A source sends this video of a group of Trump supporters today harassing Sen. Lindsey Graham at Reagan airport and loudly calling him a “traitor” after he publicly broke with Trump earlier this week. pic.twitter.com/XBF8K6DIUD
— Daniel Lippman (@dlippman) January 8, 2021
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I’m confused as to why airport security is not removing people from airports who are screaming and yelling at a paying passenger.
Is it ok now to go out to the Columbia airport and yell at passengers and call them names as they wait to depart to Atlanta?
Sure, Lindsey is now a traitor to these gullible people but I guess I’m unclear on the rules now.
There’s a policeman (or someone in a policeman’s uniform) standing in their midst. Could that be part of our society’s breakdown?
Actually, I see two. They seem to be talking to the screamers. But not doing much else. Maybe they don’t have the authority.
Lindsey has exercised very poor judgement the last few years, but he doesn’t deserve that. I wonder how many of those folks screaming at him were from South Carolina.
This just in:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/capitol-police-to-step-up-lawmakers-security-at-airports-after-confrontations/ar-BB1cC8iM?ocid=msedgntp
The article notes that Senator Graham does have a security detail assigned to him.
Well, he should, to the extent that’s practical.
All members should have security, at least until this madness is calmed down.
But I say “to the extent that’s practical” because it seems we didn’t have enough security resources to protect the Capitol. So I guess we need to beef up the Capitol security force…
From the Chairman of the Nye County Nevada GOP – letter detailing how Trump will be president for next 4 years. yes, this is real.
A portion of the letter is below. This is UNHINGED, crazy stuff folks. These people are in a cult.
“As I write to you today, I have no doubt that this letter will find many of you crushed under the weight of despair or perhaps lost in a maze of confusion. It is my hope that by the time you finish reading this letter you will be able to confidently join millions of others who support the president and another four years.
Let me be clear: Trump will be president for another four years. Biden will not be president. Yes, I know those are shocking words in these crazy days.
I have been approached by many saying, “It’s over…” and “Trump conceded the election…”. Nothing of the sort has taken place. Go back and listen to the videos all the way through. At no point does Trump even mention Biden’s name. At no point does he say he concedes. He does say that there will be a peaceful transition to a new administration and he does say that this is only the beginning. Those phrases are important to note. Indeed, we will have a new administration made up of a new vice president and cabinet as the current ones have all made their treason complete. I will touch on this in more detail shortly.
We do well to remember that for more than four years Donald Trump has been five steps ahead of everyone in every attempt to derail him, impeach him, or confound him. For example, he announced on election night in the early hours of the morning that he “didn’t want a dump of ballots at 4AM.” What happened in just a few short hours at almost exactly 4AM? A huge ballot dump took place which showed that he already knew that it was going to take place. That was a public word to the enemies of our country that he was on to them. Also, consider the recent incident at the capitol building in DC. Trump was late to his speaking engagement and then spoke on a number of rehashed things to the crowd of 500K+ but this created a problem. You see, if Trump had spoken on time and briefly, the MAGA crowd would have been at the capitol building with the Antifa faction and likely would have been drawn into the fray by accident and confusion due to the crowd size. With Trump speaking late and long, the MAGA crowd was PROTECTED and SEPARATED from the Antifa groups. It would be very clear that the disguised Antifa people were 95%+ of the people in the building. Again, Trump countered because he was steps ahead of them. This was clearly a staged event meant to blame Trump supporters and try to frame Trump so the 25th amendment could be used by Congress but it failed. Nevermind the numerous videos showing the police opening the gates for Antifa (they didn’t fight their way in) and then leading them throughout the building. “
https://nyegop.org/2021/01/08/a-letter-from-the-chairman/
The letter continues and blames Pence, Paul Ryan, and “The Clintons”
This is especially relevant given that Trump attorney Lin Wood called for the firing squad execution of MIke Pence on Saturday. I personally witnessed numerous Trumpers posting messages in support of his execution on social media for “Treason”
Continued…..
