2020 Election: Predictions, Results and Reactions

[RoseMorninStar]

I think Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson gets the "prize" for the most idiotic comments about the trial.

After Trump Acquittal, Sen. Ron Johnson Says Jan. 6 ‘Didn’t Seem Like an Armed Insurrection’

Ugh. He's such an embarrassment. He really needs to be gone in 2022. It was such a shame Russ Feingold didn't win that seat. He is an amazing representative.

I did a quick look to see what the QAnon'ers were up to. It seems March 4 is their next big day to watch out for. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens.

[River]

They believe that at some point in the 19th century the US secretly incorporated (no idea what that means) and no laws or Constitutional amendments passed since then are valid, including the one that moved Inauguration Day to Jan. 20. And somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump is secretly still President and will be inaugurated on March 4.

Not sure how that matches with the other theory, which is that Trump and Biden swapped faces and Biden's really Trump.

And somehow, this all links back the core of QAnon, which is basically the 21st century incarnation of the blood libel, with some added twist about people getting high off an adrenaline metabolite. It makes no sense of any kind. Like, the nightmares I had after reading Hyperion, in which the Shrike just randomly showed up everywhere all the time, had more logic to them than any of this crap.

I have no idea how anyone ends up believing any of this stuff to be true. I really don't.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Not sure how that matches with the other theory, which is that Trump and Biden swapped faces and Biden's really Trump.

I guess I haven't been paying as close attention as I thought, because I had not heard of that one!

[RoseMorninStar]

They believe that at some point in the 19th century the US secretly incorporated (no idea what that means) and no laws or Constitutional amendments passed since then are valid, including the one that moved Inauguration Day to Jan. 20. And somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump is secretly still President and will be inaugurated on March 4.

Not sure how that matches with the other theory, which is that Trump and Biden swapped faces and Biden's really Trump.

And somehow, this all links back the core of QAnon, which is basically the 21st century incarnation of the blood libel, with some added twist about people getting high off an adrenaline metabolite. It makes no sense of any kind. Like, the nightmares I had after reading Hyperion, in which the Shrike just randomly showed up everywhere all the time, had more logic to them than any of this crap.

I have no idea how anyone ends up believing any of this stuff to be true. I really don't.

I have no words.

[Túrin Turambar]

Something that I find funny about conspiracy theorists is their ability to believe contradictory things without cognitive dissonance. Like how Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, the disciple of a radical black Christian preacher, and an atheist Marxist revolutionary,

[N.E. Brigand]

I think Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson gets the "prize" for the most idiotic comments about the trial.

After Trump Acquittal, Sen. Ron Johnson Says Jan. 6 ‘Didn’t Seem Like an Armed Insurrection’

Today someone pointed out that just a few days ago, the Senate passed the Officer Eugene Goodman Congressional Gold Medal Act by unanimous consent, which is to say, it wasn't opposed by Sen. Johnson.

And what's the first line of that act?

"On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building was attacked by armed insurrectionists."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The most telling comment made by Sen. Johnson was this one:

The Wisconsin Republican went on to say that he would have been scared if the rioters were supporters of President Joe Biden.

“I wasn’t afraid going into January sixth that there were going to be riots,” he said. “Now, had the tables been turned, if that would have been tens or hundreds of thousands of Biden supporters out there, the people who had been rioting in the streets all summer long, I’d have been a little more concerned about security, but I wasn’t.”

In other words, if they had been black.

[Frelga]

I've stopped pointing out Republican hypocrisy, since they aren't even trying to dissemble anymore.

[RoseMorninStar]

The most telling comment made by Sen. Johnson was this one:

The Wisconsin Republican went on to say that he would have been scared if the rioters were supporters of President Joe Biden.

“I wasn’t afraid going into January sixth that there were going to be riots,” he said. “Now, had the tables been turned, if that would have been tens or hundreds of thousands of Biden supporters out there, the people who had been rioting in the streets all summer long, I’d have been a little more concerned about security, but I wasn’t.”

In other words, if they had been black.

Perhaps he doesn't recall Kyle Rittenhouse? He's certainly not a Biden supporter but committed deadly offenses in his own state on behalf of Trumpian hate squad.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm sure he considers Kyle Rittenhouse a hero.

Sent from my VS988 using Tapatalk

[RoseMorninStar]

Sen. Bill Cassidy explains his vote to convict

I listened to his answer and, good for him. It's as it should be. He said he never felt more conservative in making the choice he did to follow the constitution/evidence and he is right. He doesn't understand how those who consider themselves conservatives (who are supposed to uphold the constitution above all else) could vote the way they did. I'd say it's because those who are backing Trump are not Republicans/conservatives in the traditional sense, they are anti-democrat.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, Bennie Thompson, a key Democratic congressman from Mississippi, who is chairman of the powerful House Homeland Security committee, has filed a lawsuit against Trump and Giuliani, accusing them of conspiring with the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers to cite the insurrection.

Thompson points to Trump's words and tweets in the months leading up to the insurrection to accuse Trump and Giuliani of mobilizing and preparing their supporters for an attack to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election results on January 6.

