Michael Flynn Goes Full-Traitor

General Flynn as a cowboy. Hee-ha.

"I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can't happen here?"

The questioner from the audience at Dallas, Texas Q-Annon conference asked former National Security Director and confessed felon, General Michael Flynn.

The audience cheered and applauded.

"No reason. I mean, it should happen," said Flynn.

They cheered and applauded even more.

In Myanmar, a democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup, the leaders of the government seized and imprisoned. When the people protested, the military then turned on their own citizens, killing some 800 Burmese people, including at least 40 children. This is according to Myanmar's Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. More than 4,000 citizens people have been arrested and are being held in the continuing aftermath.

This is what Flynn, and the right, are now calling for here in America. Demanding that the United States military install Q-Anon’s favorite ‘strong’ man, presidential loser Donald Trump as a dictator-in-chief.

This is, simply, treason.

And Flynn called for this during the weekend reserved for memorializing and remembering those we have lost in our nation’s wars. He either forgot about honoring them, or didn’t care.

It should be no surprise to anyone Flynn decided to go full-on traitor, he’s been dancing on that line for years, especially since joining Donald Trump on the Trump campaign trail. He was bound to fall over the line sooner or later. He worked behind the scenes with foreign entities to advance the Trump campaign, and lied to the FBI about it. He confessed, and then (once Sydney Powell stepped in to start spewing right wing conspiracies about Flynn) withdrew his thrice confirmed confession. Then AG Barr tried to undermine the case, and several prosecutors resigned in disgust. The fight over Flynn’s guilt and sentencing continued until he was pardoned by Trump.

During the last days of the election, and in the months after, Flynn was a man unleashed and unhinged. He, Powell, (who had briefly joined the Trump defense team before being pushed out for being too crazy even for them) and Trump advisor and some-time lawyer Lin Wood during the post-election lying seemed to compete with one another over who could be the craziest and make the biggest, most treasonous statements. He even took the Q-Anon ‘pledge’.

Flynn in December was pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize the reigns of power, regardless of the election outcome. As news of this push leaked out, Flynn stated on NewsMax (one of the Trumpier of the right-wing ‘news’ pushers):

"People out there talk about martial law like it's something that we've never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times." (68 times actually, never in an election)

No big deal, nothing much to see here, just taking over the government with the military and installing a dictator. Please, go about your business.

Calls for outright violence have been louder, shriller and more desperate and Trump’s lies of a ‘stolen’ election were absorbed and amplified until they spurred the violence of January 6th at the Capitol. That violence, that attempt to overthrow the election is celebrated by Q-Anon and many on the right, and new violence is constantly advocated, constantly escalated. Again, as if the most outrageous statement wins.

This new statement is Flynn being more explicit about violent overthrow. As a retired general, as a former Trump official, Flynn is a rock star to Trumpers, one they listen to, believe, and follow. To call for a military coup from this platform is irresponsible and utterly dangerous. We’ve seen where this shouting ends. During the last five years we have all seen what the overheated lies and violent rhetoric can do to a crowd ready and willing to do the bidding of those yelling the loudest.

All they need is to believe.

Cover Your Neighbor’s Ass as You Would Cover Your Own.

Two people who should be out of a job.

Kevin McCarthy is screwed.  

Rightly so. How is he screwed? He just showed the country and his own party just how weak a ‘leader’ he is. He sent Rep John Katko (R-NY) to negotiate with the Democrats over the makeup and reach of the January 6th commission, adding a bunch of demands that McCarthy figured the Democrats would never go for; equal representation, subpoena power for both parties, with both the chair and vice-chair having to agree on the issuing of the subpoenas, you know stuff the GOP would never agree to. You just have to look at the biased Benghazi ‘investigations’, controlled by a Republican majority and designed to drive down Hilary Clinton’s polls numbers (which McCarthy admitted) for proof of what McCarthy thinks is a ‘fair’ committee. He figured the Democrats wanted a political witch hunt, because that’s exactly what he would do, so he would undermined it from the start.

