’s enemy.”
Primakov: “So why do you practice hegemony?”
Albright: “I want to know what you think of me.”
Primakov: “Look in your file at the K.G.B.!”

Today it’s a different world. It’s hard to imagine Anthony Blinken and Sergei Lavrov doing a skit.

It’s also a different Washington. We’ve now had several female Secretaries of State. We have a female Vice President, and a woman as Treasury Secretary. Not all that Albright advocated or was a part of were with hindsight, the best actions for the US, but she left an indelible mark on the world.

Ginni Thomas won’t ever be able to wear Albright’s shoes (or her pins). From the WaPo we learned that Thomas exchanged at least 29 text messages with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, as both of them strategized about overturning the 2020 election result.

Shortly afterward, her husband became the only justice to dissent when the Court granted access to Donald Trump’s White House records. Ginni Thomas has also since confirmed that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. That means Justice Thomas voted against disclosing information about an attempted coup that Ginni Thomas supported.

It’s ridiculous that Ginni Thomas, who tried to directly influence Meadows and Trump, thinks that we will believe that she would not try to influence her husband. Together they are a stain on public life.

The same day the Thomas scandal broke, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she would recuse herself from a major case involving Harvard University, where she serves on the governing board. That’s what true public servants do. They respect the norms of civility. On to cartoons.

Ginni’s world:

A fair and sober hearing:

Good question:

A clown show broke out in DC:

The difference:

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Saturday Soother – March 19, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Cherry blossoms, Tanque Verde Ridge, AZ – February 2022 photo by Bel Meader

Wrongo and Ms. Right started our return trip from Florida yesterday. We said goodbye to being able to sit on the patio with our coffee at 8 am and to walk without wearing a jacket. Two observations from our visit: First, it’s clear that all older people there are members of a “club”. On our morning walks, everyone said hello, something that doesn’t routinely happen in the north. Second, virtually everyone is maskless in public spaces.

That’s largely due to the public health policies of Florida’s governor and legislature. This time around, it didn’t work out badly for them. But we all should be at least somewhat concerned about what’s visible on the Covid horizon.

We’re talking about the arrival of the Coronavirus BA.2 subvariant. The Omicron we know is BA.1. CNN reports that the BA.2 variant is 80% more transmissible than trusty old Omicron, and about as serious an illness. They also say that BA.2 has been growing steadily in the US. The CDC estimates it is causing about 12% of new Covid-19 cases in America.

Hong Kong is in the throes of a severe wave caused by BA.2. It currently has the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world. The WaPo reports this from China:

“China’s worst coronavirus outbreak in two years has reached almost all parts of the country, stretching medical resources, shuttering businesses, and manufacturing outfits, and raising questions about the government’s staunch commitment to its “zero covid” policy.”

Meanwhile, BA.2 now accounts for more than 50% of cases in the UK and in several European countries.

Here’s an interesting chart from Charles Gaba, showing the point at which Covid deaths in Red states overtook Covid deaths in Blue states:

They crossed when Biden was inaugurated. The graph includes all variants of Covid. It shows the cumulative Covid death rates in the reddest and bluest tenths of the US at the county level. The total population of the 50 US states, plus DC, is right around 331.4 million people. That puts each tenth of the population at around 33.1 million each.

The date may be a coincidence, but the data aren’t. You know why this happened.

We look like we’re about to have another surge. That’s depressing since we are barely past the Omicron surge. If the data coming in from places where Omicron BA.2 is surging hold up, it means that our vaccinations should mitigate the worst of it.

But if you are over 60 or are unvaccinated, or unboosted, or have any medical vulnerabilities, you’d better wear your mask when out and about, even in Florida.

A whole lot of people won’t do you the favor of wearing one, so you should be extra careful.

Time for our Saturday Soother, where we try to forget about what’s happening in Ukraine, or whether Jessie Smollett deserves to be out of jail on appeal. Let’s unplug and relax and think about how Spring is just around the corner. Of course that means yard work on the Fields of Wrong, but it also means enjoying weather like we were having in Florida.

