The day after the Capitol riot

So, um, yeah: a Trump-loving mob, incited by the domestic Dear Leader himself, rushed an insufficiently-guarded Capitol building in Washington, D.C. as Congress was meeting in joint session to certify the Electoral College count.

Did the mob that invaded the Capitol intend to keep Congress from its legal obligation to certify the EC votes, all in the hope of creating a "legal" means for the domestic Dear Leader to stay in office past 20 January? I don't know. What I do know, courtesy of remarks caught on camera by an ITV reporter, is that a number of the rioters were infuriated over the illusion that the presidential election was "stolen". They attempted to justify their law-breaking by claiming they had an inalienable right to invade "the people's chamber", that "these people work for us". They said they were only seeking redress for the supposedly fraudulent election.

The water is still agitated and the ripples are still spreading but a few takeaways are beyond dispute:

• The domestic Dear Leader incited insurrection when he told his supporters to march down to the Capitol.
• The rioters, and much of Trump's base, are deluded. They are immersed in the topsy-turvy world of so-called conservative media.
• That topsy-turvy so-called conservative media, and similarly inclined social media, have spread lies about electoral fraud. There is zero evidence of such fraud but far-right pundits and politicos flatly deny that truth even as they fail to produce one iota of proof.
• Nobody in that media ecosystem or political system gives a shit what those of us in the real world think of them unless we have a strong basis for suing them.
• The domestic Dear Leader refuses to do anything involving his job except to do anything to hold onto it.
• Don Trumpone is a clear and present threat to public safety.

A few random thoughts:

• Don Trumpone's complicit vice-president and Cabinet will not act to relieve him of authority under the 25th Amendment. We couldn't trust them to act honorably anyway: the most likely outcome would be that they would set him aside until the morning of 20 January, then magically declare him restored to fitness just in time for him to grant his final set of pardons (and then fire missiles on Iran or some such insanity as a giant middle finger to the country).
• Since the 25th Amendment is an unrealistic and possibly even dangerous "solution" to our current problem, impeachment remains the most appropriate step. Not only is his incitement to sedition far worse an act than anything any past president has allegedly done, but on the off chance it succeeds and the Senate (miraculously) convicts him, it would remove the possibility that he could serve a nonconsecutive second term. That would be no small victory for the nation.
• Everyone's focusing on Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz for enabling the flatly baseless objections to the Electoral College vote certification. People, it takes members from both chambers to force Congress to consider objections. Mo Brooks and that walking pustule Louis Gohmert led 100+ House Republicans to file those objections, too. For some reason Senate Republicans are expected to know better, while House members can be excused as barely functional imbeciles. I grant you that Gohmert displays less evidence of brain activity than your average coma patient but by and large, House members are as aware of the impact of their words and deeds as senators are. So when you make your list of complicit Republicans who gave aid and comfort to seditionists, don't leave off the House members.
• Yeah: the kid-gloves treatment of the white insurrectionists by law enforcement yesterday was as blindingly obvious a sign of white privilege as one can imagine. If you don't comprehend the anger Black people feel at the disparate treatment of non-whites versus whites at the hands of law enforcement, you are part of the problem.
• Finally — finally — I've started to hear media figures talk about the conservative media problem. It predates the domestic Dear Leader, it will outlast his presidency, and it remains the single greatest threat to the viability of our democracy because it feeds the delusional rage that animates Trump supporters. By amplifying Don Trumpone's lies and feeding him fresh lies on a daily basis, these purveyors of disinfomation are weakening the country by letting their audiences live in a cocoon of unreality, rendering them incompetent to help solve our nation's problems.
• But the more fundamental problem that the lying conservative media have exposed, albeit inadvertently, is that we are woefully, embarrassingly, appallingly uneducated as regards that quaint old subject, "civics". In fact, we are woefully, embarrassingly, appallingly uneducated in general, rendering too many of us defenseless against lies, delusions, and what is more colloquially but pithily known as bullshit. We badly need training in critical thinking, too.
• The domestic Dear Leader will self-pardon. You can bet on that because after his rage-filled public denigration of the VP, even the servile Pence would not oblige him with that favor, so you can forget the eleventh-hour-resignation-to-make-Pence-president-to-issue-pardons scam.

  Now, it's hard to imagine there wouldn't be grounds to challenge any president's self-pardon, but impossible to imagine there wouldn't be grounds in the domestic Dear Leader's case. There could not be a less promising set of Supreme Court Justices to hear such a challenge but I also can't imagine a president who would give more reasons to strike down the power to self-pardon.

And finally:

When it comes to pinning responsibility for the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol Wednesday, plenty of people can and should face the music. Not just the rioters themselves (who, it should be noted, are not "antifa" or whatever other scapegoat the lying participants will claim next); not just the domestic Dear Leader, though he remains a primary instigator; not just the right-wing politicians who encouraged the insurrectionists at their rally. The responsibility also belongs to the media figures who originated and repeated the lies the domestic Dear Leader uttered at rally after rally, in tweet after tweet. The responsibility also belongs to the domestic Dear Leader's Congressional enablers like, yes, Hawley and Cruz but also Brooks and Gohmert and the hundreds of other Republicans in the House and Senate who objected to the Electoral College vote certification for reasons they knew were false.

All these people reinforced a state of unreality among the domestic Dear Leader's supporters, driving them to a frenzied fury of unjustified grievance that culminated in an assault on the Capitol they believed was not just necessary but righteous. And all of them therefore are seditionists with blood on their hands.