RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/07/pelosi-threatens-to-do-something-drastic-if-pence-does-not-remove-trump-under-25th-amendment-n1322449?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=582

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatened to launch into immediate impeachment if Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s cabinet do not immediately invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president.

“Yesterday, the president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America,” Pelosi began, mentioning the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, leading to the death of four people. “The gleeful desecration of the U.S. Capitol, which is the temple of American democracy, and the violence targeting Congress, are horrors that will forever stain our nation’s history, instigated by the president of the United States. That’s why it’s such a sting.”

“In calling for this seditious act, the president has committed an unspeakable assault on our nation and our people. I join the Senate Democratic leader [Chuck Schumer] in calling on the vice president to remove this president by immediately invoking the 25th Amendment,” Pelosi declared. “If the vice president and cabinet do not act, the Congress may be prepared to move forward with impeachment. That is the overwhelming sentiment of my caucus, and the American people, by the way.”

“Justice will be done to those who carried out these acts, which were acts of sedition and acts of cowardice,” she added.

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

No Russian cyberspooks, no Chinese spies, no jihadi terrorists – no external enemies of any kind could have brought as much harm to the United States as its own self-inflicted wounds. I spent last evening taking calls from friends around the world, including a senior diplomat of an American ally who asked me what I thought of the first evacuation of Capitol Hill since the British invaded in 1812. “I’m horrified,” I said. “So is the entire free world,” the diplomat replied.

There are belly-laughs in Beijing this morning. The Chinese government daily Global Times taunted:

The riots taking place in Washington DC, the storming of the US Capitol by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters which ended with four dead, 52 arrested and 14 police officers injured on Thursday shocked the world, and Chinese experts said this unprecedented incident will mark the fall of “the beacon of democracy,” and the beautiful rhetoric of “City upon a Hill” will perish.

The world is watching as US allies feel disappointed when they saw the country that they used to admire descend into a huge mess. Chinese observers said this is a “Waterloo to US international image,” and the US has totally lost legitimacy and qualification to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs with the excuse of “democracy” in the future.    

It’s actually worse than the Global Times editors think.

If it were only a matter of Trump’s misbehavior, this disaster would be survivable. The trouble is that the popular belief in a vast and nefarious conspiracy has a foundation in fact: Starting before Trump’s term in office his political opponents abused the surveillance powers of the intelligence community to concoct a black legend of Russian collusion on the part of his campaign. The mainstream media, staffed overwhelmingly by Trump’s enemies, slavishly repeated this black legend until large parts of the population refused to believe anything it read in the newspapers or saw on television.

The leadership of the Democratic Party, its allied media, and the Bush-Romney wing of the Republican Party decided to play dirty to expunge an obstreperous, incalculable outsider from the political system. And in doing so, this combination, America’s establishment, destroyed public trust in the Congress and the media. It’s no surprise that two out of five Americans now believe that a vast conspiracy rigged the 2020 presidential elections. 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/07/the-consequences-of-the-capitol-assault/

A little over a decade ago, I was tear-gassed for the first time. It was the first day of September in the Twin Cities, and the anti-globalist, anti-war protesters were milling about with giant papier-mache heads of the people they hated. Mark Hemingway was there. My future wife and mother of my child was inside. It was painful. Afterward, I left and set up my laptop at a nearby rooftop bar and had the best Guinness I’ve ever ordered in my life. The reports about the protesters were overwhelmingly sympathetic. These were justified because of the wars. The New York Times said so.

A few years later, I covered Occupy Wall Street, and the tone was similar. These people taking over public parks, shitting all over the place, yelling at each other in circles, and setting up occasional rape tents were to be accepted, because Wall Street exists and is a thing. The sympathy for them was even greater than for the war people because of a lot of guilt about how media is funded. Zephyr Teachout wrote a thing.

Around the same time, there was another form of protest, something very different, which emerged. It was called the Tea Party. It was, unlike the anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-Wall Street folks, a fundamentally dangerous and racist entity, bent on destruction and violence, that threatened the very foundations of representative government and only existed because people couldn’t accept a black president. They were basically the Klan. Alan Grayson said it.

It was odd. In all my years of covering the Tea Party, I never saw them be rude to a cop, even by accident. They were upper-middle-class people who drove up in SUVs. They had no designs on destruction or occupation. Their taxes paid for that park, so they would clean up after themselves. They took pride in it — that they weren’t like the dirty, filthy leftists who left graffiti and literal shit on the ground.