@blackjack21 , in addressing my main concern, that of maintaining civic peace and order, you began with discussing the Liberal display of their attitude towards concern for these things;
Oh, I completely agree. I just think that started coming to an end back in the Obama era when Obama himself was telling the SEIU to go to town halls and get in the faces of people opposed to ObamaCare. During Trump's administration, Maxine Waters was calling for that against Republican leadership and scarcely backed off when Steve Scalise was shot by an anti-Trumper, or when Rand Paul as attacked by a neighbor breaking a rib and puncturing his lung. Nancy Pelosi herself mused why she wasn't seeing "uprisings." They again did that when the RNC had an assembly at the White House, and Antifa and BLM actors attacked people leaving the White House. They further held a thoroughly uncivil rally at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, hurling anything they could get their hands on at the Secret Service--setting fire to St. John's Church. People here were horrified when Trump used the National Guard to clear the square.
Yes, I agree that the hypocrisy is breathtaking in it's utter lack of decent self reflection on the part of any liberal I have heard on the subject. The question is then; what has the Right in America been doing about all this?
Charlottesville was a classic, because Unite the Right showed up unexpected and held a little rally by the Robert E. Lee statue. The cops were called. The crowd were told to leave. They left. Peaceful. Then, they asked for a permit. The mayor got involved in organizing a counter-protest. They rallied. The left rallied in there area. The left was disruptive and unlawful, and 22 of them were arrested. The right broke no laws, and none were arrested. When they wanted to rally again, the mayor of Charlottesville denied their permit. They had to sue with the help of the ACLU, and won the permit in court. Then the mayor of Charlottesville and the governor of Virginia got law enforcement to take a hands off approach to the left, who got a permit again to be well away from the Unite the Right folks. So what happened? The leftists abandoned the place where they were permitted to assemble, broke the law blocking streets marching up to where Unite the Right was, started attacking them, and the police declared it an unlawful assembly. A bunch of fights broke out. Later a guy with a history of mental illness rammed a crowd of leftists illegally marching down the street, killing Heather Heyer, and these guys went absolutely bonkers.
I remember, I was here on PoFo when things went down in Charlottesville, and it was an interesting counterpoint to my thinking at the time. Biden says he ran for the 2020 election on the basis of Charlottesville, and I have no reason to doubt him.
Let's not forget all the riots of 2020, when we kept being assured by news media with flames in the direct background and clouds of smoke in the air, that the protests were mostly peaceful. Death Toll Rises To An Estimated 30 Victims Since ‘Mostly Peaceful Protests’ Began<--that was by mid-August.
I was particularly angry at the hypocrisy of basically allowing mass protests and riots at a time when we've been going through a terrible pandemic. People talk about President Trump having COVID-19 deaths on his hands, but what about the deaths which can be laid to BLM/Antifa Covid-19 superspreader events, who is responsible for that irresponsibility?
Yet, the Democrat leadership were taking a knee in the Capitol rotunda.
And yet a few months later, they were cowering and running in panic from a mob. Cheap theatrics will be forgotten, while the real measure of them when the moment cannot be staged or spun will remain.
Even here, we have the Capitol police shooting and killing an unarmed civilian, and not a bit of outcry because she was likely a Trump supporter and white. Frankly, it's absurd to believe these people are upset about January 6th and sincerely believed everything that occured throughout 2020 was a-okay. Violence against people they disagree with is something they are okay with and even encourage. When violence comes their way or to anyone supporting them they flip out in the most uncontrollable way imaginable.
Of course. And so they will raise up enemies to themselves that will respond in kind, I'm afraid.
That's why I loath the neoconservatives now too. That jack wagon Ben Shapiro literally tried to compare it to 9/11.
I compare it to 9-11 too, except not for reasons Shapiro gives i'm sure. 9-11 was a massive failure of the Deep State on all levels, which they have tried to cover with putting out all sorts of conspiracy theories which assume their competence at the cost of the public's goodwill for the institutions of the Deep State. Don't get me wrong, if I were in government I'd be sure to be in one of those institutions. But I'd make competence a hallmark of my being there.
Well, the establishment was never honest with the American people about the reasons for 9/11. We were told by the Bush administration, "They hate us for our freedoms." That wasn't the case. They wanted US troops out of Saudi Arabia, and many radical Saudis hated US support for Israel.
That's true, although long term we have Islamist groups out there that aim at eventual world conquest, by hook or by crook, who would be enemies in any case.
