Somebody Tried to Destroy America. I want to Know Who They Are.

Tonight is the first televised hearing on the coup attempt of January 6, 2021. 

I want to make one thing clear. This was not a riot. It was not a crowd gone wild. 

It was an organized, premeditated attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump as the first unelected head of the American state, ie, the first American dictator. 

The real hammer that could have slammed the coup home wasn’t the angry mob that stormed the capitol building at the direct behest of Donald Trump himself. It was the many resolutions authored by Republican members of the House and Senate that would have overturned the electoral vote and, by doing that, overturned the will of the people in the November election. 

With the single exception of Senator James Inhofe, every single member of the Oklahoma delegation to Congress was on board with overturning our government, ending American democracy and installing Donald Trump as dictator. 

Every. Single. One. 

This direct (and nearly successful) attempt at an insurrection was fomented for two months by Donald Trump and his weak inability to concede defeat in the election that he lost. But its near success came about because of Republican lawmakers such as the Attorney General of Texas, and Republicans in Congress who fed the lies and ramped up their brainwashed base to allow the near overturn of our government. 

Since then, these same members of Congress have worked to block any investigation into the crimes that they and other Republicans committed against our nation. They have carried their destructive indifference to the welfare of this country forward by doing everything they can to instill fear, hatred and chaos in the body politic. 

They have no interest in governing this country. They do not offer a single solution or idea to help America or Americans. All they do is attack, blame, call names and lie. Today’s Republican Party is nothing like the Republican Party most people think they belong to. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan is dead. 

Today’s Republican Party doesn’t have a patriotic thought or belief in it anywhere. 

Right wing media, including that 800 pound gorilla of cable news, Fox News, used all their considerable influence to cooperate with the attempt to overthrow our government. The committee investigating what happened has already released emails and texts showing that Fox personalities such as Hannity were basically on the White House staff, that they participated in strategy sessions and carried as much or more weight in policy decisions as any member of the government. 

These same right wing news corporations have worked overtime since the coup attempt to cover up their own activities on behalf of the attempted overthrow of our duly elected government and to instill hatred and loathing in the minds of their viewers against anyone who might try to reveal what actually happened. 

I have always been a collegial and essentially bi-partisan person. I am registered as a Democrat, but some of my closest allies when I was held elected office were Republicans who shared my values on certain issues. 

I always crossed party lines when I thought it was the right thing to do, even if crossing that line got me attacked by my own party. 

But the corruption and dissolution that the Republican Party revealed under Trump’s rule repulsed and appalled me. Their attack on my country on Jan 6 made me realize that the party as a whole is a danger to the survival of American democracy. 

I am an American. Today’s Republican Party is the enemy of America. It is using all its wits and all its power and all its media and all its money and all its lies and connivance and the gullibility of its base to try to destroy American democracy. 

I regard the today’s Republican Party the same way my great-great grandfather regarded his rebel kin and friends in the Civil War. They want the destruction of the United States of America and that compels me to go to war against them. That I will not abide. 

I have gone all my life without thinking overmuch about the decisions my ancestors made back in 1860. They had opposed slavery for as long as I know anything about, as did all their kin and, I would guess, most of their friends. But the war made uneasy personal peace impossible. Living where they did, so close to the Georgia-Tennessee border that they could throw a rock and hit Dixie, it was the thing to do to go with the South. 

Going with the South wasn’t going with slavery to those folk. People now like to simplify it down to that, but that simplification has everything to do with current political polemics and nothing much at all to do with the reality of the people who lived these times and made these hard decisions. 

It was for them a matter of going with their people. Everyone they knew, everyone they loved; their neighbors, family, friends and preachers went South as a group because … well … because of geography and kinship. It was a matter of where they lived and who they knew much more than what they believed. 

But my great-great grandfather and my great-great grandmother went the other way, even though it meant going that direction alone. When I say alone, I mean just that. It was a solitary decision of those two against everyone they knew. They had no allies.

He went to war for the North and she stayed home and took the emotional beating and the terrorist torments of the people who had once been her friends. I was told stories as a child of what she endured. I won’t repeat them here except to say that they did not involve rape or physical attacks on her person. Southern men evidently would not step over those lines with a woman.

But it did involve the loss of every bit of food and comfort, and the terror that went with marauding bands of men tearing up and burning down and despoiling all she had. 

Those people are my ancestors, and I guess their genes must run strong in me because all my life I have — painfully and oftentimes with great trepidation and sorrow — been able to stand alone if I absolutely had to. 

Today’s seditionists are working to destroy America just as surely as those in my great-great grandparents day tried to destroy it then. The 1/6 insurrection attempt was just exactly that. It was an attempt, which came within a hairbreadth of succeeding, of overturning our government, of ending our democracy, of handing America over to a mentally ill, morally dead weakling who wasn’t man enough to concede defeat in an election. 

Tonight’s televised hearings are important because they are about the survival of our country. Predictably, Fox News will not televise these hearings. 

I don’t see how any “news” network can do this. I think they should take the “News” out of their name and just call themselves “Fox.” 

You can chose to watch the ranting and raving, the lying and defaming that will most likely be televised on that channel tonight. It will feed your crazy like the drug that it has become for many people.

Or, you can push the button and watch the hearings. 

These hearings are about your country. They are about whether or not government of the people, by the people and for the people will long endure. 

This is about you, your future, the future of your children and grandchildren. 

As for me, I want my grandchildren to grow up in a democracy. I want them to grow up in an America that is a free and strong country, not a corrupted, third world toilet run by billionaire’s puppets. 

I’m going to watch the hearings. 

Because I am an American.