I need to take a moment to speak on Pence. With his treason completed, many of you may not know of his dealings and political posturing prior to the infamous day in the capitol. Pence was already wheeling and dealing way back during the 2016 election season with…wait for it….Paul Ryan. Remember Ryan? The RINO speaker of the house? Look at these emails that were recently revealed:
Pence-Ryan Emails
Pence was also involved with a scheme to oust Trump sometime during his first four years that was orchestrated by Rod Rosenstein and supported by the Clintons. The plan: get rid of Trump, become president and then appoint Rod Rosenstein as the new VP. Why would they want that? Because they felt Pence could be controlled. See these links for the 3 part series for more information:
Girl, I’m just trying to make you understand
Well now, everybody tell me
Somebody done hoodoo’d the hoodoo man:
The Republican’s are in dire need of moral leadership; clearly none presently exists, not even from Romney (with regularity).
Also, what we are witnessing is the absolute importance of education.
Oh, Lord, yes, on the education. And the very first purpose of public education should be to make sure people understand the country they live in, and why it should be absolutely unthinkable for an American to consider, even for an instant, voting for someone like Donald J. Trump.
But how are we going to formulate that curriculum? No one on the right can do it now. And on the left, you’ve got all these people who would want to throw out ANYTHING that might teach people what this country stands for and why it’s worth preserving and cherishing, and replace it with nonsense like the “1619 Project.”
It’s a challenge.
As for moral leadership from the Republicans, maybe that now depends on Ah-nold…
Anti-intellectualism has a very long history. Many people in rural New York State (where my wife and I were raised) see me as a “Global Communist” and blame my education. As many have noted, anti-intellectualism is an early sign of authoritarian/totalitarian thinking. Of course educated people say that, so what do they know.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” Isaac Asimov (1980)
You just can’t help yourself can you? The 1619 project is a valuable effort to explain another side of the American experience. False equivalency crap like this served to help in the rise of Trump by painting left and right with same brush. As a pragmatic liberal I find this narrow view of American history both incomplete and dangerous.
It doesn’t present “another side.” It isn’t an “equivalency.” It isn’t “false.”
It’s an embarrassing project that reflects poorly on the NYT, an institution upon which we all increasingly rely, and smaller and more local newspapers die out.
It proposed that the beginning of the United States wasn’t 1776. It was instead the moment the first slaves were traded on land that 157 years later would be part of that country.
It was ridiculous.
It’s not about the facts. It’s what you conclude from the facts.
Someone could say that the United States didn’t begin in 1776, but started when the first Indian was killed or enslaved by a white person, or by germs that could be traced to a white person (which is how most of those who were here at the time died), or I guess to an English-speaking white person (since that’s what seems to have counted to the creators of the 1619 project — they didn’t care about the slavery instituted in America by the Spanish a century earlier, or they’d have used a different date).
Such an account would be sharing true facts that — like those in the 1619 project — educated people already knew.
But it would be putting a bizarre twist on those facts. As did the 1619 project….
Oh, and as for “You just can’t help yourself can you?” You’re right. I can’t help describing things as they are, instead of as I would WISH them to be, the way those people who attacked the Capitol do.
I confess can’t help doing what all the “woke” people think they’re doing — revealing hidden history that no one knew until the “woke” people discovered and shared the TRUTH. I, too, feel compelled to share.
The difference is that they feel compelled to share, with the drama of sudden revelation, what they have recently discovered, but educated people knew long before they were born. They’re like Trump, who says “not many people know” about things that everybody else his age KNEW, but that he just learned. (Yeah, there are some mature adults who are like this, but most of the “woke” are kids, still discovering the world.)
The grossest thing I could possibly do is join in with the idiocy, embracing one of the two views of the world that we are constantly told are the ONLY ways we are allowed to see things. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do what Joe Biden does — see the world more completely. (Thank GOD all the “woke” people who opposed him in the Democratic Party failed to stop him. Had they succeeded, we’d be looking at four more years of Trump.)
