“Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see.” — John Lennon

The time of death is fairly easy to report. The patient had been clinging to life on life support, but finally decided to pull its own plug when the RNC decided to censure Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. That by itself was horrific news for any fan of democracy.

Mind you, the simple act of censuring a politician is almost completely symbolic. It can be loosely defined as an expression of official disapproval. So, what exactly are they disapproving? Kinzinger and Cheney were the lone Republicans to participate in the House January 6th committee.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. One thing Democrats are always guilty of doing is reaching out in the interest of fairness. In a process that took nearly three months, they tried to get more Republicans on board. It was never going to happen. Republicans can only say no at this point. They’ve somehow regressed into the mind of a two year old.

Mind you, the commission itself is not the cause of death. There are dozens of plausible reasons for not participating. Often, these things become more political than useful. The death officially came when the RNC declared that January 6th was legitimate political discourse.

This is not one of those play on words. I’ve heard these before on the other side. I’ve had people tell me the Democrats are dead in terms of electoral politics. They said this back in the Bush administration. Ironically, Bush have been the only Republican politicians to win a popular vote in the presidential elections since 1988.

Yet, this isn’t some dramatic postmortem that will turn out the other way. Conservatism is not dead. It is alive and well. Patriotism certainly isn’t dead. There are still more than enough people that love their country. The zombie version of the party has managed to rig enough elections to send the undead in the halls of Congress for generations to come. The bodies will be there, but something will definitely be lacking.

Cities perform autopsies when the cause of death is undetermined or material to a criminal case. Countries should do the same when one of the major political parties dies. We should pour over all of the relevant information to determine if a homicide has occurred. It would either be a homicide or a suicide depending on your point of view.

The outlook on that largely depends on whether you believe the forces that took over the party were ever conservative in the first place. They said they were. They still insist they are. Yet, all of the available evidence suggests that they have abandoned every principle they held dear. That is ultimately the cause of death. It was essentially self immolation.

Believing things that are plainly untrue is a sign of mental illness or denial on a galactic level. When you force fealty to that delusion you cease to be a party. You become a cult. The Republican party isn’t a democratic party anymore. It’s a death cult dedicated to the rule of one man minus the law. Democracies don’t die in a blaze of glory. They atrophy when people honor the man over the mission.

At some point when we were children we were told that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words would never hurt us. It’s a nice sentiment for toddlers and young children, but anyone that has ever had an argument with a friend, loved one, or even a casual acquaintance knows this to be untrue.

We’ve seen any number of monikers for the ex-president as well. People have found all kinds of creative names and acronyms to avoid saying his name. They do this because he sucks all of the oxygen out of the room. He is just a gigantic lump of vanity or the human form of a black hole. Unfortunately, these are only words too.

At a recent event, he admitted out loud that Joe Biden won the election and he was trying to overturn the election. However, I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way. He will continue to assert that he won while uttering phrases like this that showed that he lost.

Words matter. How we address our friends, neighbors, family members, and those we work with matters. How we speak to people matters. This is why we pay so much attention to our politicians in the first place. We pay attention to not only what they say but how they say it. When those words and the deeds that follow match up then we know we are onto something. On a similar timeline, the ex-president promised to pardon insurrectionists should he be reelected in 2024. Such talk could be seen as idle chat, but it is important to look at his history of pardons while he was in the White House.

Certainly, it wasn’t everyone on the list. Yet, when you look at a alarmingly large number of folks pardoned or commuted you see a pattern. It is a pattern of someone that used the oval office as somewhat of a criminal enterprise. It could credibly be said that no one gets poorer going to Washington. Still, no one has profited from the presidency quite like the last occupant.

In the face of these words, the mantra from the right has been eerily consistent. He didn’t mean it like that. He was just joking. You libs are taking him way too literally. He’s not a politician, so he’s not an artful speaker. He just tells it like it is. Suddenly you look up and they’ve tied themselves in knots trying to explain off something that can’t be excused.

What the former guy knows is that nothing serious is ever going to happen to him. People will talk and there will be investigations and they will find more than enough evidence to charge him, but somehow that won’t happen. It won’t happen because he breaks the law in plain sight. He tells you he’s going to do it. He tells you he’s done it. Surely no criminal would do such a thing.

