Suzie Qz posted this on X today as appropriate to Trump’s #RevoltingGOP and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s role in the reactionary subversion of America’s guiding principles and values:
If you would be passionate about the survival of American democracy, be at least curious about the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia that served to end it while also revolutionizing European diplomacy, redefining the assumptive principles of sovereignty, and forever modifying relationships between powers and the management of their affairs beneath an umbrella greater than themselves. This one treaty would then set a part of the stage for America’s own revolutionary departure from the power known to kings.
Before the Westphalia settlement, there was no recognizable diplomatic profession. Spies, irregular envoys, and heralds citing scripture or handing out ringing declamations were the usual route that princes chose to alert one another to the start of war. After Westphalia, the diplomatic craft was practiced by a kind of well-born guild, with members who were adept at melding reason, precedent, and law with quiet allusion to the implication of armed compunction.
On Elon Musk’s X platform, all Xpression may as well be flushed down the digital river of tweeted communications: the appearance is brief and the flood mighty.
Countermeasure: copy-paste and blog the message as well.
Vladimir Putin using Viktor Yanukovych as his lackey had sorely abused Ukrainian business with time-honored mafia methods, i.e., plain skimming theft in the end:
#Putin & #RussianNazis #RusNazis spread chaos, degradation, deprivation, and desperation worldwide, and then cover their crimes with lies, specifically baseless accusations, deflections, denials, erasures of collective memory, fabrications, and omissions of facts.
#TrumpPutin’s shared basic psychology: Malignant Narcissism and Process. The lies told by both represent the “Covering” of deeply seated humiliation (“Narcissistic Mortification”) and the fear of its repeat. The psyche creates an alternative undamaged courageous-heroic self, and that becomes the leader’s principle project both in its assertion and its defense (in the psychology, “Splitting” or, together, “Covering/Splitting”). Complementary observation, term, or trope: “delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries or limits, i.e., the parameters of conscience” (so I quote myself). The end of the process for the Russian dictator and the American wanna-be dictator: “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply”, i.e., the validating infinite love of millions without end in sight.
After years of blogging defined by “collect, select, and opine”, I have found with the national and global obsessions with “#FeloniousTrump” (“#4FelonyCases91Counts”)–so I frequently refer to him on Elon Musk’s X post-Twitter platform–a certain saturation. I have tired of Donald John Trump’s image and voice, his skewed anti-democratic American political stances, his now infamously malign and surreal (delusional, grandiose, messianic) narcissistic psychology, his paranoia and related lies and lying, and the uncritical and other than Christian self-righteous viciousness of his fan base.โ
Instead of writing (much), I’ve chosen to produce a page of reference with two of Liz Cheney’s YouTube videos at the base.โBefore one reaches them: excerpts form suggested reference.
Motivation
Donald Trump has failed perhaps more than his share of bank loans and debts, and he has had to deal with a rough world, one often lawless beyond his own reach.โThe pressures must get “up there” with always incessant needs for cash.โWell, he found his cash, and much of it in concentration.
As a bipartisan effort, the report does not delve into the root causes of the attack, including Trumpโs role as he called for his supporters to โfight like hellโ to overturn his election defeat that day. It does not call the attack an insurrection, even though it was. And it comes two weeks after Republicans blocked a bipartisan, independent commission that would investigate the insurrection more broadly.
โThis report is important in the fact that it allows us to make some immediate improvements to the security situation here in the Capitol,โ said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which conducted the probe along with the Senate Rules Committee. โBut it does not answer some of the bigger questions that we need to face, quite frankly, as a country and as a democracy.โ
But the DHS and the FBI do not create an intelligence report focused specifically on the upcoming pro-Trump rally. That’s important because these reports go beyond raw intelligence โ they validate information and put it into context that would help local law enforcement develop a plan. These threat assessments or intelligence bulletins are typically written as a matter of course ahead of high-profile events. It’s not clear why this didn’t happen.
โThere were significant, widespread and unacceptable breakdowns in the intelligence gathering. .?.?. The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol,โ Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the homeland security panel, told reporters. โThe attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight.โ
Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Sources also said former Trump aide Nick Luna told federal investigators that when Trump was informed that then-Vice President Mike Pence had to be rushed to a secure location, Trump responded, “So what?” — which sources said Luna saw as an unexpected willingness by Trump to let potential harm come to a longtime loyalist.
As he pushed to overturn the election, Trump relied on a band of outside allies who undertook what federal prosecutors have called a โcriminal schemeโ to fraudulently overturn the 2020 results instead of relying on the advice of attorneys in the White House who urged him to accept his loss to Biden./Trump was asked in the interview why he didnโt listen to those lawyers.
