The other night I happened to catch a discussion on MS-NBC between Chris Hayes and Michelle Goldberg (from the failing New York Times) about whether Trump should be allowed to deliver ‘seditious’ tirades on TV. After all, this is a guy who provoked the January 6th riot, is an ‘enemy of American democracy and has promised that he will continue his ‘assault’ on the government if he is elected in 2024.
In other words, according to these two experts on contemporary politics, who weren’t even alive when Richard Nixon was President, we need to ask whether TV news stations should be giving someone free airtime to organize a campaign against the national state.
Of course, the fact is (note the word ‘fact’) that after more than three years of continuous investigations by multiple authorities (with subpoena power, by the way), nobody has yet to come up with one, single connection or any connection between Trump and the schmucks who smashed into the Capitol on January 6th, and the fact is (note the use of that word ‘fact’ again) that there has not been the slightest hint of any attempt by Trump to get the military to come out and support the January 6th rioters with armed force.
Now maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I don’t know anything about history or political events, but I always thought that if you were going to lead an insurrection, i.e., a physical assault against the government, you need to equip and direct either a large group of armed followers to initiate and lead the attack, or you needed actual physical and logistical support from the military, or both.
Isn’t this what happened when Goulart was overthrown in Brazil in 1964? Isn’t this what happened in Greece when a military coup ousted the government of Andreas Papandreou in 1967? Wasn’t this the story about the overthrow of Allende’s government in Chile in 1973? Want a few more examples?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to find some back-door way to all of a sudden become the old leftie who has just seen the MAGA light. And I certainly would never try to convince anyone that Donald Trump’s vulgarity and misogynistic verbal style sets a standard for how public debate should be carried out.
But what the Fake News is doing by promoting totally false ideas about Trump’s so-called insurrectionist or seditious behavior is to create what they hope will be a sellable narrative for the 2024 campaign, the narrative being what happened on January 6th. Because even a lunkhead like Chris Hayes can use the miles of video about January 6th to create content for his so-called review of the news, and neither he nor any of his lunkhead guests from either the Left or the Right will have trouble figuring out what to say.
Yesterday I went down to my local Stop&Shop and the shelves which usually display the cat food and cat litter had nothing on them at all. How do I take care of Leonard, Bernard, Seymour, and Elsie, who happen to be my four cats? (Elsie and Bernard pictured above.)
So, I asked the store manager when they would be getting another shipment of these all-important (for me) goods and he said, “Oh, we have plenty out back, but we don’t have anyone today who can stack that stuff out here on the shelves.”
Right now, we have a shortage of long-haul truckers which will hit somewhere around 160,000 in the next ten years. Think this is because they don’t get paid enough? Walmart just announced they will pay their drivers $110,000 to start, okay? The country is lacking workers in nursing, farming and health aides, to name just a few critical industries where not having necessary hands to do the work is creating distribution and supply problems up and down the line.
The reason our economy may soon begin to contract is not because nobody wants to go out and look for a job. The reason is because we have a national population which is getting older and relatively smaller and there simply aren’t enough people around to get the necessary work done.
You don’t increase the average size of the average family through some kind of legislative incentive. You don’t get younger people to marry earlier by telling them that they need to produce more children who can fill all those unfilled jobs.
You increase your population by increasing immigration, okay? And you don’t increase immigration by sending 1,500 troops down to the Mexican border so that Customs & Immigration can spend more time running around and checking every immigrant’s papers to make sure we are only admitting the cream of the immigrant crop.
But you’re not going to hear this issue discussed in a rational or informed way on MS-NBC or anywhere else. Better to compete for viewers by talking about how and when Donald Trump will overthrow the United States.
To paraphrase our so-called ‘demented’ President, if Trump is really planning a coup, he better learn how to fly an F-15.