While Katko negotiated in good faith, McCarthy gave him nothing but a bottle of what he figured were poison pills to offer the Democrats. The problem was, McCarthy was too cynical for his own good. He figured the whole investigation was a show, ‘insurrection theatre’ designed to just embarrass the GOP. He was wrong. The Democrats actually accepted the GOP demands. They wanted a bi-partisan commission, and they agreed to just that. Katko succeeded when he was supposed to fail, so that when he failed, McCarthy could show that the whole thing was a cynical ploy by Pelosi and the Democrats. Checkmate!

The political cynicism though was all on McCarthy, like pie on Stan Laurel. His version of 3-D chess was actually one-finger checkers, and he had just jumped himself. Hard. Now, he had to deny his own deal, lie about it, calling it a one-sided sham (it wasn’t), and throw his own hand-picked negotiator under the bus. And then back it up over him. He demanded his members vote against the bill, and the GOP House Whip, Steve Scalise announced he would whip his members against the commission.

Kevin and Steve failed.  

35 Republicans broke with their leadership to support the commission. 35. Might not seem a huge number (it should be much bigger, really) but to the credibility of McCarthy’s leadership, and to the extreme partisanship of the GOP, this is a foghorn, a wrecking ball, a Spinal Tap goes-to-eleven feedback blast.

It’s an embarrassment. And all poor Kevin’s fault.

Word is leaking out that many members were pissed off over McCarty’s shameful treatment of Katko, and they just couldn’t go along with the transparent nonsense of ‘peaceful tourists’ invading the Capitol on January 6th to take selfies and admire statues. They remember hiding behind seats, barricading themselves in their offices, fearing for their lives while armed officers kept the insurrectionists at bay with pointed weapons on the floor of the US House of Representatives. They remember calling family to tell them they loved them one last time.

Like the Democrats, those 35 Republicans want answers, Kevin McCarthy be damned.

But…

Oh, there’s always a ‘but’ with today’s GOP, isn’t there? 175 Republicans — That’s 84% of the Republican conference — voted to memory-hole the insurrection. Voted to shrug and walk away. Like they did at both impeachments, like they’ve done over and over since 2015 when Trump descended that ridiculous gold escalator and started his campaign against democracy. A campaign that in January turned into open warfare.

175 Republicans who would rather let Trump and his insurrections control their party than stand up for democracy, stand up to the very people who came to kill them. Make no mistake, the people who stormed the Capitol, by their own account, were armed and looking for blood. Trump has sent out his orders about the commission on his pitiful little blog calling it a “democrat trap” to “shut it down” and they bowed and tried.

Then Mitch McConnell joined in. Both McConnell and McCarthy after the insurrection, blamed Trump. Both said he was culpable. Both have now forgotten all about that, preferring to toe the Trump line and undermine democracy. It’s what Donny would do (is doing), after all. McConnell will now direct the Senate to vote against the commission because… vague reasons. He cited overlap with the DOJ investigation, which he knows is a criminal one, not one into the origins of the mob and the violence. He has no real reason or excuses, except protecting the guilty infesting his own party.

Cover your neighbor’s ass as you would cover your own.

It is essential not only for the GOP to kill the commission, but to hide why they want to kill it. They love to go on about ‘re-litigating 2020’ (isn’t that what these Republican demands for recounts are?), but what they’re really afraid of isn’t exposing the past, it’s the threat of daylight on their on-going campaign against democracy, to undermine confidence in our elections and their fairness. They are laying the groundwork, right in the open, to deny the electoral victory of a Democratic candidate and install a losing Republican one, regardless of the outcome.

They’ll do it, or will at least try.

That’s why the commission must die.

With the bill for the commission now passed in the House, it will go to the Senate, where it will surely be filibustered. If all the Democrats vote for it, that means they have to get 10 Republicans to cross party lines for it to pass. Don’t hold your breath. McConnell has a much better hold on his caucus than McCarthy, and few have shown much will to buck him. I can see a few that might; Romney, Murkowski, maybe Collins. Maybe there are enough secret, closeted Republican senators that will put country over party.

This is where we are, hoping that sanity will break out in the GOP, and enough will step forward to actually do the right thing.