Bud, when it comes to speaking truth, it doesn’t EXCUSE false thinking on the left that the idiocy embraced by Trump and his followers is so much WORSE. Of course it’s WORSE at this point in our history, astronomically worse. It’s also kind of hopeless. Those people are immune to reason, and evidence. But I am always, always, always going to point out the flaws in competing explanations of the world, so that they get better, and foolishness is pushed to the fringes, so that we have a true, strong, better alternative to the idiocy of Trumpism.
I’ll never stop doing it. So don’t think anything will “help” with that…
But what you do is both wrong headed and dangerous. You obsessively feel a need to find equivalency where there is none. And it gives the far right lunatics an excuse to pound away with their nonsense knowing full well that the false equivalency warriors will have their back. The Democrats are hardly perfect and it should be pointed out when they are wrong (as they were when they supported the Iraq war or drone strikes) But to suggest the two sides are equally culpable in the dangerous situation we find ourselves is disgusting. And you need to own your roll in giving rise to Trump.
Have you actually read the “1619 Project” collection?
Nope. Not all of it. If I had, I probably would have written a blog post about it at the time.
But I read enough to be concerned. And that concern lingered, so that it popped into my head when I was expressing my concern to Mark. As you’ll recall, he said something about the need for education to combat the anti-intellectualism problem.
And I said yep, but it’s going to be hard to compose the curriculum. There are too many forces pulling from different directions on what the kids should be taught. And I briefly mentioned that as an example of why I’m concerned.
And unfortunately, that set off Bud on one of his “false equivalency” things. And I responded.
Do you disagree with what I said? If so, where do you disagree? Perhaps, if you HAVE read all of the series, you can educate me and cause me to think, “Wow, THAT’S the curriculum we need to persuade people that our republic is a pretty special thing worth defending from creeps like Trump.”
But based on what I DID read (and heard via podcast), I’m sort of doubting I’ll reach that conclusion. We’ll see…
What I’d like would be to find a curriculum that would help people see America and its history holistically, so that they see the themes that have been in operation through time toward making the vision set out in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution be realized more fully.
So many on the left — and this isn’t recent; we’ve seen elements of it since when I was in school — seem to have a “this tree is the forest” approach to what America is about. America is a hopeless project because this or that bad thing. Because Vietnam. Because Watergate. Because Japanese internment. Because slavery. Because Jim Crow. Because of taking it all from the Indians. Because of the diseases that spread across the Western Hemisphere and wiped out 95 percent of the native population before they’d even come into contact with the Europeans.
All pretty horrific things, some more than others (like slavery, or that last one, which is utterly mind-blowing). And if all those things were somehow things that happened “because America,” then to hell with America. Seriously. We should just give up on the whole thing, because it’s been nothing but hellish trouble.
However, if America, on the other hand, has been the story of overcoming such horrific things that have been a part of all of human history since we’ve been on this planet, then it’s worth doing all we can to keep it going. And it has been. In fits and starts, and with tremendous struggles along the way.
Right now, we’re in a pretty horrible moment, in which a huge part of the country (to oversimplify, let’s say the 46.9 percent that voted for Trump) is pushing back, hard, against the progress that had been made up to 2016.
It’s going to take a lot of really hard, consistent, rational pushing back to get us back on that positive course we were on. And people coming up through our schools don’t have to be taught that America is perfect. I certainly wouldn’t say that. But they need to know that it’s about a process that is noble, and is worth continuing and building upon. A process that started, if you must pick a date, in 1776. Oh, you could go back to the Magna Carta, or Roman or Jewish systems of law, or what ever you choose. But the AMERICA part of the rise and improvement of civilization started in 1776…
Oh, and that pushing back, in the age of the internet (which enables each person to choose his own reality) and bitter polarization, is going to be a tremendous, seemingly impossible challenge…
… but we have to succeed…
” America is a hopeless project because this or that bad thing. Because ….”
