Saturday 30th of March 2024

exposing the "deal"...

milleymilley

playing charades...

As a special congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection prepares to hold its first hearings later this month, we speak with author Michael Wolff, whose new book, “Landslide,” provides fresh details about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election, how he spurred his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and why he still holds the reins in the party. “There’s no question Donald Trump runs the Republican Party,” Wolff says. “We have two realities here: the reality of Donald Trump in charge, and the other reality which is that everybody knows that there’s something wrong with Donald Trump.

 

Read more: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/16/

landslide_michael_wolff_trump_final_days

 

Here, DemocracyNow! is sliding towards believing the establishment's shit. It does not know the way the game has been played... Give it another three or four years (say five, some people are slow in the uptake) the DemocracyNow! people will awake to the way they've been conned by the niceties of the establishment .. We could be wrong, mind you, to believe that Trump was the accidental idiot who nearly sent the whole charade (that included the war on Saddam, etc, the British fleet in the Black Sea... fill the blanks) crashing. The grand Doodah in Pittsburg can breathe a bit easier, but he wont be happy until Trump-the-idiot-with-a-following-of-idiots has been completely crushed...

a democratic murder...

 

Here’s a tale of two cops and two murders: Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, and John Doe and Ashli Babbitt. Two cops, two unarmed citizens killed. One you care about, one you don’t. Even murder is politicized these days.

No one needs much of a recap on Chauvin and Floyd. George Floyd, a black man, tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill while messed up on drugs. White Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and other cops responded, and in the process of restraining Floyd, killed him. Everyone has seen the video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and, as if it was a requirement, been coaxed to judge for themselves whether it was appropriate, necessary, and the cause of Floyd’s death.

A jury judged those things, too, and the result was a 22.5 year sentence for Chauvin (in handing down the sentence the judge said it was justified in part because Chauvin “committed his crime in the presence of children,” who of course had gathered to help jeer at the cops.) The woman who shot the snuff video got a special citation from the Pulitzer prize board.

Floyd’s death set off an angry summer of violence under the rubric Black Lives Matter, as progressives shut down opposing voices and several downtowns to insist Chauvin’s actions were part of systemic racism reaching back to 1619 in unbroken lineage. Celebrities, politicians, and academics jostled each other for camera time to demand the police be defunded. You might have seen something about all this on the teevee?

There’s also video of white Ashli Babbitt being killed by a black law enforcement officer, but it has been played by the mainstream media maybe 1/10,000th as often as the Floyd murder clip. Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag like a cape, was one of the rioters who smashed the glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol. A plain clothes Capitol Police officer, apparently without warning, fired a shot and Babbitt fell into the crowd and died. It was the only shot fired in the riot. A SWAT team just behind Babbitt saw the situation differently and never fired on her or those with her.

Like Floyd, Babbitt was unarmed. Like Floyd, Babbitt was committing a crime when she was killed by a cop. Unlike Floyd, there is no question of whether she was resisting arrest because the cop never got that far. He just shot her.

In the Floyd case, we know everything about Derek Chauvin, and saw him convicted in open court. Not so with Babbitt’s killer. Almost all police departments nationwide are required to release an officer’s name after a fatal shooting. Not the U.S. Capitol Police, which answers only to Congress. Even as Congress demands nationwide police reforms (ironically, the new, lower standards of proof proposed by H.R.1280—George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021—would condemn the Capitol cop) they have steadfastly refused to release the name of Babbitt’s killer.

In February, the Capitol Police stated they would “share additional information once an investigation is complete.” Investigators closed the case in April, cleared the still unnamed officer of wrongdoing in Babbitt’s death without addressing the fact that the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, and left it at that. Stuff happens.

No trial, no public accounting, not even a name for the Babbitt family to use in filing a wrongful death suit. Because Congress exempts the Capitol Police from the Freedom of Information Act, the family is forced to sue “for documents that identify the officer who shot Babbitt… as well as notes and summaries of what the officer said regarding the shooting and the reasons he discharged his weapon.”

