CSotD: Staying off John Chancellor
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Given that today is only the 17th, I have no idea how many people will turn out tomorrow to protest the arrests of people who attempt the violent overthrow of the government.
Nor, assuming they show up, do I know whether they will be met with the rubber bullets, truncheons and tear gas used against those who protest police brutality or who clutter the site of photo ops at Episcopal Churches.
But, like Kevin Siers, I do know that — whatever their numbers, whatever their actions — they have the support of the Republican Party, which continues to promote the lie under which they march.
Some time ago, Cassandras cautioned that someone might set fire to the Reichstag or something like it, and perhaps stage a phony assault on a radio station as well, alluding to the false premises with which the Nazis first seized power, then invaded Poland.
Hyperbole? We’ve had a series of little Kristallnachts around the country, including, of course, Charlottesville, and, if nobody burned down the Capitol, they sure made an attempt, with the support of the GOP, which refuses to investigate whether it was also at their instigation.
We’ll get to that radio station in a minute, but here’s the canary in the coal mine, if you needed one:
Ohio Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican whose parents fled Cuba, and who voted in favor of Trump’s second, post-election impeachment, has decided not to run for re-election, a decision explained by the Bulwark’s Tim Miller in a must-read warning of where we are today:
There is more. It matters. Read it.
It matters because something else has been popping up on social media for some time, which is the suggestion that, if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany, you’re doing it now.
I put together this quote and photo six years ago and I’ve posted it many times since, first as, granted, a bit of hyperbole, but, more recently, completely in earnest.
It’s not so much the people who join in as the people who stand by, and even “standing by” can become active: One of the most frightening elements of Germany’s invasion of Poland seems to me to be the fact that soldiers — ordinary soldiers, not SS hardliners — were told to shoot those who surrendered to them, and to kill civilians as well, and simply “followed orders.”
After the war was over, of course, everyone claimed to have been active in the resistance, and I’m sure that, when the dust has settled this time, we’ll all agree that we were sneaking around in the night as heroes, just as, when the rain ended and the mud dried, we all claimed to have been at Woodstock.
Now, about that radio station: The Gleiwitz Incident, in which German operatives faked a Polish assault on a radio station, did not emerge out of a clear, blue sky. Europe had been bracing for war as Hitler rattled his saber, and the staged attack was only a final excuse for him to launch the invasion.
But he didn’t have V2 missiles yet, much less the ability to launch ICBMs at the push of a button.
Things move a little faster, 80 years later, and, while you can sit back and say nothing happened in January, we should recognize what might have.
Clay Bennett (CTFP) offers a quiet, undramatic summary, which makes his cartoon all the more powerful.
As noted here yesterday, General Milley’s actions, as reported in Woodward/Costa’s book “Peril,” need to be considered in context, and further reports suggest that he didn’t act alone or in haste, but that neither was he the only person at the top levels of government who feared what an increasingly erratic president might do.
Hence Jack Ohman (WPWG)‘s more dramatic rendition, based on what might have happened but didn’t.
You don’t get medals for your action in things that didn’t happen, though my son once got a commendation from the Navy for extinguishing a fire in the torpedo bay of his ship.
Sometimes “nothing” is a cool hand, and, as he said when he called from Japan, “Boy, you’d have seen this one on John Chancellor.”
Staying off John Chancellor was the objective, and, similarly, Milley’s actions produced nothing for Lester Holt, thank God.
The difference being that this fire isn’t out yet, which leads to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
It is probably unfair to accuse them of being disappointed, since they’re talking about Milley thwarting not an actual unprovoked nuclear attack, but merely something that might have happened and didn’t.
Still, it’s a reminder of Sir John Harington‘s quote, “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
Since it didn’t prosper, Republicans will likely hold an investigation into Milley’s actions, as they did of the Benghazi incident, as they did of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail.
Though, of course, they have not held one of the January 6 uprising, because, so long as the Senate filibuster holds, it wasn’t treason.
What is clear is that, whether or not the mob shows up tomorrow, there is a substantial number of people, including some cartoonists, willing to stand behind the president.
As long, Ann Telnaes adds, as we mean their president and not some disloyal, unAmerican, fraudulently-elected president.
And as long as “treason” is defined as defying the chain of command to prevent an undeclared nuclear war, rather than as defying the Constitution in order to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
Or, as Steve Sack imagined happening four years ago, passing along highly classified information to Russian officials, which would certainly be treason if it had actually happened, and if anyone had dared speak up to make the charge.
And there might have been treason if there existed some sort of special investigation into election interference that had not — as Clay Bennett put it two years ago — been carefully examined, redacted and explained by a group of loyal, patriotic experts who understand these things.
To simplify Harington’s expression, “It ain’t treason if you win.”
But it is treason not to fight back.
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