In the original 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen, a motley crew of prisoners is assembled and honed into a team of soldiers to carry out a dangerous mission to inflict severe damage on a high value Nazi target. Fighting fascism takes all kinds.
Today’s stupid dozen, starring freshman Josh Hawley and now led by Texas Senator [and wannabe President] Ted Cruz, are engaging in a dangerous action to undermine the integrity and validity of millions of their fellow Americans votes ostensibly to provide “the lone constitutional power remaining to consider and force resolution of the multiple allegations of serious voter fraud” but in reality because they are pandering to a Trump base which they [wrongly] assess will reward them with its support in the future. Cultists are fanatically loyal to their leader not to wannabe successors, a lesson these individuals will experience harshly in the near future!
Forget how history might ultimately judge their actions. Let us here and now name them all for what they are – anti-democratic autocrats whose disdain for the rights of their fellow Americans to elect someone other than who they like and want is breathtakingly on display here.
Hawley will be joined by Cruz and six other current senators: Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana.
In addition, four senators-elect, who will be sworn in Sunday [January 3] as members of the new Congress, are Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
These Republican Senators are now standing naked in the harsh light of their own theatrical production for all the world to see. They are all self-interested in the extreme, seeking to maintain their positions of power at the expense of any semblance of personal integrity, moral values, and certainly no consideration for the long-term damage their actions will cause the image and practice of American democracy.
Their Faustian bargain of being supplicant and loyal above all else to the personal whims and foibles of a wannabe autocrat called Donald J. Trump is now exacting its endgame. Many are not just indulging his blatantly false lies of mass voter fraud, but several are actively front and centre in its defense.
Senator Josh Hawley, a Yale law school graduate, former AG of the state of Missouri, tries to justify his objection to the result in a statement, in which he said he did so as a way to highlight purported election irregularities. That is just bullshit! It is a transparent ploy to garner favour from a departing autocrat who Hawley believes will continue to hold sway over a vast number of the Republican base which he sees as necessary for his own 2024 Presidential run.
In a statement Dec. 30 announcing his decision, Hawley said he can’t “vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.”
Hawley also claimed there had been an “unprecedented effort of mega corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden.”
Neither one of these claims by Hawley has been substantiated by evidence. It is all just ludicrous conspiracy theory and what is truly disgusting is that he knows this. He is simply trying to propel himself forward [and upward in office] by staking an early claim to the voting power of the Trumpian base for 2024. Ambition has no shame!
Little comfort is to be gained from the fact that many other Republicans have chastised Hawley and the other members of the dirty dozen for precipitating this farce upon the American people.
Republican Ben Sasse from Nebraska said
Every public official has a responsibility to tell the truth. All the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party. We ought to be better than that. If we normalize this, we’re going to turn American politics into a Hatfields and McCoys endless blood feud — a house hopelessly divided.
“Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse said in his [Facebook] post. “But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”
What is even more disgustingly depressing is that the current Vice President, Mike Pence, has broken from his more recent background silence to say on Saturday that “he welcomes the efforts” of Republicans like Cruz and Hawley to ignore the results of the 2020 election. In a statement from Pence’s chief of staff “Vice President Pence shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election”. This is a fabricated rationale to provide cover for these objections to be heard since all evidence points to this past election as having been “the most secure in American history”.
Two long months of legal challenges to the election result has seen the courts flooded with frivolous and vexatious cases, many of which stated in their briefs that they were not alleging voter fraud, has done nothing to change the result. It has however had the chilling effect of undermining the legitimacy of the new President-elect. A recent NPR/Ipsos poll suggests those claims are having an impact. 66% of Republicans surveyed said they believe that voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and fewer than half of Republicans said they accept the outcome of the election.
The flaw in the Trump election fraud claim has always been the common-sense problem that if the presidential results in these states are invalid, then all of the results in the five swing states are also not valid, and those members should not be seated.1 Duh!!
When all your legal challenges are thrown out by the courts of the land and the institutions set up to tabulate the victor like the Electoral College also do their job, then all you have left is the sham of theatrical politics to assuage the hurt feelings of a dangerously demented narcissistic autocrat and his fanatical cultist followers.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, we have to suffer by watching this pathetic last act of a truly miserable play lurch its way to its final curtain call. No ovations for the performances of most of the actors over these past four years of un-American behaviour, just a longing to get out of the theatre [of the absurd!] and never, never forget what we have experienced and steel ourselves to be vigilant to never let it happen again!
On the masthead of the Washington Post newspaper is the statement, Democracy dies in the darkness, but this is evidently no longer true in a Trumpian world. It should be changed to read Democracy dies in broad daylight ably aided by elected Republicans.
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1. https://www.politicususa.com/2021/01/03/trump-steal-election-backfire.html
Speak up! But since I cannot hear you, tell me what you think in the comment field below.
Frankly, I don’t see much hope for the dis-United States of America when its own lawmakers are so quick to deny the validity of one of its foundational institutions. But with 350 or so million residents, it’s hard to know what to expect. Is there any sense of the existence of armed Trumpian militia? If they exists, we should hear about it soon enough and the police should be actively engaged in shutting them down. Problem is, demographically, many police officers are bound to be sympathetic to Trump and his inane followers. This is not a welcome scenario.
We’ll see how this week ends.
Today is Friday January 8. It is less than 48 hours since the storming of the US Capital building by an angry unruly mob of Trump supporters revved up by the President himself to impede the pro forma ritual of counting the Electoral College votes. It was a humiliating display for many Americans to have ‘the peoples house’ ransacked like that, but as Mike Davis has said it wasn’t a real coup.
“Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue.”
It was a colossal failure of security and already the token heads have rolled. It did demonstrate however an unmistakable example of aggrieved white privilege. Only time will tell to what extent those ‘insurrectionists” will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Perhaps most importantly, it forced President Trump to produce his version of a concession speech by way of a hostage-like taped video. The liberal media outcry is predictable – ousting the President immediately. I don’t think it will happen!
More likely, we will witness a Hitlerian bunker-like ending minus the suicide because after all Trump has proven repeatedly that he is coward. He will spend what little time he has left to fabricate his exit fable and seek to protect himself [first and foremost] from any potential prosecutions after he is forced out of the building on January 20th.