Yet Another Day That Will Live in Infamy
The 1868 Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, the first such trial in our nation’s history, also resulted in setting a scoundrel free.
I’ve started this blog entry four different times, only to have the zig-zags of Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial (thank God it wasn’t his Second Inaugural Address!) take so many changes in direction that I had to begin over and over, again and again. The Senate trial’s end in acquittal didn’t surprise me; it only proved to me once more that our so called “Union” is fractured into several irreconcilable regional culture blocs.
Yes, the Kentucky Fox in turtle guise pulled off another masterful magic trick. On boggy legal ground, Senator McConnell found ex-Dear Leader guilty of insurrection, but asserted Trump could not be impeached because he was out of office before the Senate trial began. He didn’t mention that the House had done its impeaching while Donald J. Trump was still in office, but he had deliberately held up the Senate trial until Joe Biden was installed as president. Yep, cheap trick easily seen through by anyone with an IQ above 45…but, remember, the GOP has given up its old patrician ways and gone populist over recent decades. You can’t expect the aggrieved white Tumpenproles to stop watching FOX while cleaning their guns…and maybe read a newspaper. Sic transit cogitamen mundi.
By Saturday morning I knew the fix was in. Forty-three Republican senators set our would-be tyrant free to try to seize power again. But, I wondered, what if that mob of Proud Boys, boogaloo bois, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the “Camp Auschwitz” crowd, and all the other self-anointed “Patriots” had been a minute earlier in their invasion of the “sacred” senate chambers? Would they have really lynched Vice President Mike Pence? Would our lickspittle VP have been martyred and become a saint in democracy’s Calvary?
Who knows? But make no mistake, my friends: what we witnessed on January 6 was merely a dress rehearsal of another violent drama still to come. So what we do? Pray. Wish Biden well. But also prepare to abandon this sinking ship of state, remembering as you search for the nearest life jacket the 43 crypto-fascist Republican invertebrates who torpedoed it. May their names and likenesses, below, live in earned infamy.
Photographs courtesy of GRASSROOTSDEMPOLITICS.COM.
Envoi!