Middleboro Review and so on blogspot: JANUARY 6 INSURRECTION

Showing posts with label JANUARY 6 INSURRECTION. Show all posts

Saturday, January 8, 2022

RSN: FOCUS: Juan Cole | Dick Cheney Says He Doesn't Recognize Current GOP, but He Helped Pave Way for Insurrection

08 January 22

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08 January 22

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FOCUS: Juan Cole | Dick Cheney Says He Doesn't Recognize Current GOP, but He Helped Pave Way for Insurrection
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "Former Vice President Dick Cheney accompanied his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), to the Capitol on Thursday to join the moment of silence in commemoration of the Jan. 6 insurrection. They were the only Republicans to attend."

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accompanied his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), to the Capitol on Thursday to join the moment of silence in commemoration of the Jan. 6 insurrection. They were the only Republicans to attend.

The elder Cheney was quoted as saying of the Republican House leadership, “It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years.” He released a statement saying, “I am deeply disappointed at the failure of many members of my party to recognize the grave nature of the January 6 attacks and the ongoing threat to our nation.”

I don’t want to be churlish. I don’t agree with the Cheneys about virtually anything in politics. But I do give credit to Rep. Liz Cheney for making a stand against the Trump-provoked 1/6 insurrection, and against the dishonesty and authoritarianism of Trump in general. You can relate to people as human beings, and on that level, you have to admire her courage. I wonder whether a Trump state like Wyoming will reelect her. There are lots of Republican representatives in Congress who agree with her, but who will not say so publicly because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Liz Cheney has more moral courage than they do, and she should be applauded for standing up and doing the right thing.

Her father, Dick Cheney, was there to give support to his daughter and to slap minority leader Kevin McCarthy around for his ass-kissing of Donald Trump. People keep saying McCarthy kissed the ring, but Trump is not the Pope and we know what McCarthy is really kissing. Dick Cheney was seen talking to Nancy Pelosi and other representatives. Except for Liz, all the others at the ceremony were Democrats. That’s how pusillanimous the Republicans are.

But when I saw Dick Cheney’s remark that “It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” I knew that I would have to be churlish after all.

The remark reminded me of what Jeffrey Goldberg wrote for the New Yorker in 2005 about former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who served in the Bush senior administration with Cheney, and who had advised against launching a war on Iraq. Scowcroft feared that Cheney had gotten himself surrounded by blinkered hawks like the Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis:

“Bernard Lewis says, ‘I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.’ ” Cheney, in particular, Scowcroft thinks, accepted Lewis’s view of Middle East politics. “The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney,” Scowcroft said. “I consider Cheney a good friend—I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

“Dick Cheney I don’t know any more.” That was 2005.

Now Dick Cheney says he doesn’t know the House Republican Party any more. Where will this ratcheting of unrecognizability end up? The Republicans are going farther right every decade, such that the previous decade’s leaders no longer know them. At this rate they’ll be Attila the Hun sacking what’s left of civilization by 2030.

So here comes the churlish part: Dick Cheney paved the way for Trump and the Capitol Insurrection.

I wrote for Salon about some of Cheney’s antics even once he left office. Cheney championed the use of torture by the U.S. government, and never recanted. Deliberate, in-your-face disregard for international human rights laws and norms has become a signature of the GOP. Cheney honed it to a fine art.

Cheney attacked Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican, and promoted Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the party (yes).

Then Rush Limbaugh turned into the tip of the spear for the presidency of Donald Trump. Limbaugh compared the Capitol Insurrection to the American Revolution. Cheney promoted Rush. This is what happens when you push the country into the arms of far right dittoheads.

As for Cheney’s view of Powell, that black and white view of the world, so that the first Black Republican Secretary of State is excommunicated for not being right-wing enough, is very Trumpian.

Colin Powell got tired of being kicked out, so during the Trump years he declared himself no longer a Republican.

Now it is Liz Cheney whose party credentials the other Republicans are questioning. Can Dick Cheney see how he personally paved the way for this situation?

Today’s Big Lie is that Trump won the 2020 election. The Big Lie in 2002 was that Iraq was “fairly close” to having a nuclear weapon. The author of that Big Lie? Dick Cheney.

