I was being dead serious. Kinda like when they asked Flynn if he believes in a peaceful transition of power. "Fifth," was his reply. It was a literal interpretation of that old Chapelle's Show sketch where he just keeps yelling "FIFTH" at a congressional panel (in which he was making fun of how they let white people get away with shit like that). I almost did a spit take when I saw Flynn do it. Spend the best 6 minutes of your day watching this:That's an obvious 'plead-the-fifth' question for everyone...
You start to get suspicious about the alleged title, and then it finally sneaks in there to laughterpunch you in the gut. Awesome experience, thank you. It wasn't the worst idea, just garbage execution.
It hasn't aged well. For example, police violence against african americans is hella more dire now than it was after Rodney King - a modern version would never have John Travolta acting violently with a gun because as we all know, simply holding a cell phone is enough to get black people killed. For another, the white trash in it mostly listen to Limp Bizkit because rap hadn't been completely appropriated into Hickhop and Witch House yet. I think a white person could watch that movie in 1995 and go "I never thought of it that way." I think a white person watching it in 2022 would go "I know chapter and verse it's so much worse than this." Which, in its own way, is a success... but considering the idea was to actually make things better rather than recognizing that things are so much worse that we can't even have this discussion anymore, it's not the sort of success we need. If you judge it in the context of "came out 18 months after Emilio Estevez learns not to go to Compton" ...it's still a movie that should have been better.
Let me spoil some of tomorrow's primetime J6 summer finalé, then. The timeline really does suggest that the timing of everything was coordinated at the top-most levels. Trump'd give the speech (holy shit I just watched 5 minutes of it and I don't think our brains were working well enough to register the true extent of his lunacy at the time), send his people off to the capitol (with their weapons, which he knew they had) at about 1:15 pm, and they'd hafta walk about a mile and half, two miles, or so, from the ellipse to the capitol building. Should take about 30 minutes to 45, depending on one's fervor. Militia dipshits had arrived at the capitol a bit earlier, presumably to initiate the agitation, and lo and behold, the rally onslaught begins to arrive a few minutes after the time House republicans have planned to object to Arizona's college elector slate, the alphabetically first state to come up for certification that had tried to send fake/illegal GOP electoral college votes. This is Mike Pence's final test, between 1:45 and 2:15 or so, just before evacuation. One last chance to unilaterally overturn the election by refusing to count contested elector slates. He decided not to overturn the election (mY hErOoOoO). Ten minutes later, after the chaos of the congress's evacuation, Trump tweets that Pence didn't have the courage to overturn the election, and the congress is in hiding. Now, it's fuckin' POTUS executive TV-time for a couple hours, and he really, realllllyyyyyyyy liked what he saw. Maybe the mob would yet prevail? Or Dan Fucking Bongino's SS coworkers could coax Pence into an Escalade, lock the doors (Mike Pence has surely not yet solved executive branch-level childlock), and whisk him far enough away to delay the vote certification, de-legitimizing the process? Ugh, they made Trump release a statement, eventually, which was surely annoying, for the poor guy, but luckily the entire Trump white house is full of fascist enablers, so the "be peaceful, totally! ;) ;) guys, haha" video message can be used to continue coup'ing. Aaaaaaaand been doin' it ever since. I think the number one thing I was surprised to learn recently was that Trump desperately wanted to get to the capitol himself. I thought he sent his goons on their way, like suckers, never planning to endanger himself out in the fray, but nope, he seemed to be most concerned with increasing the odds of his coup's success to as high as possible. Maybe that's the most hitler shit he's ever tried to pull, at least in my mind. What I mean to say is, I don't understand if/why you're doubting the Occam explanation here. Is your question whether or not Trump truly believes the election was stolen? That's like a legal defense of a bank robber along the lines of "My client, deep in his heart of hearts, felt that there was toxic alien money in your bank vault, and just wanted to help. Mary B., on facebook, and at least six other people told him about it via messenger. And plus, my client was apprehended in the act, so there's nothing to prosecute." It's clear that this is the largest and most relatively straightforward case of seditious conspiracy since the civil war. It was obviously pre-meditated/intentional. I'm certainly not opposed to negging the government, myself, but I fucking hate fascist fucks making power grabs based on lies. If DoJ prosecutes at the highest levels, they will win hella lotta cases. Not saying all cases. But the J6 committee has done an OK+ job of relaying the conspiracy, and DoJ will do even better, in 2023, and in an actual court of law. edit: oh don't fret, I never meant to imply that we're not doomed, we totally are, it'll just be interesting to watch DoJ try and mop this up in the interim. Yeah Flynn's taped deposition footage was nuts. And of course, I had to internalize almost all of Chappelle's library my first semester of jokes school (still flunked out). Even more of course, holy shit, I also lost it when Flynn did a "15-second whispering with my lawyer" and then a 'fiff' after "Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?", it was better than Chappelle, lolz.But we really need to know his state of mind to know if he acted corruptly.
DoJ ain't gonna do shit. Mark my words. Sure, they'll get the proud guys and the oath rapers or whoever, but not any actual centers of power. Eric Holder's too big to jail ethos is alive and well. Trump is just another executive whose prosecution, in the DoJ's view, would cause more harm than good. I'm sure they figure that the next GOP president will just pardon him anyway. There's a good reason Trump is going to announce his presidential bid pre-midterms: Because the DoJ will go from wavering-to-probably-not all the way to no-way-we-can-indict-a-major-party-frontrunner.
I will reiterate: the goal of the January 6 Committee is to convince Republicans that Trump is a bad Republican. Overthrowing the government, cheering on the execution of his vice president, none of that matters if he's a good Republican because by being the standard bearer of the Republicans, whatever he does is what Republicans do. The goal of the DOJ is to prosecute justice against those who committed crimes. That's hard to do when half your districts don't consider an armed coup to be a crime. If this were a Trial By Democrats it'd be a whole 'nuther world but the fact of the matter is - The United States compromised to fuck with conservative slave-owners in order to defeat the British - Then the United States compromised to fuck with conservative former-slave-owners in order to not be so weak they couldn't hold off the British - And continue to compromise to fuck with conservative wanna-be-slave-owners in order to continue to be a country And never once has this compromise taken the form of "we'll let you slide this time on this thing you shouldn't be doing" it's always a form of "clearly you violated every term you agreed to but you have us over a barrel so we're gonna change the rules to show that you were obeying them." Hitler and 2,000 Nazis marched on Munich in 1923. Sixteen Nazis died in police clashes. We learn of this as the "Beer Hall Putsch" to denigrate the seriousness of it. We don't learn that it gave Hitler a national audience to poison. If you say "Beer Hall Putsch" to any liberal, they shout "THISISWHYTRUMPWILLTAKEOVERTHECOUNTRYEVENTUALLY" like Pavlov's fucking dogs because the idea that mmmaybe, just maybe, diffusing populists diffuses populism isn't disaster-porny enough. Look - Weimar was fucked. Of the six political parties running in 1932, five were awful. Three were openly anti-semitic. Would a bunch of tanks with this bad boy on the side been as cataclysmic? I don't think so? But it still would have been bad. Fascism was coming to Germany, and it was gonna murder some jews. Hitler was just the best jew-murderer on the docket, the voters decided. Mosley? Mosley died of old age in obscurity while Churchill wrote Iron Maiden songs.