Kyrsten Sinema’s combustible thumb (The Washington Post)

‘What a moron’: Dr. Anthony Fauci on Senator Roger Marshall after heated exchange (Reuters)

I am not often in the business of advising Republican politicians. However, I really hate to see Columbus North High School’s most prestigious fella pass up such a smart opportunity.

Former Vice-President Mike Pence has let a few impressions leak that seem to me to be trial balloons regarding his recent invitation to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Via the New York Times:

In recent weeks, Mr. Pence is said by people familiar with his thinking to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the idea of voluntary cooperation. He has told aides that the committee has taken a sharp partisan turn by openly considering the potential for criminal referrals to the Justice Department about Mr. Trump and others. Such referrals, in Mr. Pence’s view, appear designed to hurt Republican chances of winning control of Congress in November.

The problem is that Pence, who presumably has designs on the presidency himself, is in a rather difficult spot. He seems concerned that capitulation to the Select Committee would lose him sway among the mighty Trump base. But didn’t he already lose that precious anointing when he refused to throw out the generally accepted election result on 1/6/2021? Or when he’s seen on video being quickly evacuated from the legislative floor?

This why I suspect we are reading such speculation in the great NYT. He needs to test his standing with the MAGATs. With the Qanons. With the true believers. With those who await the necromancing of JFK Jr., the ones who think Wayfair furniture is built out of human remains. Pence is sticking a wet phalange into the wind. And I don’t think the results are gonna be all that great for him.

That’s got to be quite a kick in the gut for a guy who spent four years staring into the back of Preznit Carnage’s head with a look on his face like when Itchy the Wookie is watching Diahann Carroll sing “This Minute Now” in the Star Wars Holiday Special. This is Mr. “I Am Deeply Humbled to Be Your Vice President,” after all. His repayment? HANG MIKE PENCE. HANG MIKE PENCE HANG MIKE PENCE.

So why is he even pondering this when there’s a much better, albeit more risky, way forward?

Hey. Mike. Get to marching in Liz Cheney’s parade.

Do I think Liz Cheney is doing what she’s doing because she wants what’s best for the country and she believes the Big Lie is a Big Lie and that the Insurrection of January 6 was ungood? I guess. But on the other hand, I think Liz Cheney sees a BIG FAT LONGSHOT PATH TO BECOME LA PREZNIT OF DEEZ UNTIED STATES OF AMERICA.

After all, what happens when or if the unexplainable shine wears off of der cheeterhosen? Criminal charges. Lawsuits. Sexual assault charges. Civil suits leaving him hemorrhaging money. His recent vaccine endorsements are already throwing off his most loyal unwashed. Who’s going to be there if and when the Republican Party tosses Former Preznit Disgraceful Carnage out on his ass in his fat golf khakis? Liz Cheney is so far the only one betting the long game that it’s going to be she. (Okay, yes, Adam Kinzinger, blah blah blah. Dude is really kind of an afterthought on all this, methinks.)

Cheney has begun to forge a path that might could behoove the former Vice-Preznit to embark upon. It could start with his straightforward, unredacted public testimony to the Select Committee, followed by public calls to his own party to purge itself of this enormous, treacherous lie, to respect the fair and correct result of the 2020 election, and to get back to the business of working for true conservative values.

Mr. Former Vice President, heed my call: You sir, are in need of a reinvention. And I would argue that the Congresswoman from Wyoming is showing you the way. Show up. Testify. Cooperate. Throw your former boss, who I remind you tried to have you assassinated, way deep and far under the bus. It will be good for the country. It will make you seem to be presidential.

Heck. It might even make you presidential.

In the early summer of 1989 in Washington, D.C., my Dad and I took a Metro downtown (or maybe we drove) and went to the Capitol to see the mighty legislator Claude Pepper lie in state. As I recall, it was kind of on a whim. He at the time was running his own newsletter so his schedule was flexible; I was a kid, so my schedule was flexible. We woke up, he said hey, let’s go see Claude, and we went.

My Dad up and moved to D.C. a few years before this. By this time, he had purchased a hovel of a house over the river in Virginia that he would soon raze and replace. So I had been hanging out in D.C. for several years by that time. I was commuting like a pro by age 15, taking the Metro to wherever I liked, and where I liked was often to the National Mall. My favorite spot was the Lincoln Memorial, where you could stand at the man’s feet and see so much of our Nation’s Capital’s great landmarks all in a line. I’d sometimes walk the whole way from Lincoln, down to the Vietnam, along the Mall passing all of the great museums, past the Washington, and then wonder at the majesty of our U.S. Capitol building.

I would later spend a semester in D.C. via a program sponsored by my school, interning and visiting various interest groups and lobby shops. I would work a summer there as a busboy just off of Georgetown Much later, I would finally succumb and move there, landing a job on a magazine published by a trade association, and ending up as their Web guy until the job was too much for me. I lasted there 13 years. And, when the weather was nice, a lunchtime walk around the White House was a usual event. (This blog, in fact, was born there, a nice way at the time to get this introvert to go out and meet people.)

Washington, D.C. is in my backbone. And though I haven’t even been there in more than a decade, it is one of the places in the world that I call home. It is decades of memories. And many of those memories involve that big beautiful bicameral building.

