_____________________________________________________
Uh, yeah and some Kung Pao Chicken.
Hey Barrack, you want anything?
Posted on 06/21/2022 11:19:09 AM PDT by Signalman
We fool ourselves if we believe that the televised hearings of the January 6 committee are changing the direction of the Republican Party, or that the hearings will end the attempted coup that Trump launched immediately after the 2020 election. The GOP is becoming ever more divorced from reality. Trump’s attempted coup continues unabated.
The first three hearings of the House January 6 committee demolished the myths of voter fraud repeated incessantly by Trump and his supporters and amplified by Republicans in Congress. A parade of Republican witnesses -- including his attorney general William Barr, Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers -- testified that they knew Trump lost the election, and told him so. Trump was also informed that the demands he was making of his Vice President Mike Pence to block his defeat were illegal.
Yet the Republican response to those hearings has ranged from indifference to hostility. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, wrote on Twitter that the members of the committee “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” and he calls the committee “despicable.”
On Friday, speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville, Trump repeated his Big Lie -- as if the hearings never happened -- and once again berated Pence, charging that his former Vice President “did not have the courage to act” in trying to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes that were being cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Why aren’t the hearings slowing the Big Lie or Trump’s continuing attempted coup?
First, the Lie is now fully entrenched in the Republican Party, a central tenet of GOP dogma. It has become the vehicle by which Republican candidates signal their fealty both to Trump and to a broad range of grievances -- some imaginary, some derived from the so-called “culture wars” -- that now constitute the Republican brand.
So far, at least 108 Republican candidates who embrace the Big Lie have won their nominations or advanced to runoffs, and there is no sign that the hearings have reduced the intensity of their demagoguery. Voters have chosen eight Big Lie candidates for the U.S. Senate, 86 Big Lie candidates for the House, five Big Lie candidates for governor, four for state attorney general and one for secretary of state.
In Michigan, the Republican race to challenge Governor Gretchen Whitmer is led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general Matthew DePerno led a November 2020 lawsuit over an election night tabulation error in Antrim County that Trump supporters have seized on in their efforts to perpetuate unfounded claims of fraud. (DePerno has promised to lead criminal investigations of alleged fraud in 2020 despite the conclusion by Republican state senators that his allegations are “demonstrably false.”) Secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo served as an observer in Detroit during the 2020 absentee ballot count and claimed, without evidence, that she had witnessed fraud.
In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made the stolen election claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on January 6. And Blake Masters, who aims to challenge incumbent Democrat Senator Mark Kelly, says without evidence that “one-third of the people outside the Capitol complex on January 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”
In Pennsylvania, Republican senate candidate Mehmet Oz has embraced the Big Lie. Gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano also asserts it, and has said that the Republican-controlled legislature should have the right to take control of the all-important choice over which presidential electors to send to Washington.
Big Lie nominees for statewide office in swing states also include Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia and Burt Jones for Georgia lieutenant governor.
Secondly, the hearings have not affected the Republican Party (and are unlikely to) because Big Lie candidates are under no pressure to respond to the findings of the committee. Their districts or states already lean Republican, and most voters in them have dismissed or aren’t paying attention to the committee hearings.
Recall that the 2020 election was mainly about Trump. You were either for him or against him. Voters in districts and states that voted largely for him in 2020 will not easily change their minds. The cognitive dissonance required to shift from believing Trump’s alleged conspiracy to accepting the reality of what occurred is simply too formidable. In addition, few of their sources of news -- Fox News, rightwing radio, and rightwing social media -- have questioned the Big Lie.
Because these districts or states lean Republican, these Big Lie candidates are likely to win the offices they are seeking, notwithstanding. In an open primary in a safely Republican Georgia district, for example, all nine candidates questioned the 2020 result. Of the two candidates who advanced to June’s runoff, lawyer Jake Evans touted his past efforts to “overturn” elections, while physician Rich McCormick emphasized that he refused to concede in a 2018 race. Many of these Republican Big Lie candidates will hold positions with the power to interfere in the outcomes of future contests -- to block the certification of election results, to change the rules around the awarding of their states’ electoral votes or to acquiesce to litigation attempting to set aside the popular vote.