Things have changed dramatically in the Middle East since then. In 2001, Dubai was a backwater with maybe one big building. Now it has more skyscrapers than Manhattan. It's mind blowing to see it. Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait are that way too. Saudi Arabia is not far behind. The religious police have been curtailed there, women are allowed to drive, and unmarried boyfriends and girlfriends can hold hands walking down the street without getting beaten by the religious police. I'm sure if they kiss in public they'll face jailtime, but it's changing.
The change concerns me though, for a multitude of reasons which boil down to it being a kind of ''Indian Summer''.
However, the US had a huge military presence at King Khalid and Dharan, that frankly left a lot of people very uncomfortable. Osama bin Laden among them. My view is that the US military wasn't going to leave after Saddam Hussein telegraphed a willingness to invade lower Saudi Arabia by his invasion of Khafji. So as otherwise non-intuitive as it was to invade Iraq in the wake of 9/11, the reason is because they wanted the entire Iraqi regime taken down to ensure Saudi security and they were just unwilling to be honest with the American people, because "blood for oil" wasn't something they were willing to fight for. So they have been literally lying to the American people about almost everything for quite a long time now.
Oddly enough, and I've probably mentioned it before, I have read people who make a strong case that the Bush Administration was not lying to the world and American people about Saddam Hussein and WMD's, but was actually a victim of the Deep State and an operation to overthrow or wound the Bush Administration. One author and book is ''Shadow Warriors'' by Ken Timmerman;
http://www.kentimmerman.com/shadow-warriors.htmReally good book and author, the parallels to today are interesting, as are the reasons why Bush succeeded where Trump has not, in my opinion.
Well, it even left Kevin McCarthy--the Republican House Minority Leader--as the British like to say, gobsmacked. What he couldn't believe is that they came with American flags shouting "USA, USA, USA." Even the Republican leadership doesn't realize how disconnected they are from the American people, their own voters no less.
To be somewhat fair, I think this is something that hasn't been seen in a long time.
But it falls flat, because these people are self serving. Mitch McConnell's speech was okay until he started claiming they won't put up with lawlessness in the Capitol, at which point I started laughing. These people disagree with Trump, so they've been going on criminal investigation after criminal investigation. Republicans disagreed with how Obama and Clinton scuttled the diplomatic mission in Benghazi and when asking for emails actually discovered a crime, which if any lower level person had done something similar, they would be in jail. Do you honestly think if you set up your own email server at home at any other level of the State Department, and it had been hacked and classified information lost, you would not be prosecuted? It's frankly unbelievable. Do you think if you were a lower level person and defied a Congressional subpoena and then started deleting your emails that it would go unpunished? Do you think if the FBI was interviewing you it would be outside the context of 1001 false statements, that your co-conspirators could claim attorney-client privilege (noting that they certainly vitiated that with Michael Cohen), or that the FBI would help you destroy your cell phones? It's frankly unbelievable.
Sure, they're corrupt as hell. And what's more, because of partisan and tribal affiliations, I don't think people (even on PoFo!) care about the corruption unless it's to point out the corruption of the ''other guys''. Corruption has to be addressed and all the criminals taken down, and the graft destroyed root and branch.
It's further amazing that they allege Trump had some ties to the Russian government--coming up with virtually no evidence--when Bill Clinton was making $500k for a desultory speech in Moscow. The decided lack of curiosity there is interesting. When Russian oligarchs give over $15M to the Clinton Foundation, who generally disburses the funds to their political cronies for highly paid and insignificant work for the foundation, it doesn't even raise an eyebrow with these people. They threaten Michael Flynn and his son with prosecution for ostensibly lobbying for the Turkish government because they had contact with someone with "ties" to the Turkish government, while Hunter Biden was clearly lobbying his father and John Kerry on behalf of Burisma, and got his father to usurp his power to have a prosecutor investigating Burisma fired? Again, any lower level functionary who did this would be prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Yet, these people sit there all stony faced and say, "We will not tolerate lawlessness." They are the epitome of lawlessness. By what authority does the United States have troops in Syria? Not NATO. Not the UN. Not a Congressional authorization to use military force in a foreign country. Yet, if the president tries to pull troops out of Syria, there's all sorts of outcry and there isn't even a shred of legal authority whatsoever to have troops there. And Mitch McConnell...why, he won't tolerate lawlessness in the Capitol? Ben Shapiro--this is just like 9/11? Really? Nearly 3000 people died on 9/11. These people live in what sociologists call a "total environment," a sort of reality of their own--utterly disconnected from the rest of society.
And what happens in that environment is that the higher up people are in their hierarchy, the less they actually know (because subordinates only tell them what reinforces their biases)and then they make ever more terrible decisions based on their ever greater ill-informed reasonings. Ultimately they reach a point of peak delusion and stupidity and everything collapses. Unless some reasonably competent strong man takes over completely before this singularity is reached.
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