To help you relax, grab a seat by a window and listen to Mozart’s Rondo from the Horn Concerto Number 4 KV 495. This is a trio arrangement played by Sarah Willis (horn), Tamás Velenczei (trumpet) and Jesper Busk Sorensen (euphonium). It was performed live in a virtual concert in the Berlin Chamber Music Hall for the Pacific Music Festival 2021:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 13, 2022

Have you given any thought to the inconsistency between how Whoopi Goldberg was treated for her comment about the holocaust, and how Joe Rogan has been treated for his um, body of work? Whoopi was condemned by the left and right. She was appropriately suspended from her position as a host of ABC’s The View. She later apologized for the hurtful inference in her remarks.

With Rogan, after the flap over his COVID misinformation, it came to light that dozens of his episodes were quietly removed from Spotify because they featured Rogan using the N-word. To date, Spotify has yanked more than 100 of his episodes. But Rogan wasn’t suspended or “cancelled” by Spotify. Still, he’s held up on the Right as another victim of leftist cancel culture.

The artists who left Spotify weren’t trying to “cancel” Rogan. They just wouldn’t continue being associated with a platform that promoted him. Both the artists and Spotify are making free-market business decisions that they have every right to make.

That’s an idea that you’d think would be vigorously supported by Conservatives.

The outcry on the Right about “cancel culture” comes at a time when they are working to outlaw Critical Race Theory, overturn elections, enact legislation to deny the vote to millions of Americans, and ban books. It’s clear who’s doing the cancelling in America.

Those who defend Rogan say he’s simply providing a forum. Sure, he interviews kooks and sleazes, but he also interviews some reasonable folks. So he’s presenting “both sides“. The other side of a fact is a lie. And if you put a lie on an equal footing with the truth, you give the lie credibility. This is a cardinal sin that the media have been committing for decades. On to cartoons.

The massive self-deception the Right Wing practices while copying Nazi tactics:

Trump’s monument on the Mall:

RNC censures two of its own, says many of its own are totally fine:

Mitch the turtle takes RNC to task for its censure, also says Trump is wrong:

Russia’s about to bite off more than it can chew:

The end of mask mandates is political signaling. We’ll soon know if this calculated risk works:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 6, 2022

According to Worldometer data, the US Covid death toll is now at 924,000. Last year, on June 1, 2021 the US death toll was 615,000. That’s the minimum number of deaths we could have suffered prior to the widespread availability of Covid vaccines in the US.

That 600,000± pre-vaccine death toll is comparable to the deaths that occurred in the Civil War. We’ve studied the Civil War for generations, although it’s doubtful that the Republican Right wants America to study all that much about Covid. On to cartoons.

As someone (?) once said, it takes a village, and we don’t have one:

The Olympics are on TV. Should we watch? Views differ:

Supreme Court nominations of women through time:

Biden’s alternate nominating strategy:

Trump doesn’t care who knows:

Putin and Biden ridin’ around the Ukraine speedway:

The NYT said on Saturday that portions of the Russian army near Ukraine have reached full combat strength. No one knows what will happen next, but there seem to be two likely outcomes. First, that any conflict is limited to Ukraine territory or second, that it moves beyond Ukraine to other parts of Europe.

If it goes beyond Ukraine’s borders, we could quickly find ourselves again on the threshold of nuclear war, since that’s a red line for NATO. But Russia also has other cards to play. They could launch massive cyber-attacks on the US, attacking and disabling our power grids, communications systems, and/or our financial system.

We would try to do the same inside Russia.

Wrongo isn’t trying to spread fear. He’s expressing the hope that we can get past all of the hollow political posturing and take a cold, hard look at what we’re truly trying to achieve if we decide on military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.

In a sense, the world changed on Friday when China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin met in Beijing. Their joint statement is unequivocal. China & Russia are now explicitly willing to at least challenge or possibly replace, Pax Americana, in Eurasia.

Borrowing from ancient history, in 560 BC, King Croesus was considering war on Persia. He consulted the Oracle at Delphi. Famously, the Oracle’s forecast was “If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire”. Let’s hope that Biden is receiving less ambiguous advice.