He also is banking on an over 200 year tradition in this country. Underlings and henchmen go to jail. The principals never do. We don’t throw our political opponents in jail. The whole country would descend into chaos if we did. Chaos is just another word after all. Still, it is a pretty good descriptor of what is going on right now.

Before this week I had never heard of Jeffrey Clark.  Who’s Jeffrey Clark, you ask?  Clark is a Trump plant in the DOJ who conspired with him to insert the DOJ into The Big Lie.  Clark wrote the draft letter that he tried to get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to sign alleging that the DOJ was investigating “various irregularities,” and, “…we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”  The letter urges the governor to Georgia to reconvene the state legislature to reconsider the certification of the election for Joe Biden and choose a different set of electors for Trump.  Luckily for democracy, Rosen refused to approve the letter.  After his refusal, Clark then conspired with Trump to fire Rosen and appoint him as acting AG so he could use the DOJ to complete a coup against the duly elected president.

Even as we watched the train wreck of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election with The Big Lie, we didn’t know how close we came to a coup enacted by Trump plants not only at DOJ, but also DOD and other agencies.  And the terrifying thing is that NONE of these officials have paid any price for their treasonous conduct as employees of the US government.  That’s the shameful part.

Far right wing Republican, Mike Nearman, a state representative in Oregon was expelled last night in a 59-1 vote for recklessly endangering the lives of representatives in special session by opening a locked side door allowing armed insurrectionists in the building last December protesting COVID-19 restrictions.  Nearman is a nut tied to all kinds of goofy conspiracy theories including signing on to our own nut, Ken Paxton’s, idiotic lawsuit to overturn the Oregon presidential vote.  Republicans had been slow walking the “investigation” of Nearman’s misconduct when a video emerged of him plotting with the insurectionists the week before the attack to let them into a locked door, and that is precisely what he did.  The evidence was so plain that even Republicans couldn’t ignore it and then unanimously voted him off the island.

There’s no question that Nearman is a bad guy.  He’s also facing criminal charges for his actions and one can only hope the judge in that case throws the book at him.  THIS is how you treat elected officials who support insurrection and lawlessness.  The same standard needs to be applied to those in DC who aided, abetted, and encouraged the attack on the US Capitol on January 6.  The morons who attacked the Capitol that day were too goddammed stupid to have done that on their own.  Insiders, and by that I mean elected officials and their staffs, helped them with the goal of delaying  or even stopping the certification of the Electoral College vote.  Elected officials, including the Vice President, could have easily been killed by said morons.  Those officials also must have the book thrown at them including jail time.  That’s how you put a stop to this nonsense.

Mike Flynn, former national security advisor and convicted felon who was pardoned by Trump, called for a military coup like happened in Myanmar to remove Biden by force and instate Trump as dictator.  That’s right folks, just in time for memorial day, a retired career US Army officer and highest ranking security advisor called for shredding the Constitution and taking over the US government, Banana Republic style.  Where did he say this?  At a Qanon convention in Dallas. Yesterday.  Watch for yourself.

Here is the video of former national security advisor Michael Flynn saying that he thinks a coup like the coup in Myanmar should happen in the US. pic.twitter.com/7mGYjfXg18

— Mamie (@MC_Hyperbole) May 30, 2021

So, instead of sitting in a federal prison cell, insurrectionist Mike Flynn is calling for overthrow of the US government.  With the radicalization of one party, we continue to inch towards actual war.

Cruz announced today that he has gathered up 11 GOP Senate nutbags to join together to object to the electoral vote on Wednesday insisting on a ten day “audit” of the states electoral votes by a Congressional committee.  This has no chance of passing, of course, so it’s just another idiotic partisan sideshow setting up for the 2024 election.  Hawley of Missouri announced this week that he’s going to object, so Cruz had to out do is dickishness, so he thought that a ten day delay would be a really good idea, leaving FOUR DAYS before the inauguration to finally certify the election that’s actually been final for weeks.

It’s a simply awful idea that’s coming from an awful person who once again is embarrassing our entire state.  This time, though, he’s actually trying to help Trump steal a free, fair, and final election that he lost fair and square.  How do we know this is simply a partisan sideshow?  If Cruz was serious, he would have proposed this “audit” back in November.

The Crazy Train to 2024 is already boarded and pulling out of the station.