From: slider@anashram.com

A little more than a week ago, most Americans – perhaps even many of
Donald Trump’s supporters – were ready for the 45th president and his administration to pass into the history books. Now Trump is making us all
live through history.

On 6 January, the US Capitol was sacked by a pro-Trump mob, the first large-scale occupation of the citadel of American democracy since the
British burned it during the War of 1812. The mob succeeded in forcing
Congress to evacuate and halting the constitutional ceremony of certifying
the electoral college votes – another first. Now Trump, who was charged by the House of Representatives with “incitement of insurrection” for his
role in the riot that left five dead, has become the first president in
history ever to be impeached twice.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/15/congressional-republicans-trump-lie-overturn-election-riot

Ten Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump, the largest number of lawmakers ever to support impeaching a president from their own party. But then, in the words of Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming
who holds the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United
States of his office and his oath to the constitution.”

Trump is unlikely to become the first president removed from office, since
the outgoing Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, won’t reconvene the Senate until the day before Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next
president. But if the Senate does eventually vote to convict Trump, he
will become the first ex-president ever to be barred from holding any
future federal office.

McConnell has, shockingly, told colleagues that he is open to convicting
Trump. In the view of many party strategists, Republicans might be better
off if Trump were prevented from running again. The possibility of a 2024
Trump campaign freezes out potential successors and prevents the party
from moving in new and more positive directions. The president arguably
cost his party its Senate majority with his lies and conspiracy theories
about the election, which depressed Republican turnout in the pivotal
Georgia senatorial races. His role in inciting the Capitol riot disgraced
his party as well as his legacy. Tellingly, almost no Republicans
attempted to defend him during the impeachment hearings. Instead, many
warned that impeachment would further enrage Trump’s followers when what’s needed is national unity and healing.

Of course, this come-together plea is rank hypocrisy from those who
encouraged Trump’s shredding of the social fabric, believing that his
attempt to tear the country apart would leave them with the bigger half.
The claim that lions would lie down with lambs if Democrats would drop
their vindictive harassment of the outgoing president conveniently
overlooks the fact that the Capitol invasion happened only because Trump
pushed the Big Lie that Democrats, the media, and the Deep State stole the election. And nearly two-thirds of Republicans in Congress made themselves complicit in Trump’s lie by voting to overturn the election results, even
in the wake of that deluded, destructive and deadly riot.

Representative Peter Meijer, a newly elected Republican from Michigan who
was one of the 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment, observed that many
of his party colleagues argued that since millions of Americans believe
the election was stolen, therefore Congress would be justified in
preventing Biden from taking the presidency. But, he pointed out, most of
the voters who believe in this false reality do so precisely because they
have heard it from Trump and his congressional enablers. “That doesn’t
make it right. That doesn’t make it accurate. It means that you lied to
them, and they trusted you and they believed your lies.”

Nonetheless, 45% of Republican voters, according to a recent YouGov poll, approve of the storming of the Capitol. And that’s largely because 72% of Republicans, according to another survey, say that they don’t trust the accuracy of the 2020 election results.

So long as millions of Americans believe in Trump’s Big Lie, the country becomes ungovernable and civil war beckons. If you believe what Trump and
his Republican enablers tell you, you will consider Joe Biden to be “an illegitimate president”, as Trump put it in his 6 January speech, and the members of his administration to be usurpers. Why then should you pay
taxes to such a government or respect its laws? Why wouldn’t you support
the violent overthrow of that government, even if that revolutionary
vanguard was led by the kind of neo-fascists who planned the Capitol
invasion and erected a gallows outside? As Representative Meijer observed,
the logical conclusion of this line of thinking makes it likely that we’ll see “political assassinations or some type of additional attempts to take lives by the folks who feel emboldened by what’s happened”.

Most of Trump’s supporters would probably recoil from the charge that they’re pushing America toward civil war and revolutionary carnage. To
accept the Big Lie, however, requires you to believe that the entire US
justice system, in which even Trump-nominated judges rejected every
baseless claim of electoral fraud asserted by his legal team, is also part
of the conspiracy. And such a widespread rejection of courts and the law
would shatter the political and social stability on which the country’s free-market capitalism depends.

Unsurprisingly, many corporations and institutions have cut ties with
Trump and his businesses and suspended contributions to those
congressional Republicans who challenged Biden’s victory. Many of the party’s mega-donors have also turned off the cash spigot, worrying about reputational damage from being seen to support Trump’s false election
claims and the ensuing Capitol riot.

What, really, does the Republican party believe in now other than the imperative of maintaining Trump in power? So long as the party clings to Trump’s Lost Cause, it rejects business, law and order, national unity,
the constitution, fiscal responsibility, traditional morality, democratic
norms and nearly everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand
for.

If the party has an ideology it’s what the French call je-m’en-foutisme, a contemptuous indifference toward others. It was exemplified by the House Republicans during the Capitol siege who, sheltering with colleagues in a secure location, mocked requests that they wear masks; now three of the Democratic lawmakers who were there have become infected with Covid-19. If Trump’s Republican party has a motto, it’s the Arizona state Republican chair Kelli Ward’s urging the president to “Cross the Rubicon” – that is,
to imitate Julius Caesar’s treasonous action that led to civil war and the collapse of the Roman Republic.

If there is to be civil war, one hopes that it will be bloodless and
confined to the Republican party. The party needs to separate itself from
those who undermine our civil order by maintaining that Democrats stole
the election. The Republican lawmakers who voted against certifying the election should be given off-ramps, perhaps in the form of opportunities
to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy. The party should support efforts like
the new Republican Accountability Project to channel donations to
legislators who face primary challenges as a result of voting for Trump’s impeachment or removal. The party should make sincere efforts to persuade
its base voters to return to reality. And it should accept and perhaps facilitate the departure of the worst bitter-enders into the political wasteland of a third party.

Democrats and others who have little love for the Republican party may
rejoice that Trump has brought it so low. But just as the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the government could not stand as
a house divided, the country cannot now endure if one of the two major political parties rejects the legitimacy of the other when it wins
elections and attempts to govern. It has to become a country with two more-or-less normal parties or none. If Trump-inspired radicalism on the
right isn’t checked by responsible actors on both sides, history will
record this moment as the beginning of the end of American democracy.

### - ahaha the GOP is now basically fucked 4-ways from sunday! :)))

and seeing as they're unlikely to get their act together in a hurry
(because they themselves are now divided too) this basically means there's unlikely to be a right-wing government in office for the foreseeable
future!? (cool)

a good thing for the planet for sure (i.e., let's see what 30 years of the
left can do for the world) but a terrible thing for america itself which
is obviously becoming rapidly schizoid?

it might all work itself out for the best in the end though; a more humble america might not even be such a bad thing in terms of equality and the
helping of others perhaps less fortunate than themselves...

the world is changing!

and ya's better get out of the new road if'n ya can't lend a hand ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ

"for the times they are a-changin'"

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)