They’d like more information on Babbitt’s death than the “investigation” provided. The Department of Justice simply wrote there was “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” DOJ did not even bother to hide its legal fudge, which had its investigators look narrowly at a Constitutional question, not a homicide.

Without shame, DOJ said it focused on 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. This requires prosecutors prove the officer acted willfully to deprive Babbitt of her rights, here the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizure. Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used constitutionally unreasonable force, but the officer did so “willfully” with the intent to deprive Babbitt of her Fourth Amendment rights. That meant evidence the officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required. In lay terms, that’s called a set-up en route to a cover-up.

Contrast that with the Chauvin prosecution, where prosecutors laid out a spread of charges—manslaughter, second-degree murder, and third-degree murder—all in the one death of George Floyd, leaving the civil rights question that saved the Capitol cop as a separate matter. That allowed prosecutors to instruct the jury (there of course was no jury in Babbitt’s case) to decide on emotion, saying “Use your common sense. Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw.” Imagine a jury in Babbitt’s case, over-exposed to a perpetually playing video of her killing, acting on the same instructions. But that never happened.

No one had much to say during the Babbitt investigation. In Floyd’s case, Joe Biden said he was praying the jury would reach the “right verdict,” calling the evidence “overwhelming in my view.” Maxine Waters demanded protesters become “more confrontational” if Chauvin was acquitted. That was so blatantly inflammatory it was almost grounds for a mistrial, never mind an impeachment had she held higher office

The president cheers on one prosecution, remaining silent while another murder is made to go away. Cities erect monuments to George Floyd as a martyr while the New York Times runs gossipy articles on Babbitt’s marriage problems. Asking for justice in Floyd’s case is a duty, even if it means burning down stores. Those who want the same justice for Babbitt are mocked as QAnon cultists. Did she not also bleed?

Oh, there’s more. Floyd was only on drugs passing fake money because of racism whereas Babbitt was a seditionist, a vandal, who was asking for it. Floyd’s death created a movement for change. Trump’s embrace of Ashli Babbitt anointed “January 6 a heroic uprising” for white supremacists seeking to overthrow democracy.

Absolutely no one would write of Floyd, as one mainstream media outlet did of Babbitt: “her death, while tragic, occurred for a very good reason. The Air Force veteran, who had been fully converted into the most dangerous and fantastical pro-Trump conspiracy theories, had joined the aggressive vanguard of the January 6 insurrection.” Babbitt deserved it. The article went on to compare Babbitt’s status as martyr to “Horst Wessel, a German storm trooper killed by communists in 1930, who inspired the eponymous Nazi anthem.”

Others claim Donald Trump is liable for the death, that the answer to Who Killed Ashli Babbitt? is… Trump. The Washington Post wrote, “The death of Ashli Babbitt offers the purest distillation of Donald Trump’s view of justice,” which apparently means to them Trump supported George Floyd’s killing while mourning Babbitt’s. Daily Beast fretted, “If the base believes they are being prosecuted and even ‘assassinated’ [like Babbitt] they will justify anything to reject Democratic [sic] rule and future elections that deprive them of power.”

Sears and Kmart pulled from sale T-shirts reading “Ashli Babbitt American Patriot” after an outcry on social media. Headlines read “Marjorie Taylor Greene provokes outrage by comparing Ashli Babbitt’s death to George Floyd’s” because Babbitt was okay to shoot “while actively participating in a violent riot” and Floyd was murdered by racists.

It is difficult in the face of so much hypocrisy to find the air to comment on the state of our country. Some murders are more equal than others. Dead bodies only matter when they can be used for your side’s political purposes. Why are some cops murderers and others protected with anonymity and a free-pass investigation?