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Saturday Soother – February 5, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Paradise Springs, South Kettle Moraine, Eagle, WI – January 2022 photo by Nick Schroeter. The spring water is warm enough that it doesn’t freeze in winter

This week two years ago, Covid began to enter America’s consciousness. It was February 3, 2020 when Trump declared a public health emergency because of the virus. Now, Republicans are again saying “let ‘er rip”. Mother Jones reported that Iowa is taking “done with Covid” to a whole new level. On Thursday, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced a plan to end the state’s Covid disaster declaration and to shut down its case count and vaccination websites later this month.

From the Des Moines Register:

“We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat COVID-19 as a public health emergency indefinitely,” Reynolds said in a statement. “After two years, it’s no longer feasible or necessary. The flu and other infectious illnesses are part of our everyday lives, and coronavirus can be managed similarly.”

In a state with less than two-thirds of the population over 5 years old fully vaccinated, Wrongo asks what kind of governor and legislature shuts down a website aimed at making it easier for people to get their shots? If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that it is in the people’s best interest to make it as easy as possible to vaccinate as many people as possible.

The Register adds:

“Her move comes as Iowa’s spike in cases and hospitalizations from the omicron variant has begun to ease. Still, 794 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Iowa as of Wednesday, while 109 patients required intensive care and 51 required ventilators.”

BTW, 70.6% of the patients in Iowa ICUs were not vaccinated. Having contemporaneous data allows us to see that Iowa recorded more than 150 additional COVID-19 deaths in its weekly update last Friday. In the same report, Iowa’s health department recorded just three additional flu deaths in its weekly flu report Jan. 28, bringing the total since last fall to just 13.

The data do not seem to make a case to treat Covid and the flu the same way.

The governor’s decision to end the emergency declaration may be more sensible. Many states have already discontinued theirs. And as Omicron case counts plummet, maybe there’s a chance to reallocate resources to other state priorities.

Today you can check Iowa’s status on its readable and useful Covid dashboard. That dashboard will now be going away.

Soon, the state health department’s website will not include regular reports on Covid hospitalizations or nursing home outbreaks. Kelly Garcia, interim director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, said Iowa will no longer require hospitals and nursing homes to report the data to the state, since they already report it to the federal government. Iowans wanting updates on those numbers will be referred to federal websites.

Lina Tucker Reinders, executive director of the Iowa Public Health Association, said in an interview that the move was premature, and could give Iowans the false impression the pandemic is over.

Iowa’s own statistics show that isn’t the case.

It’s become an article of faith inside the Republican cult that Covid is No Big Deal, and that vaccinations are either unnecessary or some sort of plot. And that masks are also unnecessary, because Covid is just like the flu.

Across the country, these same Republicans are seeing the elderly in their families, neighborhoods and churches die of Covid while a free and effective vaccine is available. But they don’t care enough to make getting themselves vaccinated a priority.

If they don’t care about their elders, why would they care about nurses, or teachers? That would require disrupting their entire worldview.

No scientist says that the virus is finished mutating. So will treating it like the flu be good enough? If it isn’t, Gov. Reynolds certainly won’t give a shit.

Time to let go for a few minutes and relocate to a chair by a window for our Saturday Soother.

It will be another winter weekend of indoor sports in New England, with binge streaming of favorite shows on tap, along with chiseling ice on the walkways around the Mansion of Wrong.

Let’s start into the weekend by brewing up a large mug of Chutzpah Coffee ($13.99/ 12oz.) brought to us by Hebrew Coffee. Their tag line is “A strong coffee to get you off your tuches”. Now settle into your chair and watch “Pow Surf 101”, a long snowboard ride through deep powder, while listening to Claude Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”, written in 1890 when Debussy was 28. The snowboarding takes place in Steamboat Springs, CO. Consider this Wrongo’s nod to the Winter Olympics:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 30, 2022

Well, this was predictable. NPR reported that China’s ambassador to the US warned that the US could face a possible “military conflict” with China over Taiwan:

“If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the US, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict.”

It isn’t a coincidence that China raises the specter of war while the US is focused on a possible threat by Russia in Ukraine. This week, 39 Chinese military aircraft flew near Taiwan, including two of China’s most advanced warplanes, their J-16D jets. Military analysts think that the J-16D has capacity to interfere with Taiwan’s defense radar systems and could make a huge difference in combat.