So I was properly horrified watching the events of January 6, 2021. I was not just horrified for my country, or for my government, or for the insurrection’s victims. It was as if my own house was being mauled. It was as if someone had crapped all over my temple. I think of the fellow who sat with a big grin on his face with a foot up on Speaker Pelosi’s desk. I think of those morons rifling through legislators’ notes looking for “dirt,” as if they had half the brain-power required to even comprehend what was on those papers. I think of that douche in the horn-hat crowing from the lectern, those who climbed the walls, those who came prepped with plastic cuffs, and my blood boils.

Due to this, yes, I wanted to hear more from Attorney General Merrick Garland today. I have liked to imagine that his demeanor through his speech would be closer to how I feel about this event, that he’d get a vein-bulge on his forehead, that his eyes might bug out some, that he’d clench his fists and declare that heads will roll. But Garland doesn’t seem to be the veiny-forehead type. C’est la vie.

But I want to see heads roll for this. 365 days now and I have yet to witness this cathartic experience. I want heads to roll. I want tales told. I want names. I want to know who paid for this. I want to know who advocated for it. I want these people to suffer as I suffered seeing my home, my temple, so horribly violated.

More than anything, I want that orange idiot to be shuffled off in chains for this. Not for tax evasion. Not for fraud. This. I fear largely that this country may punish him for his toilet business practices but may never assign him accountability for his septic tank presidency. The Republican Senate failed to do this job. It failed to do it twice. And while the Attorney General is taking massive pressure to do something regarding this, I think every conversation about that should note that had the Senate done its job in February 2021, Garland’s position would not be nearly as precarious as it is now. He would feel far less political pressure as he does now to do the right thing, to prosecute this doorknob to the fullest extent of the law. Don’t land this on Merrick Garland. Land it on Mitch McConnell. He drove the getaway car.

As an American. As a person who used to live there and considered it home to my heart. As a person who followed public policy since I was 4 years old. As a guy who took a field trip with his Dad to see Clace Pepper’s dead bald head. As a person who would genuflect entering the Capitol but would refuse to do so in any other building.

I detest what took place one year ago. I hate them all. I hate them all with a passion that spills bile from my eyes, from my mouth, from my penis. I hate them all. I hope they all find a place in a burny place after they die, I hope that burny place chops them into little pieces one crouton at a time. I want them to suffer. I want them to know that what they did wrong. They invaded my home. They violated me personally. And I want them to pay the price.

Let’s go.

Andrew Clyde (Georgia)
Ronny Jackson (Tejas)
Doug LaMalfa (California)
Tom McClintock (California)
Ralph Norman (South Carolina)
Mike Rogers (Alabama)
Matt Rosendale (Montana)
Andy Biggs (Arizona)
Mo Brooks (Alabama)
Scott DesJarlais (Tennessee)
Tom Tiffany (Wisconsin)
Thomas Massie (Kentucky)
Paul Gosar (Arizona)
Chip Roy (Tejas)

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The Office of President Donald J. Trump has ended the blog, “From the Desk of President Trump.”

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• 11 Things That Lasted Longer Than Trump’s Blog (Buzzfeed)

By every indication of her Facebook profile, a person who I loved very much in college and who was one of the most decent and principled people I have ever known is these days doing well for herself. She is still utterly beautiful. And I am also pleased to see that her parents are still healthy, together, and apparently very happy.

I will only mention briefly that while I was seeing this person, her mother was doing some local press and talks, discussing her experience having been a child in Europe at a certain time, having had a twin sister at that time, having felt compelled to hid with her sister under her mother’s dress as they assigned people from off the train, and she, having been so “fortunate” to have been a twin, she would spend her time through the Holocaust being studied by a mad doctor whose name you might know and might if you know it well associate it with dreadful evil, and that if you knew the stories, if you had heard her tell them as I have, you would understand the unlimited depth of the evil of the infamous Josef Mengele.

When I was in school, they would teach Holocaust every coupla years. Blah blah blah, the Jews and pictures of emaciated people and that breathtaking number, six million, 12 million, they thought they were finally going to get showers but instead they got Zyklon B. But hear someone’s Mom who you know tell the story, how when her sister succumbed and she fought back and how Mengele took to her phalanges with a hammer, hear that and know that person survived it and created a family that produced someone as astonishing and wonderful as the person I knew back in the day, and you can no longer experience the Holocaust as a brief read in your world history text from ninth grade. I read Last of the Just, I read Night, I was lectured to by Saul Friedman, I have heard Robert Clary tell his story. I still cannot comprehend this era as someone who lived through it, but I have heard the story from people who did. It is a story that reaches the core of this planet. And it is relevant and right under your nose.

And it is ridiculous that I have to write about Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is an ignorant psychopath with redneck in her pocket. There is no empathy under her hair or anywhere within her. None. Yet, he is a member of the United States Congress. This person went in front of a camera and equated House rules that continue to require masking with a Nazi policy forcing the Juden to wear a little gold star.

Oh, yes she did.

“This woman is mentally ill,” Greene said of Pelosi, D-Calif. “You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

This is a person who is in Congress.

This country is so fucked.

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