My observation here the other day that Donald Trump had two more weeks in which to wreak havoc turned out to be quite the understatement, huh?
Like many people I watched yesterday's events unfold on TV, in my case the free stream from CBS News, whose commentators made their own elite priorities absolutely clear right from the get-go. And those priorities were disgust at the destruction of "sacred" property and concerns about how "the rest of the world" would react to a mob storming the capitol, as though America were some kind of third world Banana Republic.
"This is not who we are," moaned many a bubble-encased pundit and elected official.
The sight of that Andrew Jackson throwback lounging in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, feet on her desk and scratching his crotch, did, I confess, elicit a little bit of schadenfreude. It would have been better if he posed eating some of her designer ice cream with his fingers. But as our betters always like to admonish us, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
CBS personality Norah O'Donnell, bless her heart, did her very best to blame the siege on Russia. But to his credit, even former CIA official-turned-#Russiagate pundit Michael Morell wasn't having it. This, he proclaimed, was pure Trumpian homegrown terrorism.
Not that I'm saying that these homegrown terrorists who are terrorizing both our elected officials and their media lackeys are therefore our friends. But at least somebody is finally striking unaccustomed fear into their self-satisfied cores.
Witness the inaction of the Capitol Police, who in at least one incident, literally seemed to invite the mob right into the Hallowed Halls, opening the gates and even posing for selfies when not being chased up the stairs by the teeming masses. No longer can our congress critters rely upon and trust their armed guards to protect them from... you know, actual people and their constituents. The only actual people that the Capitol Police have traditionally ousted from the building are climate activists, disability rights activists dragged out of their wheelchairs, Code Pink antiwar protesters and other social justice advocates. If the Capitol Police had seen crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters converging on the building, the tear gas canisters and sound blast cannons would have out in full force. It would have been over in five minutes instead of five hours.
Here's my theory. Security officials sympathetic to Trump thought the protesters they allowed into the building would have behaved a little bit better than they did. The storming got just a wee bit out of hand. The original plan might have been to let a dozen or so garishly costumed "patriots" into Senate chambers during the election hearing for a quick pro-Trump photo-op before security quickly moved in and pretended to drag them away.
So now that it's gotten totally out of their elite control, our elected officials face a choice. They can either tamp down social unrest by giving people health care, a guaranteed basic income, eviction relief and a federal jobs program. Or, they can declare all 300-plus million American citizens their sworn enemies and punish them with more austerity, more social media and press censorship, and more prisons. Right now they're flailing and still worried mainly about losing their precious - and very contrived and very tattered - global reputation as the bastion of democracy and human rights.
Even Donald Trump, who once infamously and pretty accurately claimed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, might not get away with this latest stunt. For there's an unwritten rule among organized criminals of all kinds that you must never s--t where you eat. Trump just pooped all over the very same people who control the government's purse-strings, who bankrolled his military and his border wall while covering their own complicit butts by tsk-tskiing his boorish manners and pretending to punish him over his alleged romance with Putin. It's still up in the air whether they really mean it this time and will remove him from office (even ex post facto) thus denying him his retirement package, his life-long Secret Service protection and all the other perks enjoyed by former presidents.
Speaking of whom, it's a sad day indeed when unindicted war criminal George W. Bush, responsible for millions of deaths of innocents in his illegal war, can actually appear beside his fellow miscreants Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and condemn Trump for instigating domestic violence right in the elites' own back yard.
A page has turned, and we must look forward and not backward - but just not in the way that these presidents and congress critters mean whenever they exculpate themselves from accountability.
The tide has turned. For once, they are afraid of us. The only thing we have to fear is their fear itself.
