Treason doth not prosper

So my (vaxxed, boosted, very-careful-about-masking-in-crowds) friend has the 'rona.

Most likely because someone in the group they met with last weekend had "just a sniffle", didn't mask, didn't stay home, and now has succeeded in dosing them and two others in the group (and probably more who will come back hot in the next couple of days).

Which is a reminder, in case the current U.S. House majority, and the previous Administration, aren't vivid enough warnings, of what my old drill sergeant used to tell us; that the success of our mission depended on the competence of the stupidest person in our unit.

In any group, or any nation, success depends on either those people being 1) willing to learn how to be minimally functional, or 2) being safely sidelined so their incompetence is immaterial to the mission, or 3) being shitcanned entirely. 

The sort of people who infected my friend are and are not likely to be either 1 or 2, and we've given up on number 3.

And I have no idea how we can change that short of an extinction-level crisis like the Great Depression, or a global war that either 1) pulls the general public's collective head out of it's collective ass, or 2) makes the douchenozzles like Republicans (in the Thirties) or fascists (in the Forties) so loathsome that even the morons refuse to touch them and confine their moronity to stuff like pro wrestling.

Especially now, now that Republicans ARE fascists and antivaxxers and QANuts, too?

And some forty percent of the public and the mass media refuses to be honest about that or call them what they are, or despise and shun them for it?

I'm kind of worried about how we move on from there.

And speaking of people doing fucked up things...

I didn't write anything on the second anniversary of January Treason

Mostly because that fucking ship has sailed, hit a sunken rock, capsized, caught fire, exploded, and sank.

The traitors are now a majority in one house of Congress. They - the leaders of the betrayal - paid no price for their treason. 

The goon squads that actually did their dirty work ran off afterwards and had to be slowly, imperfectly tracked down (and largely - to the extent they were - only because some of them took videos and posted to Twitter of them doing a criminal fuckin' conspiracy. Stupid people, right..?)

While in Brazil...

...their own home-grown traitors tried the same shit just now.

It's worth noting that in Brasilia hundreds of these gomers left, not rolling their coal or waving their treason flags but in zip-ties and police vans. The Brazilian Supreme Court has issued warrants for several higher-ups, including a police colonel, who were part of the inside job.

This is Brazil, a barely-Second-World nation without the sort of massive police organization that exists here in the U.S., that managed to put the collar on these dirtbags. 

We'll see if they follow through with crushing the head of the Bolsonario snake, as we should have done with the MAGAts on January 7, 2021.

But We the People already look pathetic in that Brazil, with its long and woeful history of dictatorships and coups, has been harder on their present traitors that we have been on ours, on every level from vaccination to drag queens to actual rebellion.

Whether it's as big as treason against the nation or as small as giving other people your fucking disease, I can only say this again:

"If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters."

Die Braunen Battalionen

 

One year on, a reminder.

These people, and millions more like them, were not joking and were not playing. They intended to seize power by force. If you got in their way they were perfectly willing to kill you.

They are still there. They still want the same things.

And their "leaders" - the suit-and-tie-or-power-pumps sockpuppets like Greene and Cawthorne and Cotton and, or course, Trump himself - are happy to use the levers of power to please them while ruling the rest of us with as much of an iron hand as they can.

I have absolutely no idea 1) how you deal with these people - they don't want to play nice or compromise or "govern" with us; they want us silent and, if not silent, dead - or 2) how, in fact, you "govern" a democratic republic with them there.

I wish I had more optimism about this. I wish I thought that the wingnut right was just posturing.

I don't think that. I think that in less than a year they will pull all the levers they tried in 2020, and I think they'll succeed, and I think that, just as it worked in Germany in 1933, it will work again. 

And once these new "conservatives" take power they will not let it go.

So those of us who are not of their faction and who are their enemies will be presented with a horrible choice; fight them as they deploy all the power of the State, or let them have their will with us.

And that, frankly, is simply a choice between dying on our feet, or on our knees.

Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen

 So I came across this the other day and it was so odd that I've been fiddling with it ever since.

The grinning MAGAt there is one Ashli Babbitt, the only one of the treasonous mob shot dead on January 6, 2021 in the failed attempt to putsch Tubby off his golden throne and back into the chair behind the Resolute desk.

At the time if just seemed like just another freakish event in perhaps one of the most freakish days in the political history of the United States.

Since then, however, the wingnut Right - meaning the entire GQP - led by Tubby himself has beavered away to make the woman some sort ot True Christian Martyr cut down in the flower of her youth by communism, immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, or some combination of all the above.

