All I Want For Xmas is a Reckoning

 

     I don't get it. Any other developed nation would've had a serious reckoning. I mean, very serious and I don't mean the elevated belly button gazing we've been seeing for the last three years.

     Yet, even pictures like the lead image above couldn't shock and scare us straight. Oh, sure, tens of millions of us were horrified over the events of January 6, 2021. But tens of millions of us supported the rioters, the mob, who turned the Capitol building into a state of siege.

     There they are, plainclothes Capitol police aiming right at the faces of those who would eventually break into the House chamber as their cohorts would the Senate, and stand in the very same spot where Mike Pence had stood just moments earlier as he was about to certify the Electoral College results. There they are, fully committed, ready, willing and able to kill their fellow citizens as one of them would when Ashli Babbitt tried to climb through that door window leading to the Speaker's lobby.

     Nine Americans died that day and in the weeks that followed as a direct or indirect result of a riot that very nearly overthrew our government while the man who'd sent them sat at the opposite end of the National Mall in the Oval Office dining room hoping they'd prevail.

     A recent phrase of Liz Cheney keeps finding its way on my tongue: "Sleepwalking into a dictatorship."

     One would think any other democracy in the free world would have swiftly taken steps a long time ago to ensure that such a thing would and could never happen again. Legal guardrails would be built, rebuilt, shored up to prevent another January 6th from happening. January 6th should have been an epiphany day for the nation. Yet, it wasn't.

     Instead, the criminals who tried to sack our government and overturn the result of a free and fair election have become martyrs and victims to the right wing in our own Congress. 20 of them even formed a group, outrageously called a "choir", that recorded the national anthem over a prison phone that was then accompanied by a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance by the asshole who'd sent them to attack the Capitol.

     That would be the same asshole who's been promising them freedom, one Donald John Trump.

     At the end of the Second World War, enraged Italians shot, hung and brutalized Mussolini and his girlfriend. At the end of the Cold War, Romania found their own dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife guilty of crimes against the state and minutes later impatiently shot them by firing squad against a toilet block.

     History is replete with such summary executions.

     Now, I'm not saying we should revert to 1945 Italy or Communist Romania. I'm just saying. They saw monsters in their midst and did not want to see a repeat of it. So what are we seeing here?

     We're seeing Trump coddled by an endlessly deferential criminal justice system giving him endless appeals. He appeals trial dates (although you cannot appeal them), gag orders, you name it. He flies into one courtroom or another on a jumbo jet then gets to fly home to a luxurious resort in Palm Beach so he can then grouse into the wee hours of the morning about how he's a victim.

     He gets to violate the gag orders without once feeling the cold steel of handcuffs on his wrists, he never sees the inside of a jail cell. Remember, this is the guy who told a Washington Post reporter that he wanted what the rioters wanted, which was nothing less than the violent overthrow of his own government and the murder of the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

     The two people, in other words, next in line for succession.

     Trump's actions, misactions and 187 minutes of inaction are a matter of public record and living human memory. In a lot of countries I can think of, that would've gotten him executed and thrown in a mass grave along with the rotting corpses of his confederates. They did it with Robespierre and his buddies at the end of the Terror in 1794.

     Punishment. Swift. Merciless. And, no pun intended, unimpeachable.

     And the longer Trump eludes justice for what he did on January 6th, the deeper and deeper we slide into a farce of a country, once the leader of the free world.