I’m sorry, this is a cartoonish take on new scholarship and is born of white resentment.
Man, you sure do go on about something you admit to not having read thoroughly. And from the way your rant on, you come across sounding a lot like an angry old white alt-right dude rather than the level-headed sort of person you claim to be. That is to say, like somebody who fears his closely guarded interpretation of history, his very identity, is being taken away by some vast radical left-wing academic conspiracy – which is pretty much the core of alt-right thinking on the subject. It’s the very basis of white resentment. In times like these, you should take better take care of who and what you lend credence to.
In any case, this is a topic that’s practically impossible to handle properly in a blog post. (Something you might’ve wanted to take into consideration before firing off all that scattershot verbiage.) So I’m reluctant to even try to address it – especially since you’ll probably twist something I write in a way that distorts it. Yes, I have read the essays in the “1619 Project.” But no, I’m not going to provide a point-by-point rationale for you doing the same, for the reason I just described.
In general, however, I think most of the negative reaction to it (mainly to the opening essay) stems from a gut reaction that resists any negative view of American history, that rejects interpretations of our past that don’t see the country as virtuously and steadily advancing towards a just order. Or, as the eminent historian of the (pre-)Civil War and Reconstruction period, David Blight, wrote: “The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all.” What he’s describing, again, is white resentment.
What’s more, you are entirely wrong in your belief that the 1619 Project aims to replace conventional interpretations of American history. It’s only meant to supplement those interpretations, to add additional voices to the conversation about the American past and present. You are also wrong to assume that everybody knows all this stuff about slavery etc. already. A poll by the SPLC, for example, found that few American high-school students know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, that the Constitution protected slavery without explicitly mentioning it, or that ending slavery required a constitutional amendment. And in that regard, I would just add that Sean Wilentz, one of those who drafted the letter critiquing some aspects of the project, has said: “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it’s just urgently needed.”
I may have quibbles about some of the things said in the essays – or with how things are phrased or contextualized. (Just as I had quibbles with the, in my view, too pessimistic view taken by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his Between the World and Me – while, at the same time, understanding where that pessimism comes from.) But I welcome the added perspectives. Because, while questioning some of them, I hope I might nevertheless learn something from what others – in particular those too often left out of the conversation in the past – have to teach. So, no, it wasn’t bad judgment on the part of the NYT to make those perspectives available. Quite the contrary.
For my education, tell me what political leaders in the past have best presented “moral leadership.”
Interesting question. I am not proposing a high bar for politicians; even Lincoln took his good sweet time to come around to emancipation.
That said, for moral presidents how about:
Washington
Adams
Jefferson
Lincoln
Teddy Roosevelt
FDR
Truman
Eisenhower
JFK
LBJ (domestic only)
Mark, I’ve got to argue with you. Lincoln did NOT take “his good sweet time.” He very skillfully — with political skills that were basically superhuman — LED our country to that point. He took each step at the very moment it could be taken effectively, and not a moment before. And he should be honored for that, almost as much as for anything. THAT is moral leadership.
If I’d answered that question, I’d have gone:
Lincoln
FDR
and then, after a long pause:
LBJ. And I wouldn’t have qualified it. He was a president who strongly exerted moral leadership, whatever his flaws (and they were many).
And then I would have said, “To a certain extent, any one of the 44 presidents before Trump, every one of which at least had to LOOK like he was doing the right thing, whether he was or not…”
Which of course is just a longer way of stating the obvious — that Trump is the worst president ever. But that suggests a continuum, and it’s not a continuum. It’s like ones and zeroes. Every president before him is in one category, and Trump is in the other….
For me, while I revere Washington and have great respect for Teddy, there’s little question that the two greatest were Lincoln and FDR…
I almost agree. I certainly agree about his political astuteness as to the moment, and also how to be ready for those moments. He was a master of that.
