07-21-2022, 06:12 AM
(07-20-2022, 03:30 PM)David Horn Wrote:(07-07-2022, 11:45 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The Jan. 6th Committee painted a chilling and criminally insane portrait of the former president's attempt to steal the election by weaponizing the Department of Justice.
It seems to have worked. So far, we're seeing a few small fish get jail time, but no serious players even getting indicted. Now, it seems the Secret Service was totally compromised too, so it seems Trump did a bang-up job of destroying the government from the inside.
Donald Trump is a master of corruption and self-promotion above all else. It's hard to see any other areas of expertise that he has ever had at any time of his life. Sophistication? His atrocious taste suggests a complete lack of aesthetic refinement that one expects of the usual college graduate.
Harry Truman spent no time in college, but he apparently had read all the books in the Independence (Missouri) Library. Libraries were then smaller, but back in those days they contained far less trash and were more heavily the classics. Note well that the Great Books approach to undergraduate education is one valid method. Its graduates may not be technically adept, but the good ones certainly have excellent preparation for law school. (I would like to see that approach return). How well one communicates heavily reflects what one reads, as does one's overall approach to life. One can learn much from Shakespeare alone; Trump obviously does not know Shakespeare... or Dostoevsky... or Goethe... or Dickens... or Voltaire. Can you imagine how dreadful a meeting would have been between Vaclav Havel and Donald Trump? By age 30 Harry Truman was a learned man and Trump wasn't. Truman kept reading and becoming more intellectually sophisticated and Trump has remained unlearned in anything that did not serve his immediate vanity, greed, self-indulgence, and sex drive. Good people do not fully trust vanity, greed, self-indulgence, and the sex drive.
I can assure you that Trump never read Dante's Inferno, as it has some ugly assessments of his ultimate fate. Music? I can more easily imagine Barack Obama "getting" J S Bach than Trump can.
Yes, I know; technically-trained people often are limited in their liberal-arts learning, but Trump did not get that instead.
A wannabe despot like Donald Trump must corrupt democracy to degrade, weaken, and kill it. Maybe America had institutions more solid than those of Weimar Germany and Trump was not ruthless and Machiavellian enough to overthrow American democracy as Hitler was. Had he been of different ethnic stock he would have been a mobster. Mobsters succeed by finding and exploiting personal weaknesses from greed to cowardice to self-indulgence. Trump may have learned a few things from them, but if one wants to do real good for people one seeks other methods. Cutting good deeds for both less dramatically effective than cutting throats, but cutting deals good for both is good for plenty of repeat business.
Quote:Which begs the question: where are the defenders of democracy? Sitting in their rocking chairs, apparently, because I don't see anyone going for the jugular here at all. Why? And why support a bunch of milquetoast respondents? For the record: I'll certainly vote, but I'm not giving anyone a dime.
Let's start with President Biden. He seems to not be a vindictive man, or he is cautious enough to avoid saying things that might compromise a prosecution. After all, astute prosecutors recognize that the real trial is in the courtroom and not in the pre-trial media (unless the prosecutor slips in tidbits that might cause the suspect to do something to incriminate himself). Donald Trump has a gigantic cult following, and it is as resolute in its support as one expects from Moonies or Scientologists, except that Trump seems to have committed a horrible crime with a speech encouraging an insurrection on his behalf. We may have found the events inside the Capitol disgusting in the extreme, but mercifully they failed badly. The 'alternate electors' plot may have seemed ludicrous, but that was the objective. Much time and effort proved necessary to piece those together. Now we know. I may have recognized the 'alternative slates' of electors as a contingency, but by the middle of November there could be no contingency.
We have no experience with coups in our country, but this one seems modeled upon the Bolshevik Revolution. From most accounts, Lenin was a spellbinding orator, although Trump has shown himself able to exploit America's right-leaning ignoramuses. I'm not sure that taking over the Capitol would have been adequate, as some other venue such as the sporting arena for the Georgetown Hoyas' basketball games or the arena for the Washington Capitols or Wizards, or some hall at the Pentagon or the US Naval Academy in nearby Annapolis would have served well for an official count of the electoral votes. Know well: Lenin did not establish dictatorial power until he was able to prevent the duly-elected Constitutive Assembly of the fledgling Russian Republic to assemble to pass laws.
The overall plot is far more dangerous than we may have thought. The most culpable parties are likely to face criminal prosecution with the potential for very long prison terms. I could name names, but I won't. More significantly, we need to improve ourselves as a nation. We need become less amenable to the the demagogic populist who appeals to visceral fears of a resentful segment of the public. Maybe we need to deal with those resentments with public policy that allows one to make a living in places in which industrial jobs were once plentiful but are not now, as in a band from Wisconsin and Iowa in the west to Upstate New York and central Pennsylvania in the east. Trump did win Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which Obama won twice without populist demagoguery.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.