The absolute craven transparency of the progressive argument is what gives hope. Hope that at some point enough Americans will set aside their blind Trump rage, look past the 24/7 propaganda directed at them, and come to realize even murder now only matters for the partisan clicks it generates. Our media is happy to justify Babbitt’s death, seeing it almost in biblical terms, divine retribution for supporting Trump. Floyd? Was always just a victim of an unjust society.

Ashli Babbitt was put down for political sins, and her killer escaped justice with the government’s help. Now ain’t that the Democratic vision of America?

 

 

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi PeopleHooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japanand Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

 

Read more: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/not-all-police-killings-are-created-equal/

 

 

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grandpa and marge simpson...

 

By Peter Van Buren

 

 

We need to clear some things up before they get any further out of hand, as the Dems insist on making this stuff every day’s front page. For starters, stop saying “Reichstag moment.” And when Grandpa Simpson and Kamala “Silent Shadow” Harris tottered into the White House, they became president. Between the two of them they’ll get their four years. Done.

Some 500 protesters taking selfies inside the Capitol building is a tantrum, not a coup. Among other things, a coup must have some path towards success, in this case, preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. The rioters at best might have delayed the largely ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes until the next day. Done.

Not done. The latest addition to Coup Canon comes from then—and somehow still—Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley. Milley was so shaken Trump might attempt a coup or take other illegal measures after the election that he and other top officials planned to stop Trump. Neither Milley nor any of the others actually spell out what Trump might have realistically done in some Calvinball-like way to make said coup happen. Milley’s Strangelovian performance art is based on nothing but the spittle running down his chin. American soldiers have been required to refuse illegal orders at least since Biden wore diapers, so Milley’s histrionics are just that.

Milley nonetheless felt “growing concern” after Trump placed “loyalists” in positions of power after the November 2020 election, replacing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Attorney General William Barr. He feared, based on his own sizable gut, these moves “were the sign of something sinister to come” (Update: Nothing sinister came.) Milley failed to recognize that all presidential appointees are “loyalists” and that somehow Trump did not replace Milley himself, who clearly had not read his oath recently, especially the part about taking orders from the civilian head of government.

In fact, if anyone is a threat to democracy it is nutjobs like Milley, who feel free to weave in and out of answering to the commander in chief based on their personal “concerns.” The general’s tough love for the Constitution apparently did not include the right to assemble, as he referred to a pro-Trump march protesting election results as “the modern American equivalent of brownshirts in the streets.”

While Milley was rewriting 230 years of military prudence in late 2020, Paul Krugman from the New York Times bunker wrote there were “substantial odds America as we know it will be damaged or even destroyed” by the election (Update: it was not.) He told us to “expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow” until Trump “stops counting of absentee ballots, claims massive fraud, and probably tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result.” (Update: none of that happened.)

Over at the Nation they simply assumed Trump would illegally remain in power. The writer’s real concern was that at least “we have the moral high ground. But we don’t have, frankly, the military leadership in place to direct a guerrilla campaign against an illegitimate regime. We don’t have a government-in-exile waiting to take power. We don’t have international allies. We don’t have an underground network of spies and saboteurs. . . but we can lay our bodies down in front of the tanks.” Any hope for the rule of law? Nope. “The Supreme Court too is, fundamentally, an anti-democratic institution run by people who are not subject to the popular will of our diverse society.”

The Nation should not have worried about having to go Red Dawn unarmed. General Milley said, “They may try [a coup] but they’re not going to f**king succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.” An interesting take on where power lies in a nation whose founding document begins with “We the People.”

Milley’s real plan was to prevent Trump from using the military in a coup by using the military in a coup against civilian leadership to gun down American citizens. CNN reports that after January 6 Milley feared an attack on the presidential inauguration, telling senior military leaders: “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re Boogaloo Boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

But Milley is also a liar, claiming publicly at the same time, “I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this election process. We will not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States,” while planning his Ring of Steel (it sounds better in the original German, Ring aus Stahl.)

