Mr. Write's Page

I have ranted on this blog numerous times about Donald Trump, vile Republican politicians, empty-headed conservative voters, and the Fox News bubble. I have opined often that the Trump presidency would not end well, which was a safe and easy prediction.

Still, I didn’t expect it to end with the Kafkaesque spectacle of white supremacists, at Trump’s invitation, storming the Capitol while Congress was in session, with an eye toward maybe killing some politicians and derailing the certification of Joe Biden as President so the Republicans could somehow arrange for Trump to remain in office.

Nor did I expect law enforcement to leave the Capitol so vulnerable under the ominous circumstances in Washington on January 6. At best, it was a shocking intelligence failure. At worst, it means the insurrection was abetted by people on the inside; Frankly, I suspect both.

Clearly, the mob should have been kept well away from the Capitol from the beginning. The Capitol should have been ringed by heavily-armed forces ready to crack heads as necessary — like how they do when facing non-Caucasians.

At this stage, we don’t know with certainty how the riots went down or who, through action or inaction, was complicit in the events. All we know for sure is that Trump specifically told the crowd to march on the Capitol — for which he was slapped with Impeachment Number Two.

But this much is clear: the riots were not carried out by a Trump “MAGA crowd.” The attackers were hard-core, dedicated white supremacists and domestic terrorists who simply accepted Trump’s invitation to take action on his behalf. Trump gave them a window of opportunity, and they took it.

Some of the groups have been around for years, some are new. Many of the leaders are known to the authorities and are on FBI terrorism watch lists. Essentially, they are Nazis and Fascists, and possibly a few anarchists.

In case you need a visual aid:

Simply put, the events of January 6, and whatever further turmoil is ahead of us, is a matter of politics being militarized. Fringe groups have escalated the left-right divide into violence aimed at the government.

And we got here solely and specifically because of the political right wing and its decades-long descent into madness.

Make no mistake, the Democrats are literally blameless. This mess is the fault of the Conservative Republicans, their wacko supporters, and right-wing media.

The descent began, you can argue, when Newt Gingrich got the idea of turning politics into warfare. As GOP House Speaker in the 1990s, Newt didn’t simply oppose the Democratic side, he demonized it. He actively blocked any bills the Democrats proposed because Democrats were made out to be sinister, dangerous, evil.

Gingrich also distributed two lists of specific “trigger” words Republicans should use, one list to promote themselves and the GOP, the other to scorn and belittle Democrats.

Among the words to apply to themselves: courage, liberty, pride, duty, vision, moral, pioneer, principled, and rights.

Among the words to label Democrats: pathetic, bizarre, corrupt, hypocrisy, incompetent, welfare, decay, and greed.

Republicans being Republicans, they embraced Newt’s ideas like hyenas at a fresh kill.

The GOP House Speaker after Gingrich, child-molester Dennis Hastert, contributed the “Hastert rule,” under which no bill was brought up for a vote unless a majority of Republicans supported it. In effect, this ended the concept of negotiating with the opposition and achieving bi-partisan cooperation.

From there, we entered the era in which Mitch McConnell controlled the Senate, and the concept of bi-partisanship was euthanized.

I can’t help it; when I hear Mitch McConnell, I always think Merrick Garland.

Trump has a few days left in his term. The Capitol in DC and most state capitols are on alert for more violence from domestic terrorists. Trump is said to be contemplating a self-pardon and possibly a blanket pardon for his white supremacist rioter friends.

He also plans to have Joint Base Andrews give him a rousing military send-off. I will think of it as a “goodbye and good riddance” party.

When Trump became the Republican nominee for President, I posted this indignant assertion:

Trump is a walking affront to civilized behavior. He continues to make outrageous, caustic statements that, in normal times, in a normal reality, would earn him the ire and scorn of the entire populace and send him slinking back to Trump Tower. But this is the era of the Fox News bubble. And Trump is the Frankenstein monster it created.

Given the insanity that has occurred since then, given the horrific death toll from a virus Trump allowed to spread, given the widespread damage inflicted on this poor country by Trump and his conservative enablers, calling the man a Frankenstein monster was a grave understatement.

Gingrich, Hastert, McConnell, and Trump, respectively.