The lawsuit cites a scarcely used federal statute passed after the Civil War that was intended to combat violence from the Ku Klux Klan; it allows civil actions to be brought against people who use "force, intimidation, or threat" to prevent anyone from upholding the duties of their office.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/politics ... index.html

[Frelga]

Actual Quote: “We did not send him there to vote his conscience, we did not send him there to do the right thing, whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us.” - Dave Ball, Washington Cty PA GOP Chair

PA GOP on why Sen. Toomey should be censured for voting to convict Trump.

[Inanna]

I thought you were providing the quote in the translation game.

[Maria]

Something that I find funny about conspiracy theorists is their ability to believe contradictory things without cognitive dissonance. Like how Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, the disciple of a radical black Christian preacher, and an atheist Marxist revolutionary,

I've heard that the cognitive dissonance required to believe such things is what makes them so immune to logical persuasion. They are already well practiced in accepting the contradictory views within themselves- an outside influence has no chance against that.

[RoseMorninStar]

Actual Quote: “We did not send him there to vote his conscience, we did not send him there to do the right thing, whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us.” - Dave Ball, Washington Cty PA GOP Chair

PA GOP on why Sen. Toomey should be censured for voting to convict Trump.

It's frustrating. I don't know how they did it, but they did a very good job of putting not Republicans, but Trump loyalists in top key positions at many levels of the GOP. That there are so many who are putting a person over country or party must be why Trump was surprised he couldn't get election officials to go along with his election fraud scam.

Whatever he is up to, it's not democracy, it's autocracy.. or something else.

Something that I find funny about conspiracy theorists is their ability to believe contradictory things without cognitive dissonance. Like how Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, the disciple of a radical black Christian preacher, and an atheist Marxist revolutionary,

I've heard that the cognitive dissonance required to believe such things is what makes them so immune to logical persuasion. They are already well practiced in accepting the contradictory views within themselves- an outside influence has no chance against that.

This is particularly frustrating. I don't intend to besmirch anyone's faith, but it seems that many who are of the Evangelical bent are easy pickings for this type of thing. It is part of their ethos to accept things unquestioningly by authority/authoritarian figures.

[N.E. Brigand]

Actual Quote: “We did not send him there to vote his conscience, we did not send him there to do the right thing, whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us.” - Dave Ball, Washington Cty PA GOP Chair

PA GOP on why Sen. Toomey should be censured for voting to convict Trump.

What makes this particularly funny (and sad) is that a standard Republican talking point is that the United States "isn't a democracy; it's a republic."

And yet here we have a Republican (and I've seen similar comments from other Republicans criticizing members of their party who voted against Trump) calling for the equivalent of direct democracy.

[N.E. Brigand]

We know there was some discussion of the 25th Amendment at the end of Trump's term because of what happened at the Capitol. Now Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News posts (I have expanded abbreviations in the quote) some news from three years earlier:

While at the White House, Steve Bannon concluded that Donald Trump was suffering from 'early stage dementia' and later started a covert campaign for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him, veteran 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen tells Daniel Klaidman and me in a new Skullduggery podcast. (He's got Bannon's texts to back it up.)

As I recall, one of the first books published about the Trump administration, Michael Wolf's Fire and Fury, which appeared in January 2018, was understandably dismissed by many for focusing on frivolous matters and was generally believed to rely heavily on the claims of a few axe-grinding Trump staffers, Bannon among them, did include a passage in which Bannon was said to have warned Trump that he was more at risk of removal via the 25th amendment than via impeachment. Pretty sure nothing was said in Wolf's book about Bannon himself trying to engineer that particular outcome.

[N.E. Brigand]

I think Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson gets the "prize" for the most idiotic comments about the trial.

After Trump Acquittal, Sen. Ron Johnson Says Jan. 6 ‘Didn’t Seem Like an Armed Insurrection’

Today someone pointed out that just a few days ago, the Senate passed the Officer Eugene Goodman Congressional Gold Medal Act by unanimous consent, which is to say, it wasn't opposed by Sen. Johnson.

And what's the first line of that act?

"On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building was attacked by armed insurrectionists."

More from Johnson's comments about what he thinks of as the non-insurrection:

When you hear of "armed", don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would’ve liked to ask: How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?... If that was a planned armed insurrection, man, you'd really have a bunch of idiots.

As others are noting, the Washington Post weeks ago quoted one police officer as saying this:

I didn't want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they [i.e., the insurrectionists] had guns -- we had been seizing guns all day. And the only reason I could think of that they weren't shooting first was they were waiting for us to shoot first. And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple thousand demonstrators, we would have lost.

And CNN (source) had the following story:

One officer said he wouldn't have begrudged any officer for firing their gun, but they were outnumbered. "I got 16 bullets in my handgun, 28 in my long gun. Then what?" he said.

"At that point, I wasn't looking for arms. But there were arrests with guns, a cooler of Molotov [cocktails was] found. We recovered 9 or 10 guns, found or taken off people. Guarantee so many more had 'em," he said. "You don't want to start a gunfight and have a bloodbath. We wouldn't have won."

[RoseMorninStar]

I think someone needs to educate Mr. Johnson.

Those poor officers.