And so on to the Reichstag. With as little knowledge of history as they have of coups, the mainstream media have turned the Reichstag fire into shorthand for everything they fear Trump would do but somehow never did. The 1933 Reichstag fire was a false-flag arson attack on the home of the German parliament in Berlin. The Nazi Party used this as a pretext to claim communists were ready to overthrow the elected government.

Left out of the current misuse of the incident is the fact Hitler had already become chancellor before the fire. More importantly, missing when trying to connect 1933 to modern America, is any amount of context. Hitler had already achieved power on promises to conquer the world, implement the Final Solution, and all sorts of other Mein Kampf stuff. He had announced plans to abolish democracy via the Enabling Act, which gave him power to pass laws by decree without the involvement of parliament. That next step needed an excuse, a trigger, to crack down on his opposition—not a prime mover to seize power.

Unlike modern America, the Germany around Hitler  had had only a few years’ taste of a wimpy democracy, and a long history of autocracy. No matter how dramatically someone wants to portray Trump’s non-actions, none of what never happened came within miles of what the real Nazis did.

So if there was no coup on January 6, and no possible road to a coup, why are we still talking about all this? We should be mocking, not raising up, those who have no basic understanding of current events, never mind history.

But we are still talking about all this (with Nancy Pelosi’s stacked-deck “investigation” grinding along) because the Biden agenda is stalled. He has decreed a few things to un-decree a few things Trump decreed, but is unlikely to make much progress on all those promises of infrastructure, immigration reform, or student loans. Inflation is at a 13 year high even as gas prices eat away at what’s left of our middle class. There is no vision to end the Covid-19 panic. The social justice and culture war issues which dominate the Democrats’ minds seem ever more flaccid. So what do Democrats have left to run on?

Trump. The Democratic message for the midterms and beyond is Trump, coups, January 6, white supremacy, racism-a-go-go, militias, domestic terrorism, a veritable Nazi renaissance. As one progressive journalist put it “The Capitol riot Committee… is a potent political weapon. Democrats have a massive opportunity: Shove it down the GOP’s throat.” A New York Times reporter called Trump and his 74 million supporters “enemies of the state.”

Why not? Dems have little else but fear of things that never happened to work with, and so they hope to milk the “we’re not Trump” cow one more time. They amplify voices that have been wrong in the past and make heroes of those who would replace the Constitution with their own judgment.

As for a real threat to democracy: It is General Milley preparing to disobey the Constitution and take a patriot-sized dump on his chain of command; it is progressive rag the Nationtelling their readers they will fight a guerrilla war against other Americans, and that the Supreme Court, the third branch of our republican government, is an illegitimate, antidemocratic institution. Who again is the threat? Trump is out of office, but Milley still holds command of the entire U.S. military.

 

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Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi PeopleHooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japanand Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/general-milleys-imaginary-coup/

 

 

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Read also:

 

does this look like trump?

 

 

thrones...

 

GusNote: As I have mentioned before, Trump was disliked by the Army, the Navy, the Airforce, the CIA, the NSA and everyone in America with an official secret/battle function. All he had for him was a bloke with horns and three pop-guns. You don't stage a coup with this kind of harware... 

 

freefree

sick at a general....

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has tested positive for Covid-19 and is working remotely, the Pentagon has announced. One other member of the Joint Chiefs is positive, but the military did not say who.

Milley tested positive on Sunday and is “experiencing very minor symptoms and can perform all of his duties from the remote location,”Joint Staff spokesman Colonel Dave Butler said in a statement on Monday.

The general “received the Covid-19 vaccines including the booster,” Butler added. All other Joint Chiefs tested negative except for one, but he would not say who it was.

Milley’s last public event was last week’s funeral of retired general, Raymond Odierno, at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was in contact with President Joe Biden. 

“He tested negative several days prior to and every day following contact with the president until yesterday,” Butler said.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/546313-general-milley-pentagon-covid/

 

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