The third reason the hearings aren’t affecting the Republican Party is that the GOP’s biggest backers -- such as billionaire Peter Thiel, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of Big Lie candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters -- show no signs of reducing their backing in light of the committee’s findings.
It’s shameful enough that Republican lawmakers and candidates have embraced the Big Lie for the utterly cynical purpose of gaining or remaining in power. For the GOP’s billionaire funders to embrace it as well, presumably for no purpose other than to destabilize American democracy, can only be described as traitorous.
In his closing statement before the January 6 committee, former U.S. appellate court judge J. Michael Luttig -- one of the most conservative judges in the federal system, whom George W. Bush passed over for the Supreme Court because Bush thought him too conservative -- called Trump and his allies and supporters “a clear and present danger to American Democracy.” This was not only due to what happened on January 6, said the Judge, but because they still “pledge that in the presidential election of 2024 if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election.”
By not divesting itself of the Big Lie and not embracing the truth of what the January 6 committee is revealing, the Republican Party is losing its last shred of moral authority to function as one of America’s two governing parties.
The Big Lie was the Russia Hoax.
Time for the half-pint pipsqueak to pipe up. This mental and physical midget has nothing to offer except praise for marxist ideology.
1. The committee is failing.
2. But there was no attempted coup by Trump.
3. There is a fight for election integrity being waged by Trump and his supporters.
Trump’s attempted coup?
Yet it was these same screw worms who attempted to criminally compromise, undermine and overthrow a legitimately elected president.
I’ve never seen such lies and evil.
I thought the little Munchkin was dead?
well, the coup happened the previous November with The Steal ... Trump attempted nothing of the sort...
I guess using the political system to win votes for conservative candidates is what passes for a “coup” to the DemonRATs now.
There can be no co-existences with such people.
nutter
the coup has already taken place moron, the treasonists are currently in charge of the US Government
Big lie coming form a little man.
Same as he ever was.
> Trump’s attempted coup continues unabated. <
What? The coup is still going on? I already put all my secret coup stuff back in storage. I guess I’ll have to get it out again.
Side question: Is the secret password still “FatAssHillary”?
Because there was no coup attempt on January 6.
January 6th was in protest of the successful coup that occurred on November 3, 2020 and beyond.
The DOJ, FBI, and Congress are complicit in this election-coup, which is why we are now being shown this political theater and why those who participated in the January 6 protest are still being held in the DC gulag in solitary confinement, in squalid conditions with spotty access to legal counsel, medicine and items for personal hygiene.
This will be corrected in short order.
_____________________________________________________
Uh, yeah and some Kung Pao Chicken.
Hey Barrack, you want anything?
The shrim is PROJECTING...again
Honestly, I'm more troubled by the Colbert Coup, with the aid of Adam Shift's aide who let them in illegally and threatened the commissions work. We need hearings on this. It threatened our Democracy!
Any time this guy says something, assume projection. That’s all he does.
Putting your ridiculous idea in capital letters does not make it any better, nor does calling the illegitimate president “Joseph R. Biden Jr.” change the perception that Joe Biden is a useful idiot.
And so apparently is this Reich’s furor.
The hearings have shown nothing except for this one fact — there is a willingness to avoid confronting the unpleasant and rather obvious fact that of the 81 million votes supposedly cast for Biden, probably 20 million were somehow made up by a number of different types of fraud. That is what the hearings should be about.
It is not Jan 6th that is the problem, it is Nov 3rd-4th, 2020. One day I hope the truth about that comes out.
RE: .. failing to slow Trump’s attempted coup
Reichhhhhh is presenting a topsy turvy picture. The REAL coup perpetrated was on the night of the November 2020 election when coordinated massive fraud occurred that changed the REAL results and overturned the will of the majority.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.