Wednesday, September 22, 2021

A Few Things I Have Noticed

I don't have to read the article; the caption below the picture says it all. I've compared the fighting over CRT and masks to divorce cases, because I saw Mom & Dad fight each other "for the sake" of Jr., when really Jr. was just the battlefield. Same dynamics here, across the country. Parents generally deny their children agency, usually because minors should not be responsible for their actions (and thus should not have agency). But that makes it easier to deny children their humanity, too. "I, Tireisias, have foresuffered all...." What I was thinking when I saw this story. Glad to have someone else say it for me. What if he'd announced he was going to fly to the moon and eat it, because it's made of green cheese? Because he might as well have.... Frankly, if it really was that easy, we might as well give up the game now. Indeed, it'd be a wonder we made it this far. But ultimately we are a government of persons AND laws. And the persons in that chamber were not going to countenance the shenanigans Pence was urged to get up to in that memo.  Laws are finally only as effective as the people who agree to follow them.  The Senate and the House were always going to follow them.  As I never tire of saying, Hawley & Co. never wanted the responsibility for denying Biden's victory, especially because that was a fight they couldn't win.  The risk of success on Jan. 6 in that chamber was all in Trump's head.  The scheme the memo outlined was only fit for the chamber pot.

We the people did all this to ourselves.  We, in the end, are responsible.  When we start acting like it, things will change for the better.  In the meantime, declaring democracy "dead" or at least comatose and likely to slip away any minute, is not really the inspirational message so many on Twitter think it is.

As to that memo: It turns out Eastman had a 6 PAGE memo (one page per point?), and that he was even more ridiculous than anyone realized.  He told Steve Bannon his memo was justified because Biden clearly didn't win.  And to put in a memo to government officials that Biden's victory means "we...have ceased to be a self-governing people" is just....   Well, it's the kind of stupidity I expect to see on Twitter, from people who don't know what they're talking about. The kind of people who take Mike Lindell seriously.  Respond to Eastman accordingly.  Was Eastman ever going to get somewhere with that shit?  Well, the best he can do now is talk to Steve Bannon, if that tells you anything.
An aide to Kelly Loeffler, who was also dating Brian Kemp's daughter (Gov., GA-R) was killed in a three-car collision.  Sidney Powell and others are going Seth Rich on the story, to prove Trump won Georgia; somehow.  Powell has wandered into "X-Files" territory, where everyone is a conspiracist and she alone can see the truth.  But is the whole world crazy except her, or is it not the world that's crazy?

Anyway, she continues to be an embarassment to the State Bar.  Whether they could successfully disbar her (it requires prosecuting and winning a civil suit, up to the Texas Supreme Court if necessary), remains to be seen.

Carry on.
at

1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal8:23 AM

    I wish I were as confident that the Supremes wouldn't have done it if, say, Trump or whoever is the next Republican-fascist president with a McConnell style Senate got even more unitary-executive, etc. fascists hacks on it.

    I have written this morning on how seriously my confidence in the legal profession became about a year ago. If I were a lawyer I think I'd be as reluctant to believe that things like this were impossible as I am now as a non-lawyer. When words can mean whatever a "justice" wants them to mean and people believe that because the Supreme Court says it, we've got to follow it, anything can happen, though more reliably the bad things than the good ones. I was reading about the Naim case which the Warren Court declined to hear because they didn't want to overturn miscegenation so soon as they overturned school segregation. I don't anticipate the Roberts court will have those kinds of hindering qualms about doing unaccustomed things.

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