CSotD: Expecting a miracle

Marc Murphy warns that it is late, though perhaps not too late.

But it is certainly too late to sit and watch and wonder and hope.

Like the man in the joke, God has sent us a canoe, a rowboat and even a helicopter, yet here we are, sitting on the roof watching the waters rise and expecting a miracle.

Murphy specifically warns of the actions of fascists to subvert elections in our various states, but that’s only part of a deliberate subversion of our form of government.

We’ve seen it and downplayed it and denied it, with the biggest, clearest warning of all having come on January 6, when the Nazi mob stormed our nation’s Capitol building.

But we’d seen it before, long before, and we did nothing.

In 2017, when violent racists and antiSemites marched in Charlottesville and even murdered a counterprotester, we held back from calling facts facts, politely obeying the Internet’s “Godwin’s Law” that said calling opponents “Nazis” shows that the argument has become futile.

Godwin himself spoke out against our polite avoidance:

And yet we let the lies persist and multiply and metastasize, and now we are staring something in the face that we should have excised before it got anywhere near so large and threatening.

And please do not pretend that it “just happened.”

As Ann Telnaes charges, it was aided and abetted by Fox News, and she singles out Laura Ingraham, who — within hours of begging Mark Meadows to have the President call off the coup attempt — not only denied that the rioters were Trump supporters but suggested, with neither evidence nor logic, that they were antifa.

Nor was this jaw-dropping defiance of journalism and decency, as well as patriotic loyalty, confined to Ingraham.

It was not “spin” and it was not an “opinion” and it was not one renegade commentator violating her company’s ethics.

Her company has no ethics, and, out of their own mouths, the Fox fascisti condemn themselves:

As Amanda Carpenter wrote at the Bulwark:

Apparently, there are limits to this corporate depravity. As DD Degg reports, Fox doesn’t want anyone to admit to being an actual Nazi, and it would be nice to believe that this signals some sort of pull back.

But given the latitude given to Tucker Carlson to repeat “Replacement Theory” and praise white culture, it’s clear that, for Fox management, it’s okay to promote the ideas, just as long as you don’t repeat the actual imagery.

As Murphy says in his cartoon, our own sin is to sit back and act as though we needn’t rise up until we see actual swastikas.

It is a self-destructive folly clearly shown by the fact that Fox silences Branco while embracing Carlson.

 

It’s hard to know the extent to which Fox News actively collaborated with the coup, rather than simply setting a mood in which it could happen and covering it up later.

But the fact that they were texting Trump’s chief of staff on such intimate and partisan terms certainly suggests an unholy, and unethical, familiarity.

However, we face a greater issue in examining the administration.

Proving that some people in the GOP supported the attempted coup does not prove that they actually carried it out, and RJ Matson reveals something else we all know: They plan to stall until the midterms, assuming they will then have gained control of Congress to match their control of the Supreme Court.

It is critical to bear in mind that it was the Senate Watergate Committee that put the pressure on Richard Nixon, and the Supreme Court that ordered him to release the smoking gun of his White House tapes.

I guess I shouldn’t say “bear in mind” about something that happened 47 years ago, in a nation where the median age is 38.

You cannot bear in mind what you have never known, and the national sense of stunned amazement in those days cannot be shared through history and videotapes and the remembrances of old men and women.

Nor can we explain how different it was to live in a world where only a handful of crackpots and intense loyalists stood up for the traitors.

Not an entire news network.

Not an entire political party.

I have confessed more than once that I expected Nixon to wiggle out of it, and the odds were far more against him then than they are against the current crew of insurrectionists.

 

Robert Ariail (AMS) joins in accusations that Mark Meadows is now declining to say things to Congress that he said in his book, but, according to this article in Mother Jones, a reading of that book shows he wasn’t particularly forthcoming there, either.

The question, of course, is not whether he presents information to counter the accusations but whether he says anything that confirms them.

The timeline of his texts, with Fox personalities, with Congress, with White House insiders, paints an ugly picture, but the trail only leads to Meadows, not, specifically, not irrefutably, not undeniably, to Trump.

Nixon was caught on tape specifically authorizing payments to silence the Watergate burglars. Whatever John Dean claimed to recall, whatever other staffers may have been forced to admit, the proof that ultimately sank Nixon was his own words confirming his guilt.

Knowing he was a crook was not enough. It was necessary to prove he was a crook.

And here we are again, but without Sam Ervin. Without Howard Baker. Without John Sirica.

Please tell me that the Roberts Court would vote 9-0 to order release of that sort of evidence, if it even exists.

Please tell me that, if they did, it would matter to our current Congress.

Please tell me you are ready to quit waiting for a miracle and step into the damn boat.

 

 

UPDATE:

I wish I’d seen this piece by former Fox employee Jonah Goldberg sooner. Not only would I have linked to it, but I could have skipped all my commentary entirely. He saw it, too, and from the inside.