Mastodawn

A few hours ago, @nytimes wrote:

«"It is very clear that, if there is a middle of all of this hot mess of division, Americans want us to work together when we can and find common ground," Sen. Amy Klobuchar tells the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle.»

I'm going to pray that they've been sitting on that quote for weeks and that it's not the evidence of dangerous cluelessness by Klobuchar that it appears to be.

I think Americans want first for Congress to save Democracy, Amy. Because control of the public's attention is easily manipulated in social media, they may not realize it's in mortal danger, but it's Congress' job to know that fact.

If they, Democrats and Republicans alike, aren't describing it as a full-on assault on the Constitution, a coup, a sudden & complete dismantling of Democracy via a prior published & detailed plan, then they aren't solving the right problem and show no evidence of paying attention.

Even 4 years ago, on January 6, it wasn't "business as usual". We needed Congress on that day to continue a Constitutional government but NOT to hear budget debates and such mundane legislative things. We knew we were UNDER ATTACK.

This, now, today, is an ESCALATION OF THAT ATTACK, and she's talking like she wants to ignore it, treating this as an ordinary work day. Work together by IMPEACHING maybe, but nothing less. Do not underestimate the seriousness and urgency of what's going on. Do not get distracted.

If Congressfolk don't see this as an escalation, maybe because it's a "white collar" attack not (yet) involving guns, they can't respond properly. They must stop talking about this as something to legislate their way out of. We in the US are under a real time administrative assault. Stop taking weekends & holidays. This is not a schedulable event. They are preying on your willingness to pretend it can have a leisurely pace.

Congress has long been soft on white collar crime, treating it as a privilege of the elite, the donor class. Perhaps it's become invisible to them, even as it's far more sweeping and hurtful than much street crime. Maybe a white collar coup is then likewise invisible. We need them to wake up and SEE.

This time they're using ID cards to get into buildings they're taking over, but there's more to Constitutional government than right of entry. The Constitution spells out limits on power. They're violating limits so fast they can't all be checked fast enough. A Gish gallop assault on policy & power.

Sadly, I predicted this crisis on the ex-bird site Oct 13, 2016 (before 2016 vote). Talking Points Memo (TPM) had cited USA Today on Trump's propensity for legal challenges. I expected the same with Constitutional challenges. Just as happened. Our system barely handles a few challenges a year, not thousands.

#USPolitics #politics #USCongress #Congress #democracy #coup #TrumpCoup #oligarchy #fascism #authoritarianism #attack #assault #Jan6 #SCOTUS #Constitution #Lawless #Project2025 #TPM #Klobuchar #Senate #WhiteCollarCrime #WhiteCollarCoup #GishGallop

(This post is an expanded form of a thread I just posted to BlueSky.)

Show thread

Kent Pitman Feb 1, 2025

For those who don't know it, the Gish Gallop, which I used as a metaphor in the post above, has a Wikipedia page, which describes it this way:

"The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality. "

My use was re-purposing it from the debate stage to the modern legal landscape (and now, using this technique, battlefield).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

#GishGallop

Gish gallop - Wikipedia

Show thread

Ramin Honary Feb 2, 2025

“It is very clear that, if there is a middle of all of this hot mess of division, Americans want us to work together when we can and find common ground,”

@kentpitman These centrists keep talking about “unity,” as if people (especially their voters) were still actually fooled by this stupid political trope. They are asking us to unify with Nazis. They want “unity” with Nazis, while the Nazis are busy purging from government the very people calling for unity along with anyone else perceived as a political enemy.

You suggest they fail to realize what is going on, and that may be true of Klobuchar at least. But seeing Biden’s policy implemented for 4 years, especially Biden’s policy on immigration, and the war of genocide he enthusiastically helped to perpetrate, makes me think unity with Nazis was more of a deliberate goal of theirs and not just naive and poorly informed tactics on the part of the Democrats.