Texas secessionism was, indeed, something we viewed with dreary regularity at least as far back as the '80s. We're talking a Texas that prided itself on being the setting of Dallas, that elected Ann Richards governor - if you are Texan, you have a truck, and you like to go skiing, you will tell anyone and everyone that the Republic of Texas is ready to go it alone at the drop of a hat and you have done since the invasion of Grenada or before.

The difference now is every news source is at "ZOMG THEY MIGHT DO IT" because while we have to be fair and balanced, and also teach the controversy, and both-sides every issue, we're also scared to fucking death of crazy right-wing republicans.

I, myself, grow more sanguine every day. It has become apparent to me that the J6 committee intends to slow-walk the country through the entire affair, get all the juicy shit in unimpeachable public testimony, and then let the AG wrap it up with whatever is polling the best.

The country at large is pretty firmly at "let's not do this again." 60% of Americans polled want to see Trump charged with a crime. That's an important distinction - that doesn't mean 40% think he's innocent, that means that 40% want to move on, at a bare minimum. Raffensberger said an interesting thing yesterday: he pointed out that at the end of the day, 30,000 more people voted for Republican senatorial candidates than for Republican presidential candidates. That's a small city's worth of Republicans - in GEORGIA - that couldn't hold their noses long enough to vote the party line. And the party line was short and unequivocal:

Out here in normie world things are really clear: you're for democracy or you're for fascism. Us left-wingers have known shades of this since Reagan or before but much of the country is pretty much at holy-shit-Hitler. I think it's much muddier in the party: I doubt Liz Cheney and I agree much on policy but at a bare minimum, she's lawful evil. I know for damn sure Mitch McConnell and I agree on absolutely nothing but he's lawful evil, too. For the longest time, the Republican Party has been at "we, as a group, give no fucks about anyone but this group" and now they're in a feedback loop where "group" has become "Trump."

RINO-hunting license? That's a witch hunt, man. That right there says if you don't sign your name to this entire, heaping pile of shit, you're not one of us. Evil-for-all or Evil-for-one are the two wolves within the Republican Party right now and here we are, five months before the midterms, and it's looking a long way from settled.

Mathematically, is Trump's influence going to advance or decay in the following five months? Who has a better parliamentary ground game, the skullduggers or the populists? Trump seems to be limited clown shows and off-brand memos while, for once, the skullduggers are seizing the media.

I think the real battle is whether the old-school Republicans can peel the party back from the populists. I don't think it'll make them better people? I don't think it'll make them care about the environment? I don't think they'll suddenly see the light on abortion? But I do think the coup against the United States has failed while the coup against the Republican Party succeeded beyond the Russians' wildest imaginations. And I think the Republicans in charge know that they either shut this bullshit down or they accept their fortunes are in the hands of a venal madman who's only an election or two from senility.