I’ve taken to calling them the Recessive Traitors.
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Oh my, from the article:
Minutes after the House voted to impeach him for a second time, Trump held a private ceremony in the Oval Office to award the National Medal of Arts to country singer Toby Keith, a senior administration official said.
Some years ago, at our yearly Las Vegas tradeshow visit, one of our crew had his 50th birthday party at “Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill” in Harrah’s. We had the little glass walled function room so could peer out at the rabble watching the band. We also had a $50 Elvis impersonator in a rhinestone jumpsuit who, having exhausted his repertoire of Elvis songs, switched to tunes by U2 and others. Even these were punctuated with Johnny Bravo style karate kicks. He was the best thing about the whole week there, and when we gave him $200 to stop he tried to give us change 
Ahead of the shindig I perused FourSquare for reviews of this place, what I found pretty much sums up why Trumpy boy would give him a medal:
“I hate this bar and grill.”
“Best place in Vegas to yell “Yee-hah!”, and act like a redneck…”
“Warning: This is not a place where black people should go.”
“This bar is everything that’s wrong with America.”
Yup.
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Hmmmmmm…
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“Peaceful protestors”
Remember back in the summer when a police force tried to convince people that an empty can of White Claw was a deadly weapon?
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We’ll see, but I’d like to think…
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Yeah, but these are white right wing racists and Nazis. So obviously they were just worried about self-defense.
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That would be amazing!!!
I would much rather they vote to convict, but if they fail to do that and then there’s a massive walk-out of their staffs, that would cut the sting a tiny bit.
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There’s not much I wouldn’t do if Peter Dinklage asked me, but I think Rudes might be getting desperate.
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Are they deplorable yet?
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“I was referencing the kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England,”
eta: I have my doubts that he’s ever really watched it. He probably did a search on “trial by combat” when he was making up his excuse, and picked a hip cultural reference.
Here we are, right after the recent Giulani fluff, this was the first hit:
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Behind The Fallen Capitol, A Government In Ruins
This Week in the Swamp: A weekly dive into the muck of the Trump administration.
By Matt Shuham
January 14, 2021 5:22 p.m.
We can only hope that President Donald Trump will be out of the White House by this time next week.
There’s a chance he won’t. As my colleagues and I have reported both prior to and since last week’s mob attack on the Capitol — for which Trump recruited participants and then issued marching orders — danger remains of future insurrectionary activity in defiance of the Constitution and the will of the voters.
Open for the Full Article
The chaos Trump unleashed on the Capitol exemplifies the abuses we’ve tried to cover in this Trump Swamp column: the use of presidential power for one’s own ends.
But for all of the democracy-eroding violence and intimidation on display this month, it’s important to put the moment in context. I’m speaking about the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS, as TPM reported this morning, did not issue a threat assessment for the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” demonstration in D.C. As one former DHS official explained, “such a report would be very poorly received by the MAGA folks within DHS.”
Typically, such improper political considerations would be subject to the United States’ robust checks-and-balances system: Congressional accountability. But DHS, like others in the Trump administration, has ignored such trivialities. Not only did the now-former acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf defy a congressional subpoena in September — he also wasn’t even legally serving as acting secretary, several judges and watchdog groups found in recent months.
Why? Because Wolf’s predecessor’s predecessor, as we’ve explained before, disregarded the lawful order of succession and installed her chosen successor instead.
The result of this constitutionally indifferent arrangement, by now, is clear: A domestic security agency that was accountable to no-one, operating without a Senate-confirmed leader for nearly two years and catering to the President’s ever-changing whims, has now failed to protect the most sacred American institution — the peaceful transfer of power.
Chad Wolf resigned Monday with just 10 days left in the President’s term. He cited the ongoing legal challenges to his status, mentioned above, but he failed to mention that the President, on Jan. 6, had withdrawn Wolf’s Senate nomination to become the official DHS secretary just minutes after Wolf urged Trump to condemn the Capitol siege.
In his final days, nonetheless, Wolf sought to continue the bureaucratic charade that marked his tenure: In a memo flagged by BuzzFeed News, the former acting secretary said that he’d drafted a new order of succession — just like his predecessors before him — such that FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor would take over as acting DHS secretary the minute Wolf resigned, which was 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday.
What followed was the kabuki theater to which we’ve become accustomed, because Wolf has done it twice already (see “Schrödinger’s DHS Secretary,” part I and part II): Gaynor, per Wolf, “delegated to me the authority to approve regulatory actions.” And Wolf, with “full and complete knowledge” of… his own actions over the past year, promptly confirmed that all of the Trumpy policies he’d enacted — limiting asylum, speeding up the deportation machine, and so on — were, in fact, totally cool and legal.
Cherry on top: Wolf signed and dated the memo “1/13/2020.”
There’s little comfort to be found in watching Trump appointees, following the Presidents’ lead, tossing around untested legal conjecture like a nerf football.
But as the Trump administration draws to a close, Wolf’s actions as the door shuts serve as a reminder: The Capitol only fell because the government behind it was already rubble.
From Talking Points Memo.
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And dependable.
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That headline…
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You want headlines? I got one:
Folks, this ain’t normal.
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Not even trying.
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I mean, damn, all those “Antifa and others, steer clear on the 6th, leave them to the police” messages posted here well in advance, and it turns out that law enforcement were asleep at the stick.
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