Everyone remaining is now an accomplice

Audie Cornish of NPR talked to Thomas Kean who was co-chair of the 9/11 Commission. I am relying on memory for this one (though I heard the segment less than an hour ago) because the transcript is not out yet. Kean made a few important points: Yes, the attack on the Capitol must be investigated through a commission. The membership of the Commission must be bipartisan “right down the middle” or the public won’t trust the results. Those chosen to serve on the commission must demonstrate they put country over party. Hunter of Daily Kos, who wrote this post a day before Cornish talked to Kean, said a bipartisan commission is not likely to work.

We know this: The crowd had been incited with many weeks of repeated but fraudulent claims that the election was "stolen" from Trump, a hoax propagated by Trump himself, his allies, his campaign, his lawyers, Republican senators, Republican members of Congress, state Republican Party offices, multiple far-right propaganda outlets, Republican pundits, and Fox News. It was an organized campaign of false propaganda intended to discredit the election results and the election itself, a hoax then perpetuated by Republican lawmakers who used the same false claims in a Jan. 6 attempt to themselves nullify the election results by erasing the electoral votes cast by multiple Biden-won states. How, then, will a bipartisan commission tackle a propaganda effort planned and executed by all levels of the Republican Party itself?

Why was the mob so easily able to breach Capitol security? Why does it seem the Capitol Police, supposedly non partisan have trouble with investigation sabotage in its own ranks? Why was the National Guard delayed for hours?

What we have here is a national security crisis caused by a planned and furiously promoted hoax propagated by top Republican officials for the explicit purpose of nullifying a U.S. election, which led to a violent attack on lawmakers by Republican supporters on behalf of the Republican president who gathered them on that day and hour in a premeditated effort to sabotage the vote count and declare himself the true winner. The 9/11 Commission may have been flawed, but it was not constructed with the "bipartisan" goal of including Al Qaeda's input on what should happen next. It does not take a cynic to suspect that what will happen with any appointed commission, bipartisan or not, is that it will face relentless attacks by those partisans most responsible for the hoax that now comes with a death toll.

Sens. Cruz and Hawley, among others, will attack the commission at every turn. So will Fox News. Remember how the Mueller Report was spun even before it was released?

As long as Republican officials and officeholders have the power to immunize themselves from the consequences of even an attempted coup, there will be no reason not to go that far again, and farther. … [The work of a non partisan commission] will be a tough haul. Bipartisanship, however, will not enter into it. Anyone in the Republican Party unwilling to tarnish their names by associating with those who would attempt even to nullify an election rather than accept its outcome has already left the party. Everyone remaining is now an accomplice.

There is no remaining Republican who will put country before party. David Neiwert of Kos reported on what the MAGA crowd has to say now that they are facing criminal charges for their actions during the Capitol attack. They have two main points. One: Billy Chrestman of Olanthe, Kansas. Neiwert wrote:

“It is an astounding thing to imagine storming the United States Capitol with sticks and flags and bear spray, arrayed against armed and highly trained law enforcement,” Chrestman’s attorneys said in a court filing this week. “Only someone who thought that they had an official endorsement would even attempt such a thing. And a Proud Boy who had been paying attention would very much believe he did.”

Two:

The movement’s true believers who participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege and are now facing federal charges are similarly perplexed and outraged by the large numbers of fellow MAGA “patriots” who are now claiming that the insurrection actually was the work of violent “antifa” leftists. This fraudulent claim—promulgated not just by conspiracy theorists and fringe partisans, but by elected Republican officials, including members of Congress—has spread so widely that one poll found that a full half of all Republicans believe it. This infuriates the people who participated and now face charges, because they all are ardent Trump supporters who believed then that they were participating in a nation-saving act of patriotism—and many still believe it now. They can’t fathom how quickly their fellow “patriots” have thrown them under the bus and are now depicting them as actually acting on behalf of their hated enemies.

Today I heard from a nephew who lives in Texas. He and his family are doing OK. He is impressed at how well Texans are caring for each other, how much generosity he’s been seeing. Stores without power are telling shoppers to leave with what they had without paying. Elie Mystal, a justice correspondent for The Nation, tweeted:

How come @BetoORourke and @AOC work to raise money for struggling Texans, many of whom didn't vote for Beto and think AOC is a she-witch, doesn't count as a UNITY story? How come the media isn't spinning it that way? How come "unity" can only mean "giving the GOP what it wants"?

The Recount tweeted:

Last month, Texas resident Royce Peirce paid $387.70 to heat his two-story house. This month, he owes $8,162.73 — and counting. Amid freezing temperatures and another looming winter storm, Texans are facing a second crisis: astronomical power bills. … Amid freezing temperatures, the imbalance between Texas’s staggering electricity demand and its limited supply caused prices to skyrocket from $20 per megawatt hour to $9,000 per megawatt hour.

In a post from ten days ago Dorothy He of Kos reported that Gabe Ortiz, the immigration reporter for Kos was on the Michelangelo Signorile show to talk about undoing the damage to immigrant communities inflicted by the nasty guy. One major problem is ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and related agencies have been accountable to no one and now have a deep and toxic culture. Biden’s executive orders on immigration have been blocked by nasty guy judges. Ortiz thinks ICE is testing Biden, to see how far they can defy his orders. In a post from yesterday Gabe Ortiz looked at the short history of ICE (created as part of the Department of Homeland Security only seventeen years ago). When the agency was created lawmakers knew they would have to revisit the agency to get it right. Over the last four years ICE has been defying Congress and violating court orders. Lately, it has been targeting black immigrants for deportation and torture. Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and New York Rep. Richie Torres are now calling on Biden to clean out that agency and a few more. In another post from last week Meteor Blades of Kos reported on the large number of bills being introduced by GOP state lawmakers to increase voter suppression. Blades also reported the large number of bills being introduced by Democrats to expand voter access. He then suggests for each suppression bill that’s filed Democrats should also file an expansion bill.