When you get a party used to swallowing blatant falsehoods, eventually it will lose its grip on reality. Dick Cheney started the GOP down that road.

So, good for him that he stood with his daughter and with Nancy Pelosi to condemn the Trump conspiracy against America. But he is part of a longer-running such conspiracy that he had never renounced or apologized for, which makes his stand on Thursday ring a little hollow.

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Friday, December 31, 2021

Heath Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson

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December 29, 2021 (Wednesday)

Yesterday, Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo reported that the Trump allies who organized the rally at the Ellipse at 9:00 a.m. on January 6 also planned a second rally that day on the steps of the Supreme Court. To get from one to the other, rally-goers would have to walk past the Capitol building down Constitution Avenue, although neither had a permit for a march. 

The rally at the Supreme Court fell apart as rally-goers stormed the Capitol. 

Trump’s team appeared to be trying to keep pressure on Congress during the counting of the certified electoral votes from the states, perhaps with the intent of slowing down the count enough to throw it into the House of Representatives or to the Supreme Court. In either of those cases, Trump expected to win because in a presidential election that takes place in the House, each state gets one vote, and there were more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states. Thanks to then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) removal of the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments, Trump had been able to put three justices on the Supreme Court, and he had said publicly that he expected they would rule in his favor if the election went in front of the court.

This story is an important backdrop of another story that is getting oxygen: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro’s claim that he, Trump, and Trump loyalist Steve Bannon had a peaceful plan to overturn the election and that the three of them were “the last three people on God’s good Earth who wanted to see violence erupt on Capitol Hill.” 

According to these stories, their plan—which Navarro dubs the Green Bay Sweep—was to get more than 100 senators and representatives to object to the counting of the certified ballots. They hoped this would pressure Vice President Mike Pence to send certified votes back to the six contested states, where Republicans in the state legislatures could send in new counts for Trump. There was, he insists, no plan for violence; indeed, the riot interrupted the plan by making congress members determined to certify the ballots.

Their plan, he writes, was to force journalists to cover the Trump team’s insistence that the election had been characterized by fraud, accusations that had been repeatedly debunked by state election officials and courts of law. The plan “was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings…. But we thought we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.” Televised hearings in which Trump Republicans lied about election fraud would cement that idea in the public mind. 

Maybe. It is notable that the only evidence for this entire story so far is Navarro’s own book, and there’s an awful lot about this that doesn’t add up (not least that if Trump deplored the violence, why did it take him more than three hours to tell his supporters to go home?). What does add up, though, in this version of events is that there is a long-standing feud between Bannon and Trump advisor Roger Stone, who recently blamed Bannon for the violence at the Capitol. This story exonerates Trump and Bannon and throws responsibility for the violence to others, notably Stone. 

Although Navarro’s story is iffy, it does identify an important pattern. Since the 1990s, Republicans have used violence and the news coverage it gets to gain through pressure what they could not gain through votes. 

Stone engineered a crucial moment for that dynamic when he helped to drive the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot that shut down the recounting of ballots in Miami-Dade County, Florida, during the 2000 election. That recount would decide whether Florida’s electoral votes would go to Democrat Al Gore or Republican George W. Bush. As the recount showed the count swinging to Gore, Republican operatives stormed the station where the recount was taking place, insisting that the Democrats were trying to steal the election. 

“The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba,” Stone later told legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. "We were very explicitly drawing that analogy.” “It had to be a three-legged stool. We had to fight in the courts, in the recount centers and in the streets—in public opinion,” Bush campaign operative Brad Blakeman said. 

As the media covered the riot, the canvassing board voted to shut down the recount because of the public perception that the recount was not transparent, and because the interference meant the recount could not be completed before the deadline the court had established. “We scared the crap out of them when we descended on them,” Blakeman later told Michael E. Miller of the Washington Post. The chair of the county’s Democratic Party noted, “Violence, fear and physical intimidation affected the outcome of a lawful elections process.” Blakeman’s response? “We got some blowback afterwards, but so what? We won.”

That Stone and other Republican operatives would have fallen back on a violent mob to slow down an election proceeding twenty years after it had worked so well is not a stretch. 

