Well. That was something.
I’m talking about the J6 hearing, of course. I couldn’t hear every word, because the contractors are finally here — after a 10-month wait, more or less — to do our bathrooms, and today was demo day. But between the jackhammers? Unreal, even though I didn’t learn anything really new. Rudy Giuliani is a drunk. (Everyone knows that.) Every person with two brain cells to rub together in the Trump inner circle knew he lost the election fair and square. (Another thing everyone knows.) Bill Barr’s testimony in particular should do damage, but won’t. The people who most need to know this aren’t paying attention. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
Imagine if you’d been one of the chumps who actually sent money for the “election defense fund.” It would be hard to admit you’d been conned. So you would stick your fingers in your ears and say NAH NAH NAH as loud as you could.
Gannett, which owns the Freep, has decreed that it wants to de-emphasize opinion journalism. Very very bad idea, that, reminiscent of the time a Knight Ridder executive told me he didn’t think people wanted restaurant reviews, but rather news about restaurants. (They want both.) He thought a critic shouldn’t talk about what they thought of the food, because after all, everyone has different taste, but rather what the decor was like, the prices, the parking situation. This would be a terrible mistake, in my opinion, because it would probably reduce the appearance of columns like these, which correctly points out that while we now know virtually no one other than the president believed the Big Lie, all of the surviving Republican candidates for governor of Michigan…do:
Earlier this month, when Michigan Radio’s Rick Pluta asked GOP candidates participating in their party’s first gubernatorial debate if they’d “accept the results of the August primary and the election in November as a fair and accurate reflection of the will of the voters,” only one committed to do so.
The rest agreed it’s too early to say whether the candidate who gets the most votes in those elections should be considered the legitimate winner.
…Now, less than two years later, impugning the legitimacy of the electoral process has become the Republican norm. The presumption is that any Democratic victory must be the product of electoral fraud, administrative error, or rigged voting machines.
This heads-I-win-tails-you-cheated mantra belies the confident attitude Michigan Republicans like to project as they approach this year’s mid-term elections. If a GOP comeback is as inevitable as GOP leaders assert, why are they so busy concocting excuses for defeat?
Exactly.
One piece of bloggage today, because I guess I’m working today after all. David Hogg grows up:
Hogg has learned that conservatives are more disciplined and proactive than liberals, and they tend to stay focused on a single goal rather than try to do everything at once. He and his fellow liberal activists too often find themselves reacting to outrages, he says, “timing the market” rather than building new political structures from the ground up. He cites conservative organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation. “Liberals are organized the way that a bunch of six-year olds doing a group project together with a bunch of crayons are,” he says. “Conservatives are organized like SEAL Team Six.”
Hogg now thinks that curbing gun violence is going to require a multi-year, three-pronged strategy: focusing on state-level activism; expanding the movement to include responsible gun owners and moderate Republicans; and changing the culture around gun ownership in the United States.
‘fraid so, kiddo. Good luck anyway.
Also, on edit: Wow, Yellowstone.
All entrances to Yellowstone National Park are temporarily closed due to this developing situation. https://t.co/cJhLykXbct
— Sean Breslin (@Sean_Breslin) June 13, 2022