This is more evidence of how strategically fraught America’s legacy global policies are in a multi-polar world. Russia is threatening NATO and our Western allies, while simultaneously, China threatens our strategic position in Asia. We haven’t fought a two-theater war in 77 years, and haven’t won a war since.

It’s ironic that neither Taiwan nor Ukraine are formal mutual defense treaty partners with the US, yet US defense hawks think we should defend either or both. On to cartoons.

Surviving is difficult when you live in the wild:

Some voices on the Right support Russia:

Breyer retires, but opinions differ on who owns the right to replace him:

There seems very little Republicans can do to stop Biden from filling this seat, since there’s no filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. That was taken away by Mitch McConnell, during the nomination of Neil Gorsuch.

Mitch looks for a loophole:

The never-ending Republican hissy fit:

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “MAUS”, is a memoir about the Holocaust. It was banned last week by a school board in Tennessee. In the book, the cats are the Germans while the mice are the Jews:

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Monday Wake Up Call – Remembering MLK, Jr.

The Daily Escape:

After an ice storm, Taos NM – January 2022 photo by Bob Benson

“Freedom without consequences is a myth. Our actions always have consequences. The question is: who will bear them?” – Seth Godin

The year 1968 was pivotal. In addition to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it brought the Tet Offensive, student protests across the country, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the student and police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, Black Power salutes at the Olympics, and the triumph of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy.

MLK, along with others in our churches and a few courageous politicians, came together to support the Big Idea that Separate was not Equal. MLK gave a voice to that Big Idea. His presence, power and persuasiveness drove our political process to an outcome in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was completely unthinkable in 1954 when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court.

Wrongo participated in the Civil Rights movement from 1958 to 1962. He left active participation in the movement believing good ideas and a morally sound position would change our politics. He was wrong.

Legislation has recently passed in eight states that will restrict what students can be taught about our past. This is an effort to segregate certain subjects from our common history. These Republican states want to diminish or exclude the stories that speak to slavery, to Jim Crow, and to other moments in which America’s deepest shortcomings around the subject of race in America are told.

Wrongo wishes that this represented a minority of the Republican Party. But when Biden spoke in Atlanta, he said:

“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Dr. King had said that stripping the right to vote from Black southerners laid the groundwork for laws that further disadvantaged poor people, even across racial lines. Then as now, Southern legislatures justified limiting the franchise to vote with specious claims about electoral shenanigans.

Biden’s words set Republican teeth on edge. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Biden:

“…called millions of Americans his domestic enemies…and that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace….If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well you’re Jefferson Davis.”

Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer tweeted:

“Now he says disagreeing w/him on voting laws means you’re a segregationist, like George Wallace or Bull Connor. How low can he go?”

The linkage between trying not to teach America’s true history with the censorious outrage shown by Republicans over Biden’s comments is clear. Biden said America needed to be on the side of voting rights.

That was Dr. King’s great struggle, and his great success.

But Republicans want to whitewash that history. They also condemn Biden’s efforts to tie today back to our undemocratic past. As Jelani Cobb says this week in the New Yorker:

“This holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., sees a nation embroiled in conflicts that would have looked numbingly familiar to him. As school curricula and online discourse threaten to narrow our understanding of both past and future, it’s more important than ever to take stock of our history and its consequences….

Time to wake up America! We are docile sheep heading back to the barn, the place where we will be shorn of our democracy, just as surely as wool is shorn from the sheep. The smoking guns are all around us, and yet, we seem hopelessly divided about what we should do to change course.

To help you wake up, let’s listen to Wrongo’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their 1986 album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we remember as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech in “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why focus on that part of the speech? One day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, or how whatever remains of their civil rights, came to be.

Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, take the time to teach a child about why MLK is so important.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 16, 2022

A new Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted between January 7 – 10 of a nationwide sample of 1,313 adults shows that Americans are confused about which Party is protecting voting rights:

(hat tip: Jobsanger)

This is another example of poor messaging by Democrats. Republicans have been trying to suppress voting in many states, and the Republicans in Congress have prevented Democrats from passing legislation to protect the right to vote for all citizens. But only 45% say Democrats are protecting the right to vote and 43% say it’s the Republicans. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 2.7%, meaning it’s a virtual tie.