Still, Navarro seems eager to distance himself, Trump, and Bannon from any such plan. That eagerness might reflect a hope of shielding themselves from the idea they were part of a conspiracy to interfere with an official government proceeding. Such interference is a federal offense, thanks to a law passed initially during Reconstruction after the Civil War, when members of the Ku Klux Klan were preventing Black legislators and their white Republican allies from holding office or discharging their official duties once elected.

Prosecutors have charged a number of January 6 defendants with committing such interference, and judges—including judges appointed by Trump—have rejected defendants’ arguments that they were simply exercising their right to free speech when they attacked the Capitol. Investigators are exploring the connections among the rioters before January 6 and on that day itself, establishing that the attack was not a group of individual protesters who randomly attacked at the same time, but rather was coordinated. 

The vice-chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Liz Cheney (R-WY), has said that the committee is looking to see if Trump was part of that coordination and seeking to determine: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceedings to count electoral votes?” 

Meanwhile, the former president continues to try to hamper that investigation. Today, Trump’s lawyers added a supplemental brief to his executive privilege case before the Supreme Court. The brief claims that since the committee is looking at making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, it is not engaged in the process of writing new legislation, and thus it is exceeding its powers and has no legitimate reason to see the documents Trump is trying to shield.

But also today, a group of former Department of Justice and executive branch lawyers, including ones who worked for presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging it to deny Trump’s request that the court block the committee’s subpoena for Trump’s records from the National Archives and Records Administration. The brief’s authors established that administrations have often allowed Congress to see executive branch documents during investigations and that there is clearly a need for legislation to make sure another attack on our democratic process never happens again. 

The committee must see the materials, they wrote, because “[i]t is difficult to imagine a more compelling interest than the House’s interest in determining what legislation might be necessary to respond to the most significant attack on the Capitol in 200 years and the effort to undermine our basic form of government that that attack represented.”

Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/.../january-6-supreme-court...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-advisor-peter-navarro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../its-insanity-how.../
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../4e581d00-5c51-11ec...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1985
​​https://www.supremecourt.gov/.../20211229145839584...
https://twitter.com/Teri.../status/1476353108934422528
https://apnews.com/.../joe-biden-riots-capitol-siege...
https://www.supremecourt.gov/.../20211229075025712...
https://thehill.com/.../587606-ex-white-house-doj...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../text-messages-meadows.../


TALKINGPOINTSMEMO.COM
EXCLUSIVE: There Was ANOTHER Rally Planned On Jan. 6 ... At The Supreme Court

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Democrats score MAJOR election victory

Today's Top Stories:

Democrat Phil Murphy wins reelection as Governor of New Jersey
Murphy is the first Democrat in 40 years to win a gubernatorial reelection in the state.

Here's what went wrong in the Virginia election
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down the disappointing results for Democrats.

Republicans try to set TRAP for Democrats over Biden's new bill
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Disgraceful.

Speaker Pelosi adds paid family and medical leave back into spending bill
In a major shift, the House Speaker announced that four weeks of paid family and medical leave will be added back into the social spending bill, after Democrats had previously scrapped the provision from the package.

At least 8 Republicans who attended the Jan. 6 rally right before the insurrection won their elections
Some voters used their sacred right to vote to endorse a violent attack on American democracy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert deliver veiled threat to a deputy warden at Jan. 6th jail
The two far-right representatives reached for the nuclear option when their PR stunt backfired and they were denied access to the facility.

Voting machine company sues Newsmax and OAN for spreading lies about them stealing the election
Voting technology company Smartmatic sued the right-wing networks, saying they must be held accountable for spreading lies that their tech rigged the election against then-President Donald Trump.

Biden urges parents to vaccinate their 5 to 11-year-old children
The president called the CDC's authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine for kids in the new age demographic "a giant step forward to further accelerate our path out of this pandemic."

Senate Republicans block John Lewis voting rights bill
At this point, the GOP cannot possibly make it any more obvious that they simply do not believe in the idea of democracy.

Twitter suspends Newsmax White House reporter who said vaccines contain Satanic tracking devices
Emerald Robinson's conspiratorial tweet about COVID-19 went viral and ended in the social media website temporarily blocking her access to her account.

Iran nuclear talks to resume November 29 after five months
The Biden administrations is striving to undo the near incalculable diplomatic damage done when Trump unilaterally pulled out of Obama's historic Iran deal.