In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Dozens of times, he simply characterized the election as โrigged,โ โstolenโ or โa hoax,โ and flatly and falsely declared he had won โ even as a mountain of evidence proved otherwise. Other falsehoods were more specific about the voting and ballot-counting process, contained unproven allegations and promoted conspiracy theories.
Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights
โโSection 3 Disqualification from Holding Office
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Charles Michel serves as the President of the European Council.โWhen the news comes straight from the authority who makes it, no further confirmation would seem needed.
Donald John Trump may not think of himself as a cowardly and smarmy con man, felon, mafia chief, or traitor to his nation in light of his own delusional, grandiose, and messianic character and apparent absence of conscience.โHowever, all indicators point back toward cooperation with Vladimir Putin in relation to seeing himself installed in power–with immunity from felony-level wrongdoing, no less–by an overwhelmingly White Christian American Nationalist Front that itself appears to have America’s Republican Party leveraged away from its traditional adult, civil, Constitutional, lawful, and responsible navigation.
When Trump covered for Putin in the now infamous “Helsinki Moment”, mainstream media and moderate cognizant and good Americans were shocked but then gave that moment two minutes of squawking before some other drama displaced it.
Here, copied verbatim, is what Trump said in that now hideous and signal moment:
***
all I can do is ask the question my people came to me dan coates came to me and some others they said they think itโs Russia I have president putin he just said itโs not russia i will say this i donโt see any reason why it would be I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer he offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the people I think thatโs an incredible offer
And there Trump is, no different back then than he is today: inveigling, lying, infantilizing, pandering and far gone in the sordid business of trading country–and American law–for the lowest in the way of criminal, corrupt, and ruthless power.
And where has been the GOP in relation to Trump?
***
โฆTrump and company donโt simply want to โdeconstruct the administrative state,โ as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.
Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbรกn has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.
In X-speak, has #America tired of #FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts?
Today, Americans know that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election and with premeditation chose to lie to his base, which may now be considered either gullible or just plain traitorous and vicious, and then he drove a violent portion to insurrection in an attempted coup.โThose whom Trump betrayed and inveigled in his madness should be especially angry with him.
Call him “Trumpolini” and hope America–the vast majority of Americans–will find the courage to defend their nation, its revolutionary Constitution and spirit, and be finished with him as well.
Later that same month, the subcommittee held a hearing aimed at promoting Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana that challenged the Biden administrationโs efforts to work with social media companies to control disinformation.
โThe executive branch has undertaken a broad campaign to censor the American people,โ Johnson declared. โThatโs the headline. Thatโs the takeaway today.โ
While the Biden Administration’s program focused on integrity in the interest of the American People, Johnson and Republican attorneys general chose to hamper the effort in their own partisan interest, an interest that belies a lust for power unbridled by any interest in the bedrock that is truth x context x empirical observation x careful handling, sifting, and weighing of factual data x reasoning with good character and good sense — all of that to fool what they may presume to be their own sheep.
Call the sort of lie Speaker Mike Johnson uttered disingenuous speech or sophistry.โOur “executive branch” encouraged honesty and integrity, but Johnson took it as a moment to call it censorship and thereby safeguard disinformation, chicanery, and fraud, which may to Johnson may rank among Christianity’s most fundamental and necessary virtues for they are not so useful to any sustained secular democratic republic.โ
Not all politicians lie so brazenly to their constituencies–and for the privileges of power itself, no less.โToday’s Grand Old Party has stained itself with its abandonment of the Constitution, honor worth the recognition, and general integrity.โSpeaker Mike Johnson has only led the cowardly and seditious charge and been booted into place potentially to fully subvert the 2024 election.
How to Lie Like A Speaker (Representing the Devil)
For those daring to cross over to the forever burnt side of history, here is a smorgasbord of methods known to delusional or practiced liars: baseless accusations; defamations; deflections of responsibility; denials of culpability; erasures, omissions, and revisions in the telling of events; fabrications and frame-ups; fishing expeditions; libels and slanders.
For criminals, there are more potent forms of foul speech in the abuse of the law: conspiracy to commit crime and incitement to violence are two.โSpeech intended to defraud is another.โTrump himself appears to own a special collection of tools with his finesse in vocalized or otherwise signaled coercion and intimidation–or marching orders.โHe has, after all, developed a reputation as a highly motivational speaker.
At the moment, the House has embarked on a programmatic impeachment of the incumbent President Biden and has done so without a single affirmed assertion or charge.โ
The US House of Representatives has voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry into president Joe Biden, moving forward a process that has been promised by Republican leaders since they regained control of the lower chamber in midterm elections in 2022. / Although no evidence has been produced, Republicans have accused Biden and his family of personally profiting from his position while vice-president under Barack Obama.
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