Rachel

Press Poodles Clutching Pearls

The US Constitution works on the honor system.

Trump is exactly the guy Madison and Hamilton worried out - the unscrupulous jerk who would use the founding documents as a guide to subvert them, and to warp government structure to serve his own ends - to make his own law.

A slug like Trump lives in SmarmSpace© (where loopholes are found, or manufactured).

He simply doesn't care about honor, or the rule of law, or right-n-wrong.

Unfortunately, there are about 275 people in Congress who are willing to go along with all this shit - because they're either cowardly phonies, or active participants in the project to tear down our traditions of democratic self-governance in order to replace it with a corporate-style plutocracy.

It's not a bad thing for media to keep these things in public view, but instead of the usual 10 minutes of exasperation, we need an acknowledgement of the fact that these assholes are actively working to kill democracy, and we need to know how we go about beating them - including civil disobedience.

Jan6 Stuff

The guys on the top rungs may get splashed a little, but it's more than likely the really smart ones all had a patsy one rung below them to take the hit, and just enough plausible deniability to mount a workable defense.

Elie makes the point:

It's possible that the top guys will get away with it, and we have to be ready for that.

Ari Melber, MSNBC with Elie Mystal

They came close - so fucking close

What's Wrong With Conservatives?

Seems to be something of a theme developing here.

So it turns out "conservatives" are at best control-freak assholes about practically everything, and at worst ... well, I guess there's no such thing as "worst" because they seem to take every critique as a challenge for them to be even shittier than they were before.

Chris Hayes - featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones

I dearly do love listening to smart people.