Passing A Milestone In Infamy

A MAJOR, if sympbolic mileston was passed the other day in the ongoing pursuit of the criminals who participated in the infamous insurrection Capitol insurrection of january 6th, 2021. The one thousandth perpetrator was indicted. It is now estimated that approximately two thousand people participated in the violence, meaning that the process of apprehension and justice is about halfway home. The process has been greatly expedited by the fact that many if not most of the participants, apparently unaware that they were unintentionally providing all the evidence needed for their own prosecutaion, videotaped themselves on their own cell phones, including not only motion picutres useful in court, but also "selfies", many of which ended up on social media, most notably, Facebook. As the saying goes, paraphrased, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters. The outcomes vary widely. The most recent conviction resulted in a jail sentence of three years for a woman who, after breaking through a door in the Capitol building, photographed herself barging into the vacated office of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and stealing her laptop computer. Vacated, that is, other than a fellow mobster who took the liberty of sitting in the Speaker's office chair, and propping his feet up on her desk. He too has been indicted, tried, and sentenced, and is now appealing the verdict. Defenders of Trump's speech in which he incited his assembled mob to violence have weakly, dubiously tried to point out that when Trump exhorted them to "go to the Capitol and fight like hell or you aren't going to have a country anymore", the word "fight" could be construed in a variety of ways, and was intended to mean "protest virorougsly, but peacefully". However, there is, as they say, a fly in the ointment. Every indicted mobster has provided a deposition, and in every deposition the indicted criminal plainly asserts that his or her actions were intended to follow orders given by Trump. Tbe usual statement is: "I thought that's what he wanted us to do". Clearly, when Trump gave his marching orders, they were interpreted to mean, literally, "fight". and fight they did. To this day a large majority of registered Republicans mainatin that their behavior was proper and justified. Amazingly, the formal position of the Republican National Committee is that the insurrection constituted nothing other than "legitimate political discourse". Behold the descent of a major American political party the Republican party, into a terrorist, criminal enterprise.