Comments on the center column from our contributing pundits On the Left
Can’t Even Write the Words
By Jessica Gottlieb
I have started and stopped a half a dozen essays about January 6 and the ongoing Trump coup. In polite conversation I’ve become the woman whose jaw has quite simply dropped and left me fishlike, struggling for the right words, then only silence follows.
Back in 2015 when Trump’s rallies made him look like P.T. Barnum, the left laughed and ignored threats that were happening in plain sight. Some folks murmured around their dinner tables, but like today, most Americans treated our political circus like a reality TV show, ironically allowing them to ignore a very dangerous reality. The world seemed to know that, given power, Trump would be an inept leader. Some posited that he would lead U.S. civilians to their death.
How does a person write the words, “My country is a failure. We are a lawless kleptocracy,” and then finish her coffee and get on with the day?
How does one man release his militia on the seat of American Government, the same government he pillaged from and destroyed from within, and not face prosecution?
How does a person write the words, “We lost to Putin” and then wander around town like America isn’t at war? How can we ensure 2024 elections aren’t flashpoints for more white nationalist mobs?
Americans have an overly punitive justice system. That system is proving to not apply to the rich or connected. This basic judicial inequality set the stage for the death of any semblance of democracy.
How will we recover?
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Staging a Coup: The Past as Prologue
By Eric Blair
There is no hyperbole in stating that the United States may well witness a coup in the 2024 Presidential Elections not as a surprise, but through the cold, calculated, highly visible tactics. Trump is merely a figurehead and cheerleader for the efforts of a political party that stands for nothing, represents no one but a very narrow bandwidth of socio-economic elites and non-human entities (corporations), exploiting the intellectually feeble and sociologically bigoted to mortgage their democracy for upholding their own cynical grip on power. Ironically, it is the words of an imperialist that may be the clarion call for liberty lovers in the U.S. to repel the GOP’s treasonous ambitions: Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches” speech may be helpful to motivate those still asleep to the impending threat.
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The Big Lie's Incredible Power
By Jim McCraw
With every passing day, the investigations by Congress into all the things that happened after the election and before the certification on January 6th reveal more and more details about who was in league with Donald Trump and what they were all up to; Generating doubt from every angle about the legitimacy of the elections in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan.
With every passing day, we find that more evidence of Republican senators and congressmen and vast numbers of people inside the Trump White House, all screaming about “crime,” “fraud,” “impropriety,” “cheating,” and all the rest of the epithets that add up to The Big Lie.
They took command of the news media and social media, they instituted lawsuits against governments and officials and didn’t stop lying about The Big Lie for weeks, inflaming right wing voters to the point where the most radical elements in the party attacked the building, the people and the institutions that form the United States government because certain leaders in the government told them to do it.
Treason is an ugly, ugly word, but, for many of the people involved in this horrible mess, that it exactly the definition of what they did, and I hope that every single one of them will be made to answer for their crimes. This is still America.