There are only three cohorts with more than 50% saying that one Party is better. Women (52%) and Blacks (86%) say it’s the Democrats, while Whites (51%) say it’s the Republicans. It’s also interesting that 12% apparently have no opinion about which Party is better for voting rights. Whatever the reason why this poll is so close, it isn’t good for the country. On to cartoons.

Let’s vote our way out:

More GOP inflation:

Sen. Sinema is just not that into him

Are Sen. Manchin’s priorities misplaced?

Supremes reject federal government’s right to set rules for public safety:

(The mandate would have covered about 84.2 million Americans. OSHA estimated (before Omicron) that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over a six-month period.)

Supremes can’t rule on Djokovic:

 

 

 

 

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Saturday Soother – January 15, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Mount Pierce, with Mt. Washington in background, NH – photo by Eric Duma

On Tuesday, Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick won an election to fill the seat in Florida’s vacant 20th Congressional District. She will replace the late Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D) who died last April after losing his fight with pancreatic cancer.

Cherfilus-McCormick, a 42-year old health-care company CEO, easily defeated Republican nominee Jason Mariner. The WaPo reports that Mariner had talked openly during the campaign about his past convictions for theft and cocaine possession and his time in jail. Bless his heart!

It wasn’t expected to be a competitive contest since Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans in the district. Biden won Florida’s 20th in 2020 with 77% of the vote, while Cherfilus-McCormick won the special election with 79%.

The CBS affiliate in Miami reports that Mariner is now refusing to concede his 60-point loss and is demanding an investigation into “election fraud”:

“Now they called the race, I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean…that we lost,”

He had filed a lawsuit before the polls even closed alleging there were problems with the ballots in Palm Beach and Broward Counties.

While we know that winning candidates can take office even without a concession, Republicans are turning into the Party of sore losers. When the 2022 mid-terms roll around, it is abundantly clear that few Republicans will concede in their races.

This makes a lie of what some Democrats (and a few Republicans) have said about the looming problems with vote counting; that if the winning margins are big enough, elections can’t be stolen. Margins are rarely as large as Cherfilus-McCormick’s, and her opponent isn’t conceding.

The entire point of the GOP’s continuing election lies is to undermine the legitimacy of wins by Democratic candidates. We’ll soon see whether contested mid-term elections won by Democrats will be judged as fraudulent in the many Republican-controlled states.

The broader Republican Party understands that there’s no such thing as a bad Conservative. Until they aren’t. At which point they call them liberals. As Rick Perlstein famously observed, in Conservative circles, “Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.”

When Congresswoman Cherfilus-McCormick takes office, Democrats will again hold 10 more House seats than Republicans. There is currently one vacancy in the House, the empty California seat formerly held by Congressman Devin Nunes (R).

Let’s move on from this week’s sad news that we will not see Democrats break the filibuster to pass either the For the People Act or the somewhat more modest Freedom to Vote Act. it’s time for our Saturday Soother!

Here in the Northeast, we’re expecting snow on Martin Luther King Jr. day, although we still have a respectable amount of snow on the Fields of Wrong. Today we’re hosting another gathering of family who were unable to visit when Wrongo inconveniently got Covid on Christmas Eve.

So the time is right to have a Saturday Soother before the house fills up. Let’s start by brewing up a vente cup of Panama Washed Process Gesha ($50/6 oz. That tells you inflation is really out of control!) from Jersey City, NJ’s own Modcup roasters.

Now grab a seat by the fireplace and remember Ronnie Spector, who died this week. Spector and the Ronettes were (along with the Shirelles) the essential 1960s girl groups. In 1963, the Ronettes joined forces with Wall of Sound producer, the odious Phil Spector, by cold-calling him.

The Ronettes went on to have nine top-ten hits working with Spector. Ronnie and Phil married in 1968. During the marriage, Spector was violent and abusive, subjecting her to physical and emotional threats, and locking her up in their home. She finally managed to escape, barefoot and with just the clothes on her back.