In case you're not a student of Nazi iconography, the title of the post is from Die Fahne hoch, also known as the Horst-Wessel-Leid, the official theme song of the original NSDAP, supposedly written by the original Ashli Babbitt, a fightin' Sturmabteilung street brawler who was given a fatal injection of external lead by his Red Front street brawler enemies. So we've kinda been here, seen that. It's now dangerous and scary because it's Nazis; it's dangerous and scary because it's worked in the past.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.

It's that part of the emerging Babbitt the Martyr legend is that she was a veteran of the US Air Force.

Tubby himself has been banging that drum. Dead Ashli was "An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman...” according to the President quondam ex futuris. 

Given the tidal level of tongue-bathing the U.S. public gives veterans of any stripe that's not a bad propaganda ploy. Brand your people as Real American Heroes and suddenly any and everything they do is American and Heroic, right?

So I've been kind of following the whole Dead Ashli Saga with a curious and jaundiced eye for a while now but only just this past week came across these two little related items.

1) Babbit had a total of 12 years time-in-service; four active USAF (2004-2008), two AF Reserve (2008-2010), and six in the ANG (2010-2016), all as a "security" specialist, meaning one of the air cops that pull gate guard and provide perimeter security for USAF installations among other things.

2) Babbitt got out as a Senior Airman (E-4), the equivalent of an Army Specialist.

That is intensely weird to me.

I know that it takes longer - it used to take much longer - to make rank in the USAF than the Army. In the 1980s, when I came in the Army if you weren't at least E-4(P) - meaning on the promotable list for buck sergeant -  by the end of your first term you were a total spud. After a dozen years in? A decently competent troop should have been at least an E-5 and probably an E-6 - Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in the Army, Staff Sergeant or Technical Sergeant in the USAF.

To still be an E-4 after a dozen years in?

That seems pretty shocking. You'd have to have been either passed over repeatedly - meaning that your unit commander would have to find some pretty big reasons for not just 86ing your ass the next time your re-up date came around - or you had to have been promoted and then busted...also not a good reason to keep you hanging around the dayroom.

The endless Wars on Terror have forced the services to body-snatch pretty hard, though, so it's possible that Warm Body Ashli was better than a hole in the MTO&E, so there's that.

Still.

I find it intriguing in a not-good-way that the Wingnut Wessel of 1/6 turns out to have been - as a "military women" - kind of a pretty poor sort of "military woman". 

But, then again...why not? She clearly missed the part in the words she swore every time she re-upped where she was supposed to "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and became, instead, one of those enemies herself and got killed as such.

But the big picture seems to me that, like Tubby himself, wingnut world seems to find some of the sketchiest human beings on the planet to make into heroes. It's taking a street brawling thug and turing him into one heroic martyr, or taking a sad act air force cop and making her into another.

I wonder whether that says more about the heroes, or the sorts of people who make up Wingnut World..?

Fools Rush In

 I see that the "news" is fulminating about the Senatorial GQP's hard no on setting up an "investigation" of the weird mysterious thing that happened at the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021.

 

 
Ummm...gee. That's too bad. 

Without our solons on the case how on earth will we ever get to the bottom of that mystery, Scoob? Imagine the difficulty of unraveling who might have stormed the seat of government in desperate hopes to change the result of an election they'd been told over and over by their beloved Dear Leader had been "stolen"? Who, on that day, had spent hours listening to Tubby and his minions roaring about how the "traitors" and "thieves" inside the building were going to make that theft official and that how if only brave patriotic Real Americans could somehow, someway, get between these rascals and that process perhaps their dream of an endless reign of Emperor Trumpolean could come true? Who might possibly, just possibly, have been goaded through their gullible rage and credulous stupidity by grifters and conmen into trying their own Orange Foolius Revolution?

Who were recorded on live footage, on thousands of their own cell phones, on Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram doing just that and boasting about it?

I can't possible imagine, and now, without that precious commission, We the People will be forever in the dark.

There are many reasons to despair of this fucked-in-the-head country of ours (hi, systemic racism, massive militarization, and climate change!), but letting Joe Fucking Manchin roll over and beg for doggie treats from Moscow Mitch "investigating" whether the sun rises in the east isn't one of them.

 No.

THIS is one of them;

"Yet a full 73 percent of Republicans pin “some” or “a great deal” of responsibility on “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad,” even though both the FBI and Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have rejected the falsehood that leftist protesters were involved."

Now that's fucked-in-the-head. When you can see something with your own eyes, hear it with your own ears, and yet "not believe" it? What's that line about those who can make you believe absurdities..?

There are things that we can fix about the issues We the People face in the coming years.

This? This intransigent, dangerously belligerent stupidity of the people who have gone all in on the QANut Con?

Is not one of them.

There is no cure for Stupid.

It can only - and must - be utterly exterminated if this nation, as the nation it promised itself it would be, shall not perish from the Earth.