I think Lincoln had a strong moral sense of the unity of the nation; however, I think he had to grow during the war into a firm believer that slavery was wrong in every way, everywhere. As a leader he understood moral leadership. As a person he wrestled long and hard with many issues. This happened generally out of sight, but it does appear to be the truth – he struggled with thoughts and didnt give up wrestling. The defining characteristic of Lincoln was that he did grown and evolve throughout his life. He was a better person each day. That is unusual and commendable. It’s just that he had to catch up with some egalitarian ideals that others had constructed in earlier decades, things that weren’t at first central to his world view.
You raise some great points that I’d like to explore further. It might be tomorrow before I get to it, though. Don’t let me forget.
I especially want to engage on the idea that he had to “catch up.” I don’t think he did, but maybe you can convince me. I think he was there all along. The abolitionists didn’t think so. But I always felt the abolitionists failed to appreciate him — and especially failed to appreciate that despite their moral purity, they were not the people to accomplish their goals. It took Lincoln to do that…
Many, including Brad, tend to overstate American exceptionalism, giving far too much weight to the “white” version of events. I agree we should view our history holistically. Here is a different side of Mark’s heroes.
Washington – slave owner
Adams – Alien and sedition act
Jefferson – Rapist
Lincoln – suspended habeas corpus
TR – Imperialist
FDR – Japanese internment
Truman – Korean War
Ike – Slow rolled civil rights
JFK – Early involvement in Vietnam
LBJ – Really ramped up Vietnam
Are your points what you actually consider the most significant of each President you list, or are you just playing Devil’s advocate?
BS
Those were Not Great Men!!!
I guess we’re talking definitions here. JFK, for instance, was one of the great womanizers, protected by press and others because they liked him.
And can you imagine JFK saying this to a crowd of black people; disgustingly oppressed from the beginning of this nation right through his administration: “Ask not what this country can do for you; ask what you can do for this country?”
Of course he was just a representative but someone I was always very impressed with was Tom Osborne- the former Nebraska football coach who ran for office. He had no illusions of being President or being House Speaker or anything like that.
He was a republican- but if you tracked his position on a chart he was solidly conservative but leaned slightly toward the independent line as opposed to right wing.
I actually heard several of Osborne’s speeches on the House Floor when he was in office. He focused heavily on issues related to young people. That was his main concern. Of course he wasn’t in leadership or anything of the sort but he was someone I looked up to. (In other words, he’d have little chance of being even elected in today’s republican party).
He later ran for Governor and narrowly lost – most likely- because of his support of a bill that would have granted instate tuition to the children of illegal immigrants in Nebraska. Osborne’s position was that it was unfair to punish children and possibly prevent them from getting a college education because of something their parents did. But of course in “Family values” Republican Nebraska, punishing the children was popular.
Some of the bills he sponsored…
H.R. 6011 (109th): Coordinated Youth Education, Employment Training, and Residential Treatment Act of 2006
H.R. 5775 (109th): CAFO Tax Credit Act
H.R. 4750 (109th): Lower Republican River Basin Study Act
H.Res. 660 (109th): Supporting the goals and ideals of National Mentoring Month.
H.R. 4065 (109th): Temporary Worker Registration and Visa Act of 2005
H.R. 2717 (109th): Hunger-Free Communities Act of 2005
H.R. 1741 (109th): Rural Veterans Access to Care Act of 2005
Imagine spending your spare time researching Tom Osborne in order to broadcast it to an audience of about seven. Was there no Andy Griffith festival on TV?
What’s great about this blog is that I can reply to an anonymous troll and “he” will never be able to respond to me. necause my resolution for 2021 is to never go back and look at any other comments. So save your time responding… maybe you can do a Tommy Tuberville deep dive instead.
I LOVE you resolutions,Mr Ross!
To correct you, I didn’t have to do much research on Coach Osborne.
I’m a long time fan. The only thing I had to look up were the bills he sponsored which took about 15 seconds.
An audience of seven is fine. Heck, an audience of 1 is fine. But, I think Brad’s blog has more readers than that.
There is always an Andy Griffith tv show marathon on somewhere.