Saturday, August 07, 2021

If I Ran The Circus 🎪

I'm expecting information like this to come out through the House Commission investigating the incident on January 6 (I'm tired of calling it anything; I'm going for mundane).  I would also note much of the information that's coming out now is coming from the Justice Department, not to it.  They don't need the FBI to chase down leads and witnesses; they have the documents.

What they do with them is the question.

But "accountability" is not the Holy Grail you are all looking for.  The people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 are being held accountable.  A number of them have already plead guilty, been sentenced, and are in jail or released on parole.  That's accountability.  Do you imagine it will, alone, stem the next assault?  Without Trump, or someone like him, there won't be such an assault, but what do we do to prevent another Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk?  Arrest the one we have?  I'm all for it, but the next Trump will just avoid this one's mistakes.  Will we avoid our national mistake?

Aye, there's the rub.

We need the commission's report and public investigation just as much as we need trials in criminal court. I would be happy to see Jeffrey Clark and Donald Trump standing trial for violating federal laws related to politics and government employee coercion.  I'll be even happier if the commission comes up with clear evidence of the problems, and offers clear direction for how to fix it.

I mean, as long as we don't end up with another Department of Homeland Security.  I still want to see that nonsense dismantled.

We need Constitutional and statutory change to prevent the next Trump.  We aren't going to get anywhere close to that by just putting the one we have now in jail.  The situations are not comparable, but the Germans didn't wipe their hands and say "Well, Hitler's dead, he was held accountable, nothing more to be done."  They went to tremendous efforts on their own, not just under foreign occupation, to be sure another Hitler wouldn't come along again.  Because they understood the collapse of the Nazi regime and the death of Hitler weren't enough to dissuade the next would-be Hitler from trying to get it right next time.

I oversimplify history and events to make my point: punishment is not the deterrent we think it is.  Trump already thinks he's beyond the law.  He's thought that most of his life.  The next Trump will, too.  We can't arrest the next Trump before he/she happens; we have to prevent them from happening.  He shouldn't have happened the first time.

We can’t deter loonies by arresting the prior generation of loonies. It's entirely on us to keep the circus from coming back to town.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)