This is where we are.

It’s Not You, Democracy, It’s Them

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, attempting to demonstrate with his hands how far the GOP is from reality. His hands can’t go that wide.

Kevin McCarthy needs to see if he can rent back his balls from Donald Trump long enough to support the investigation into the January 6th insurrection. After all, it was negotiated by his own representative, signed off on by him, and was supposed to move forward. But now?

Now he doesn’t like it anymore.

Evidently, he got another friendly call from Mar-a-Largo because Donny doesn’t want an investigation. Of course he doesn’t. And now Kevin doesn’t either. Not anymore, anyway. Trump is against it, as is most of the GOP, because they are complicit; they supported it, they either went along with the lies that inspired the mobs, broadcasted the lies themselves, or said nothing and hoped it would go away like a bill that comes due when your bank account is empty.  

If we just don’t answer the knocking, it’ll stop, they’ll just go away. But they didn’t. They came back with a battering ram, looking for blood. Not metaphorical blood, actual blood. McCarthy is guilty of going along, of trying to stop democracy, of voting to kill it before it threw his unpopular party and its equally unpopular president out of power. After a period of a day or so where they pretended regret, trying to see where political chips were going to fall, they’ve sprung back into ‘Big Lie’ mode, denying the insurrection and supporting Trump’s continued spewed lunacies.  

The ‘Big Lie’ of the stolen election is now the Republican battleplan of taking power in DC and the states; keep telling your voters they were cheated, that they have actual grievances, that the election and their rightful president were stolen from them. Keep the base angry, seething, ready to storm the polling places and vote for anything Trump and the GOP tell them. Get them angry and near violence and keep them there.

Just not too angry and violent. It’s a subtle and deadly dance, like a replay of the classic French film ‘The Wages of Fear’, only this time it’s not truckers hauling degrading nitro, it’s the GOP playing with the nitro emotions and violence that their most extreme voters are capable of, both already on abundant display long before 1/6.

The Democrats must move ahead on the investigation, without the GOP. They will never cooperate anyway. Hell, they only regret the insurrection didn’t succeed, democracy be damned. A new CBS poll asked GOP voters that if they were a party consultant, would they focus on developing a message and “popular policies and ideas” to win over more voters? Or would they prioritize changes to the voting rules in states and districts?

Almost half the GOP, 47%, went with screwing voters, with making sure ‘those’ people don’t vote. You know, you and me. 2/3rds pledged loyalty to Trump, and thought getting rid of Liz Cheney, a far-right conservative who voted with Trump some 93% of the time, was a good idea. Not loyal enough. Insufficiently ready to steal coming elections.

They are done with democracy. It’s no longer giving them what they need. No, it’s not you, democracy, it’s them. Totally on them, they’re done, they want a divorce.

It’s now up to the Democratic Party to show that democracy can be saved, that it can work. The 1/6 investigation is needed to show the agenda of the GOP, to show the country where the rot is and how deep it goes. The Democrats will have to stop playing nice as usual, stop playing defense and start playing offense. Nancy and Chuck need to go it alone, while they still can.

2022 is coming at us like a freight train, we can hear its mournful whistle in the distance and soon it’ll be too late to get off the tracks.

We have to make sure we’re on that train and not in front of it.

The Last Free Election

Vote here, while we still can.

 “When you give up integrity the rest is easy”.

- JR Ewing

Was our last free election in November of 2020?

It was if the GOP has its way.

What we are seeing right now is an extension of the January 6th coup attempt, a slow-motion insurrection going on in the states where the Republicans hold the legislature. They are purging the party of anyone who doesn’t at least pretend that Donald Trump won an election he lost by 7 million votes. They are working to suppress the votes of those who dare not to vote Republican, to remove barriers that hold them from throwing out the will of the voters, to make flesh the bones of what Trump tried to do in the months after he lost. To make the ‘Big Lie’ our new reality.

