America’s Epitaph: the Republican Insurrectionist Party (RIP)

As a matter of good conscience, I can no longer remain silent while what remains of my country comes apart at the seams. This is my testament. I at least want history to remember that I was not complicit in this collective derangement.

On January 6, 2021 the President of the United States seditiously incited a riotous insurrection on our nation’s Capitol that claimed the lives of at least five people, including a Capitol Policeman. He did this in real time on national television. We were all witnesses. And then, having ordered the National Guard and others to stand down, he watched gleefully while his minions came within an eyelash of getting their hands on the certified electors’ ballot box, Mike Pence’s throat, and AOC.

Six months later, the Seditionist-in-Chief has not been arrested. There is still no indication that he will even be charged.

Not only has Mr. Trump not been placed under military guard, the White House Press Corps has not even bothered to ask President Biden what his position is on prosecuting the disgraced ex-President for sedition, insurrection, and felony murder. We all remember the last time Biden inhabited the White House, and his boss famously intoned that war criminals who ordered widespread torture and bank criminals who brought our economy to its knees with fraudulent practices would not be prosecuted, because it was a time to look forward, not backward.

So the question is clearly relevant. Since the press won’t ask the appropriate questions, I will. For the record:

“Mr. Biden — why hasn’t Mr. Trump been charged by your Department of Justice for leading an insurrection on national tv?

Why hasn’t he been charged with the 10 counts of obstruction of justice the Independent Counsel’s Office said he was guilty of?

Are charges being prepared, or do you consider him to be above the law for crimes committed while he was in office?”

Of course, we know President Biden would initially respond that, unlike with “the former guy,” DOJ now operates independently. But there is a pressing national interest in knowing what our President’s position is on whether Trump should be charged, as hundreds of those acting at his behest on that dark day already have been.

Given what happened in 2009 when he and Obama faced a similar national emergency, the American people have a right to know if there are two systems of law — one for “we, the people” and another for a privileged class that is not required to answer for capital crimes openly committed on Pennsylvania Avenue in broad daylight. That seems simple enough.

And as for that pressing national interest…

While the Democratic leadership fiddles on the rooftops, and Joe Manchin holds democracy hostage, Donald Trump’s GOP is busy actively dismantling the electoral system, passing laws in states they control that will fraudulently tip the balance of power back in their favor next year, and replacing those Republican officials who refused to help steal the election last time with Trump loyalists. And, of course, they’ve cancelled the idea of an independent commission to investigate the insurrection — NOT because it would be politically embarrassing to do so, but because they aren’t done yet.

The plan is both simple and obvious to anyone paying attention: regain control of the House and Senate in 2022 on a platform of white grievance, voter suppression/intimidation, and the Big Lie; and then, guarantee Trump that if he runs in 2024, he will win even if he loses again, because they will control the certification process at both the state and national levels.

And why would they get away with it?

I’ve been catching up on The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood got a lot of things right about America 2020. And at the same time, I’ve been watching Adam Curtis’ chilling documentary series, The Power of Nightmares, which clearly shows how the original neocons paved the way for Trump by marrying Machiavellian Manichaeism with Evangelical Fundamentalism under Reagan. When the Dems next took control of the White House, the neocons applied the same strategy that they’d successfully employed to demonize the Soviet Union (and would later apply to bin Laden) to demonize Clinton.

And now, less than two decades on, those same neocons call themselves “Never Trumpers.” Oops!

According to polling, at least 50 Million Americans subscribe to the Big Lie now. Just as Trump was their response to Obama, the Big Lie is the response of these religious gun nuts to Black Lives Matter. This is White Supremacy come home to roost. They want their country back, and they don’t care what means are used to that end.

When you are an aggrieved Christian White Supremacist who believes that the Constitution is a religious document by which God shed his grace on you and John Wayne, but not on the slaves who built the White House, not on indentured servants who built our railroads, and certainly not on Indians, then Donald Trump was sent by God to set things right again. Oh, and according to those same polls, one of every four Republicans believe Joe Biden is a Satan-worshipping pedophile.

And that is today’s Republican Insurrectionist Party (RIP).

Let’s be perfectly honest. The reason the RIP has fallen in line behind the Big Lie is that their Senators and Congressmen are afraid for their own safety and that of their families back home. That was made clear when many of them voted to de-certify the election after they’d been attacked.

The RIP constituents wield A-15s and believe this is 1776. They believe the Second Amendment is for the purpose of armed insurrection, as Matt Gaetz and Michael Flynn are promoting, and they love to quote Thomas Jefferson about the need to periodically spill the blood of some politicians in order to preserve white minority (mob) rule. The Don is their mobster in chief.

The reason Donald Trump, the greatest traitor to America since Benedict Arnold, has not been arrested is because Joe, Nancy and Chuck are afraid of those very same all-American religious terrorists. They don’t want to spark another civil war. So they’re playing the appeasement card, and gambling that if they can just cling to power next year, they might be able to avoid the 2024 hostile takeover of our corporate government.

Now we all know Dems have the power to avoid the RIP takeover next year by passing the Voting Rights Act — finally adopting minimum standards for voting in a general election and thwarting inconsistent state laws under the Supremacy Clause — simply by abandoning the Jim Crow era filibuster rule in the Senate. One man, it seems, stands in the way of that sensible solution, which would likely save democracy.

Sen. Joe Manchin.

Now why would a Senator from West Virginia view the elimination of the filibuster, and not the continuing GOP insurrection, as threatening “the destruction of government,” in his own words? If he does not relent, based on the sham of bipartisanship, then we really have to ask ourselves a simple question: what does Donald Trump have on Joe Manchin and/or what has he promised him?

Stated differently, which of the special interests who fund our legislators have the most to gain from Donald Trump and the RIP instituting permanent minority rule?

We have 10 years to radically transform our energy system from coal, oil and gas to renewable fuels, and Biden has at least begun that process. Joe Manchin represents a state whose primary claim to fame is their willingness to remove the tops of mountains in the Appalachia to get at coal seams, dumping the mountaintops into rivers and streams. The laws were changed to allow them to do just that.

The one thing Margaret Atwood got wrong about Gilead, I mean the RIP’s America? That one of the changes power-mad militia leaders would make after imposing their theocratic system on the unwilling masses would be to save the planet from global warming. Ha! Quite the opposite, I’m afraid.

Obama subverted the climate process and made America the #1 producer of fossil fuels in the world because, well, it’s the economy, stupid (neoliberalism 101). The RIP wants to make that permanent. Joe Manchin will become Trump’s Energy Czar, if he so chooses. The neocons will own the neolibtards.

Follow the dirty fossil fuel. They will not give up so easily.

So again, I on behalf of America’s conscience ask:

“Mr. Biden, when will Donald Trump be charged with sedition?”