[Hope everyone had a joyous and loving Christmas with their family and friends.]
The Bulletin
Scott Deshefy
Sun, December 26, 2021, 3:01 AM
One needn’t read Nietzsche, Hegel or sociologic discourse to conclude “God” and America share slabs in the morgue. Our gun-maniacal culture of violence fills judicial and legislative dockets with “leads that bleed.”
Mark Meadows, slapped with contempt of Congress charges, hasn’t given depositions before the Capitol R**t Committee. But, a 38-page PowerPoint and incriminating texts were leaked, including Fox News emails “directing” Donald Trump to stop the J*** 6 incursion.
Outlined was the former administration’s plan to overturn President Biden’s e******n, a handbook for s******n that included f**e declarations of national security emergencies, fabricated foreign interference and wholesale invalidation of electronically cast b****ts. Cobbled from memos on o*******wing e******ns by law professor John Eastman (also subpoenaed), VP Pence was scripted to be a senatorial stopgap to Biden’s e******n confirmation. That impasse hinged on the lie China had somehow “gained control over our electronic e******n system,” distorting v**e tallies.
Ironically, the J*** 6 r**t and Pence’s patriotism and integrity derailed things. Given how society’s so fact-averse, prejudicial and susceptible to right-wing conspiracy theories, many would have fallen for the s**m.
We’re teetering on the edge of civil violence Northern Ireland once endured. Barton Gellman wrote a piece for The Atlantic recently in which he suggests “J****** 6 Was Practice,” and the GOP’s actively stacking decks, dictatorially, to decide the 2024 presidency.
Over the past year, Gellman explains, Trump and his allies have tested legal strategies to allow state legislatures with GOP majorities to challenge and dismiss bona-fide v**e counts. Processes preventing Trump from stealing the 2020 e******n are methodically being jettisoned. Even Secretaries of State powers to certify accurate e******ns are summarily being stripped so b****ts against Trump and other Republicans can be tossed.
Dangerously, a “politically-violent mass movement” has coalesced around the Big Lie that President Biden is somehow illegitimate. An estimated 21 million Americans (primarily underemployed, less-educated men) not only believe that fallacy, but consider violence justifiable in returning Trump to office. With an estimated 20% of our adult population detached from reality, coordinated acts of subversion, even a c**p, are numerically possible.
Thankfully, justice prevailed in Georgia, where three men convicted of k*****g Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 were found guilty of felony murder, aggravated assault with firearms and other h**e crimes. Having essentially hunted down the 25-year old, they’ll be sentenced Jan. 7 for his fatal shooting.
Yet, nine years after Sandy Hook, Congress still hasn’t restricted firearms, even vacillating on a $170 billion a year reconciliation bill necessary to combat c*****e c****e, expand health and child care, and increase taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for it.
This year’s Defense Spending Bill ($770 billion ─ more than the next 11 top-spending nations combined) passed easily, however, despite costing us 160 million taxpayers about $5,000 each on average.
Johnny Cash wrote the song, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” For open-carry states like Wisconsin, the “Baby Face” Rittenhouse acquittal (three shot, two fatally) has deadly implications beyond its “m*****a defense” absurdity. Private paramilitaries are illegal, w***e s*********t or not. So-called “minutemen,” defiant of curfews, strutting amidst roiling turmoil with assault weapons, are malevolent, brown-shirted mobs. Notoriously unreliable in battle (“broken staffs,” Washington called them), m*****as, like the Second Amendment supporting them, originally enforced s***ery. Now, that thuggery recruits police/military cast-offs and misfits, many with PTSD.
Thanks to the Rittenhouse verdict, people with guns can defend shooting the unarmed, arguing any aggressive movement signaled the victim’s intent to use their own firearms against them. In Kenosha, even negligent homicide, aggravated assault; reckless endangerment didn’t stick. By wielding an AR-15, instigating Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber to physically respond (one brandishing a bag, the other a skateboard), Rittenhouse’s cop-wannabe vigilantism became a “license to k**l.”
“Have Gun, Will Travel” is America’s business card now, without the intelligence and moral clarity of Richard Boone’s Paladin.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/view-left-politically-violent-mass-100115973.html
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