Now, listen to a 1987 cover of the Ronette’s original “Be My Baby” this time featuring Ronnie Spector alongside The E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons, with backing vocals by Belinda Carlisle, originally of the Go-Go’s, and Grace Slick from the Jefferson Airplane. The song was written by Ellie Greenwich, and was a genuine teen anthem in 1963, it was recorded live at The Latin Quarter, NYC, in February, 1987:

RIP Ronnie!

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Saturday Soother – January 8, 2022

The Daily Escape

Hopi Buttes, AZ – January 2022 photo by Jon Ray Doc

January 6 should have been a national day of mourning. The president spoke in the very place that symbolized the attempted coup, the Rotunda of the Capitol. From Biden: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“We saw with our own eyes: rioters menaced these halls, threatening the life of the Speaker of the House, directing to hang the Vice President of the United States of America. What did we not see? We did not see a former president, (Trump) who had just rallied the mob to attack, sitting in a private dining room off the Oval Office in the White House, watching it all on television and doing nothing for hours as police were assaulted, lives at risk, the national Capitol under siege.”

You can watch his speech here.

But except for a very few, Republicans boycotted Thursday’s 1/6 events. We have to accept that means they support the insurrection and the candidate who mobilized it:

“Top Republicans were nowhere to be found at the Capitol on Thursday as President Biden and members of Congress commemorated the deadliest attack on the building in centuries, reflecting the party’s reluctance to acknowledge the Jan. 6 riot or confront its own role in stoking it.”

Trump won the argument within the Party over his efforts to nullify the election results. McConnell, McCarthy, and their allies abandoned the thought of considering impeaching Trump over January 6. That instead became a rallying cry for Democrats. When the second impeachment went forward, the Republicans closed ranks behind Trump.

Wrongo argued for the second impeachment. With hindsight, that effort has ended any bipartisan effort to get to the truth about who and what caused Jan. 6. Republicans initially supported a commission to investigate it, but soon abandoned even that.

A bit of history: When Hitler attempted his putsch in 1923, he got off with a slap on the wrist thanks to a sympathetic right-wing judge. A decade later he was chancellor. That’s a stark history lesson for AG Merrick Garland.

The attempted putschists who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6 are being prosecuted, but it’s the principal organizers who should now be getting the primary attention of law enforcement. Republicans are hoping that Garland will sweep the potential crimes committed by Trump and his organizers, like Bannon, Meadows, and Navarro, under the rug.

We now find ourselves in a place where whatever the Democrats say Republicans did on Jan. 6 is mirrored: Republicans are saying that it’s the Democrats who are doing those exact things. The Republican Party is trying to end anything resembling democracy in America by relying on the claim that the Democratic Party is trying to end anything resembling democracy in America.

This is the ultimate expression of the rule that every accusation made by the Republicans is in fact a confession. From the AP:

“….since that day, separate versions — one factual, one fanciful — have taken hold. The Capitol riot — the violent culmination of a bid to delegitimize the 2020 election and block its certification — has morphed into a partisan ‘Rashomon,’ the classic Japanese film about a slaying told from varying and conflicting points of view.”

Instead of receding into the past, the story of the Capitol riot is yet to be fully written. America needs the DOJ and the House Select Committee to tell the story by criminal referrals.

Leave the history of the event to historians.

We need to take at least a momentary break from thinking and talking about January 6. It’s Saturday and time for our Saturday Soother, and boy, we need one today. It snowed quite a bit in New England on Friday morning, with totals between 3” and 15” depending on location. Once again, Wrongo’s repaired snowblower served as an insurance policy against a heavy snowfall. We got a mere 5”, so Wrongo got to exercise his snow shovel instead.

We’re having a belated Christmas party today. Between Covid and suspected Covid, this is the first time that some of us can occupy the same space. So, before the family descends on the Mansion of Wrong, let’s brew up a strong cup of Conquistador coffee ($18/12 oz.) from San Francisco’s Henry’s House of Coffee.

Now grab a comfy seat by a window, look out on the winter wonderland and listen to the “To Kill A Mockingbird Suite” written by Elmer Bernstein for the 1962 movie. Bernstein was one of the most prolific composers to emerge in Hollywood in the 1950s. It’s played here by the Beethoven Academy Orchestra, in Krakow Poland, with Sara Andon on solo flute:

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