Georgia, for example, in 2020 had Brad Raffensperger as Secretary of State. He oversaw a fairly uneventful (as actual electoral problems go) election. It was after the call was made and the outcome was one not expected by Trump and the Republicans that the problems occurred. Now, for a bit of context here, Raffensperger oversaw an election system set up by the current Georgia Governor Republican Brian Kemp when Kemp was Secretary of State, a system designed to elect Republicans. Kemp threw every dirty trick he could in his run for governor and as Secretary, there were a lot he could throw.  

That is the system that Raffensperger oversaw. It should have worked, but it didn’t, at least not the way the Georgia GOP thought it would. Shock turned into anger, turned into accusations of fraud, fanned by the lies of Trump and his supporters. Raffensperger, to his credit, stood up to it, denied the lies and held open recounts of the votes. He didn’t try to ‘find’ the votes Trump demanded he find. He actually ‘stopped the steal’, the attempted theft of the election in Georgia by Trump and his supporters.

Yeah. Well, the Georgia legislature fixed that. They removed the Secretary of State as head of the board of elections, making that position a political appointment. No more Raffensperger getting in their way. They also gave themselves the power to remove local election officials and reject vote totals if they suspect ‘fraud’. How do they define fraud?

When Democrats win, of course. It is obviously a crime and cannot be allowed.

Silly voters, you got it wrong! Don’t worry, we’ll fix that for you.

They are tossing anyone who will not toe the Trump ‘Big Lie’ line, from local election boards (remember Republican Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, the election board member who voted to certify the Biden votes? They got rid of him) to national leaders like Liz Cheney. They are setting up the mechanics to deny any Democrat who would win the 2024 presidential election the position. What seemed like fantasy in 2020, refusing to certify the election and throwing it to a GOP congress who would then decide the election themselves, is now the goal. This is the Republican dream, power without having to actually rely on people voting for them. Why bother with voting when you can just take power? Why pass go to collect $200? Just reach over to the tray and take $200, or maybe more? Who’s going to stop you?

The GOP is a party that has given up on voters and democracy. As demographics change they see their base shrink. If this was a business, they would introduce new products, try to grow into new markets, try to figure out what the people want and work to give it to them. Identify the need, and fill it. The problem here is the majority no longer wants what the Republicans are selling. Lower taxes for the rich, fewer services, and no social safety net for Americans just isn’t a good sell (never was, which is why they push the never-ending culture war), and they’re slowly running out of angry White people, so do they change their message to appeal to a broader audience? No, they just won’t bother with that messy democracy stuff anymore, too uncertain. Better to just take power, to declare the opposition as ‘un-american’ and ‘enemies’ and any defeat of Republicans as ‘fraud’.

There will not be another national election, or probably even local, where if a Republican loses they will not cry ‘fraud’. It’s already happening, Trump has shown them the way, what they must do in the future, and that’s exactly what they will do. Why not? Who will stop them?

They will audition this in 2022 in the sticks to see how it will play. 2024 is opening night.

This is the worst kind of ‘doom and gloom’ porn, I know, where the writer pelts you with godawful news, hardballs thrown fast and furious, one smacking you as you duck the others. I know, but this is what is happening right now, as I type this in a slow dawning morning here in Seattle. A fix for all I write here is sitting in the US Senate right now, S. 1, about to be introduced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, where it will die under the weight of a Republican filibuster. Right now, with this ‘Senate tradition’ the anti-democratic filibuster in place, celebrated by those who enjoy the fruits of nothing getting done, the proposed bill making it easier to vote will gasp and will die.

What to do?

We all know who is holding this up. Senator Joe Manchin claims bipartisanship is more important than actual reform, and his definition of ‘bipartisanship’ is not that the majority of the country (Democrats and Republicans) support it, it’s that the majority of his friends in the Senate support it, country be damned. Now that may be harsh, but I really don’t care. That is the motive I attribute to such an attitude that puts a Senate rule over the will of the people, over the health of our governing principles, our democracy. What else can we say about it?

We can say it to Joe, and the rest of the Senate. Manchin’s contacts are below. Letters are usually better than emails or calls, but anything will help. Mailing mine out later today.

We’ll talk more tomorrow.  

https://www.manchin.senate.gov/contact-joe