The Fight for the Soul of the Nation isn't pleasing to the Fascists Losing the Fight
“So you just want to let him off scot-free for insurrection because he’s no longer in power? That’s like acquitting Jeffrey Dahmer because he’s full.” — Stephen Colbert
Joe Biden: “No one expects politics to be patty-cake — it sometimes gets mean as hell. But the idea that you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying if such and such happens, there will be blood in the street. Where the hell are we?”
The President has taken off the gloves to go after the ex-President directly. When he said a considerable number of Republicans are resorting to semi-fascism, Republican Senator Kevin McCarthy demanded an apology for that.
Yesterday, a NYC police officer who committed multiple acts of violence on the US Capitol police during the insurrection effort was sentenced to ten years in prison, the longest sentence so far.
And Trump? From the Washington Post:
Former president Donald Trump said he would issue full pardons and a government apology to rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and violently attacked law enforcement to stop the democratic transfer of power.
“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he told conservative radio host Wendy Bell on Thursday morning. Such a move would be contingent on Trump running and winning the 2024 presidential election.
Supporters of the former president attacked the Capitol as Congress was confirming Joe Biden’s electoral college win in the 2020 election, the worst attack on the seat of democracy in more than two centuries. The insurrection left four people dead, and an officer who had been sprayed with a powerful chemical irritant, Brian D. Sicknick, suffered a stroke and died the next day. About 140 members of law enforcement were injured as rioters attacked them with flagpoles, baseball bats, stun guns, bear spray and pepper spray.
As a result, the House impeached Trump for inciting an insurrection.
Catering to criminals. Some of whom were out for blood trying to kill Trump’s vice president and House Speaker Pelosi. This is exactly what Biden meant by calling the MAGA movement semi-fascist.
Trump, during his conversation with Bell on Thursday morning, also said that he met with some Jan. 6 defendants in his office this week and that he is helping some financially.
“I am financially supporting people that are incredible and they were in my office actually two days ago, so they’re very much in my mind,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them. What they’ve done to these people is disgraceful.”
A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how the former president is financially supporting the rioters.
Color me skeptical that he’s providing financial support. He does have a tendency to lie if he can harvest money from supporters by doing so.
There should be no doubt that Trump is a criminal supporting violent criminals.
The Washington Post again:
PHILADELPHIA — President Biden delivered a forceful address Thursday on what he called a dangerous assault on American democracy, warning that “too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal” as “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Biden’s speech, outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, was a remarkable assessment from a sitting president that the fabric of American governance is under serious threat — “we do ourselves no favors to pretend otherwise,” he said. While Biden did not name Republicans other than the former president, he warned of election deniers who have won Republican primaries and those who have sought to overturn legitimate elections.
“We are still at our core a democracy — yet history tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader, and the willingness to engage in political violence, is fatal to democracy,” Biden said. “There is no question that the Republican Party is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.”
And:
Biden said Thursday that he was not taking issue with those who disagree with him or come from another political party, but rather with those who challenge the principles the country was founded on.
“I believe it’s my duty to level with you, to tell the truth, no matter how difficult, no matter how painful,” Biden said. “And here in my view is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election.”
He added, “They promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to our pursuit of justice, to the rule of the law, to the very soul of this country.”
And the finis:
At Constitution Hall, Biden said he was not maligning all Republicans or those who disagreed with him, but rather what he called extremist forces that have undermined election results and stoked political violence. He understands that politics can be nasty, he said, but the United States is a “big, complicated country” that could only endure if people accepted election results, whether their candidate wins or not.
“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election — either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where the MAGA Republicans are today,” Biden said. “They don’t understand what every patriotic American knows: You can’t love your country only when you win.”
“I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost,” Biden said. “I will not stand by and watch the most fundamental freedom in this country — the freedom to vote and having your vote counted — taken from the American people.”
I’d add that approximately one-third of the adults in this country are Republicans. Polls indicate 52% of them support the MAGA movement, so that’s around 17% of the adults in the US. It’s enough to be a force but it also means 5 out of 6 adults are not MAGA supporters, which is far more substantial. 5 out of 6 that aren’t buying Trump’s BS.
The judge considering whether to appoint a Special Master to review the seized documents from Mar-A-Lago is expected to make her ruling today. Her comments thus far seem to break with past precedents under the Presidential Records Act.
I expect her to appoint the Master who will ultimately find nothing.
All of these deaths are ‘coincidences’.
The chairman of Russia’s second-largest oil company, Lukoil, died Thursday after reportedly falling from the window of a Moscow hospital where he was being treated after suffering a heart attack.
Ravil Maganov, 67, fell from a sixth-floor window at the Central Clinical Hospital around 7 a.m. local time, the state-run Tass news agency reported.
It was not clear whether Maganov’s death was an accident, a suicide or something more sinister.
And:
Maganov’s unexplained fall is at least the sixth fatal incident this year involving high-profile Russian oil and gas executives whose lives ended in gory or murky circumstances.
In April, the body of a former top manager of gas giant Novatek, Sergey Protosenya, was found at a Spanish villa alongside those of his wife and their 18-year-old daughter.
Spanish news outlet Telecinco reported that police found the mother and the daughter in separate rooms with stab wounds. Protosenya was found in the yard, where he reportedly hanged himself.
Spanish media reported at the time that murder-suicide was the Catalan police’s leading theory in their investigation.
Novatek, however, seemingly cast doubt that Protosenya could be responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughter. He “established himself as an outstanding person and a wonderful family man,” the company said in a statement. “Unfortunately, speculations have emerged in the media about this topic, but we are convinced that these speculations bear no relation to reality.”
A former vice president of Gazprombank, Vladislav Avayev, was similarly found dead in April alongside his wife and daughter in their Moscow apartment.
A month later, former Lukoil tycoon Alexander Subbotin died of heart failure in the Moscow region after reportedly receiving homeopathic treatment from a shaman, who offered his clients injections of toad poison.
Lukoil made headlines in March as the only Russian oil producer that called for an end to the war in Ukraine.
Me: Coincidences, right? This is how fascism works.
Something lighter to kick off your weekend.