Death of the Party

Sometimes I just need what I like to think of as a “comfort read” and this is my latest one. It’s an early 21st Century whodunnit, with a minor political angle, but the title jumps out at me today in a way that it did not back when I bought the book.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/614404.Death_of_the_Party

And just like that,

I got out of bed following President Biden’s first full day in office and was not morbidly depressed.
😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸😍🇺🇸

Al Roker got a fist bump from the President!

Who jogged over to him!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Best response to whataboutism!

Michael Beschloss asks an urgently important question.

'How Did We Get Here?' A Call For An Evangelical Reckoning On Trump

As fallout continues from the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol, Ed Stetzer, head of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, has a message for his fellow evangelicals: it's time for a reckoning.

Evangelicals, he says, should look at how their own behaviors and actions may have helped fuel the insurrection. White evangelicals overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the 2020 election.

Some in the protest crowd raised signs with Christian symbolism and phrases.

"Part of this reckoning is: How did we get here? How were we so easily fooled by conspiracy theories?" he tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "We need to make clear who we are. And our allegiance is to King Jesus, not to what boasting political leader might come next."

https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tally-live-updates/2021/01/13/955801878/how-did-we-get-here-a-call-for-an-evangelical-reckoning-on-trump

Republican U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler

PORTLAND, ORE. — Republican U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who represents Southwest Washington, said she will vote to impeach President Donald Trump after last week’s deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

SO RUN, YOU CUR!!!!!

The American Abyss

By Timothy Snyder
Published Jan. 9, 2021
Updated Jan. 10, 2021, 10:12 a.m. ET

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html

A longish read but a powerful and brilliant analysis and conclusion. And elegantly written.

Hellenic American Leadership Council Issues Strong Statement Against Trump, Collaborators