Impeachment

[Mori Chu]

The Republicans have infected multiple Democratic members of Congress with COVID. They caught it while in the "safe room" where Republican Congressmen refused to wear masks. One of the Dem members who caught COVID from them is 75; the other is Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Absolutely unconscionable.

[ShelC]

This country is seriously broken.

[In2ition]

The Republicans have infected multiple Democratic members of Congress with COVID. They caught it while in the "safe room" where Republican Congressmen refused to wear masks. One of the Dem members who caught COVID from them is 75; the other is Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Absolutely unconscionable.

Idk, I think Nodack is right, this seems to be all theatre. She's claiming that the Republicans gave it to her, because they weren't wearing a mask. That means she must have been wearing a mask though, right?

[Indy]

so now you believe masks work...

[In2ition]

so now you believe masks work...

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

[Cap]

so now you believe masks work...

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

The point of the mask is more to protect others from the wearer than to protect the wearer. So if your point is that catching it while wearing a mask discredits mask wearing, you’re missing the point of the mask.

[In2ition]

so now you believe masks work...

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

The point of the mask is more to protect others from the wearer than to protect the wearer. So if your point is that catching it while wearing a mask discredits mask wearing, you’re missing the point of the mask.

I wear a mask everywhere, not because I'm going to infect anyone, because I don't have it, gotten over it a month ago and according to recent studies I am immune to it for another 7 months, but for the other person's mental state of mind. I think she's being hypocritical, and doesn't know for sure that she didn't have it prior and gave it to others herself.

[Mori Chu]

A third Dem congressman, Rep Brad Schneider (D-IL), has now tested positive for COVID after being stuck in the confined room with the GOP.

[In2ition]

A third Dem congressman, Rep Brad Schneider (D-IL), has now tested positive for COVID after being stuck in the confined room with the GOP.

That could be the case that they got it from the GOP congressmen, but how do we know for sure? Did those GOP have it or have it now? Do we have proof, or just conjecture?

[Indy]

so now you believe masks work...

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

The point of the mask is more to protect others from the wearer than to protect the wearer. So if your point is that catching it while wearing a mask discredits mask wearing, you’re missing the point of the mask.

I wear a mask everywhere, not because I'm going to infect anyone, because I don't have it, gotten over it a month ago and according to recent studies I am immune to it for another 7 months, but for the other person's mental state of mind. I think she's being hypocritical, and doesn't know for sure that she didn't have it prior and gave it to others herself.

you can still spread it, even if you already had it.

[Indy]

so now you believe masks work...

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

sure i am the one missing the point in this thread.

[Superbone]

The Republicans have infected multiple Democratic members of Congress with COVID. They caught it while in the "safe room" where Republican Congressmen refused to wear masks. One of the Dem members who caught COVID from them is 75; the other is Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Absolutely unconscionable.

And you've seen the video of them laughing off the mask offer, right?

[In2ition]

so now you believe masks work...

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

The point of the mask is more to protect others from the wearer than to protect the wearer. So if your point is that catching it while wearing a mask discredits mask wearing, you’re missing the point of the mask.

I wear a mask everywhere, not because I'm going to infect anyone, because I don't have it, gotten over it a month ago and according to recent studies I am immune to it for another 7 months, but for the other person's mental state of mind. I think she's being hypocritical, and doesn't know for sure that she didn't have it prior and gave it to others herself.

you can still spread it, even if you already had it.

Only if they are infected by someone else, right? So, immune person spreads it by inhaling the virus from some other person, then exhaling that same virus to others?

[Indy]

I am skeptical of just how much they work. You must have missed my point of the post above completely.

The point of the mask is more to protect others from the wearer than to protect the wearer. So if your point is that catching it while wearing a mask discredits mask wearing, you’re missing the point of the mask.

I wear a mask everywhere, not because I'm going to infect anyone, because I don't have it, gotten over it a month ago and according to recent studies I am immune to it for another 7 months, but for the other person's mental state of mind. I think she's being hypocritical, and doesn't know for sure that she didn't have it prior and gave it to others herself.

you can still spread it, even if you already had it.

Only if they are infected by someone else, right? So, immune person spreads it by inhaling the virus from some other person, then exhaling that same virus to others?

well, nobody can get it or spread it unless they are infected by someone else. that is kind of what an infection disease is.

[In2ition]

The point of the mask is more to protect others from the wearer than to protect the wearer. So if your point is that catching it while wearing a mask discredits mask wearing, you’re missing the point of the mask.

I wear a mask everywhere, not because I'm going to infect anyone, because I don't have it, gotten over it a month ago and according to recent studies I am immune to it for another 7 months, but for the other person's mental state of mind. I think she's being hypocritical, and doesn't know for sure that she didn't have it prior and gave it to others herself.

you can still spread it, even if you already had it.

Only if they are infected by someone else, right? So, immune person spreads it by inhaling the virus from some other person, then exhaling that same virus to others?

well, nobody can get it or spread it unless they are infected by someone else. that is kind of what an infection disease is.

Specifically, this is affirmative to each of these questions? But you couldn't get it from a masked person or spread it to other masked people while wearing a mask and being immune?

[Nodack]

The Republicans have infected multiple Democratic members of Congress with COVID. They caught it while in the "safe room" where Republican Congressmen refused to wear masks. One of the Dem members who caught COVID from them is 75; the other is Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Absolutely unconscionable.

Idk, I think Nodack is right, this seems to be all theatre. She's claiming that the Republicans gave it to her, because they weren't wearing a mask. That means she must have been wearing a mask though, right?

By theatre I mean the House will vote to impeach and the Senate will punt. I am all for impeachment or the 25th. It’s theatre because they won’t succeed in getting the Senate to impeach unless it’s after Trump leaves.

I don’t know who was infected or not or by who. Clearly the rioters weren’t wearing masks. The video of Congressmen huddling under desks and behind railings didn’t all have masks. Some had them, some had their plastic gas masks on or in their hands. I think they were a little more worried of being shot, hung or beaten than wearing their masks.

I am for whatever it takes to neuter Trumps political ambitions for life.

[Nodack]

Top US generals condemn Capitol attack in message to troops
https://news.yahoo.com/top-us-generals- ... 35785.html
"The violent riot... was as direct assault on the US Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process," said a memorandum signed by all eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by the chairman, General Mark Milley.

"The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection," they said.

The letter said members of the armed services are bound to defend the constitution.

"Any act to disrupt the constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law."

"We don't tolerate extremists in our ranks," said spokesman Jonathan Hoffman.

Underscoring the point, the Joint Chiefs said that, "in accordance with the Constitution," Biden would be inaugurated on January 20th "and will become our 46th commander in chief."

[Nodack]

https://news.trust.org/item/20210112223824-d64ql
Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, said: "There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution," as the Democratic-led chamber moved forward on a path to remove Trump from office.

Trump "summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack" on the Capitol last Wednesday, Cheney, the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, said in a statement, adding: "I will vote to impeach the president."

[Mori Chu]

Trump will be impeached by end-of-day Wednesday. He may actually get removed this time, too. Even McConnell may have turned against him. I suspect resigning would be the smart move for Trump, and then hoping for Pence to pardon him quickly.

[3rdside]

Why does the US fall for conspiracy theories?

Daniel Finkelstein
The Times

Spoiler: show/hide

America was founded on the imagination of its settlers but many citizens now believe reality is whatever they want it to be

If only Philip Roth had lived to see last week’s invasion of the US Capitol. The great novelist would have seen it as the logical conclusion of the work of fiction that the American people have been crafting for 60 years.

In 1961 Roth wrote an essay entitled “Writing American Fiction” about the first televised presidential debate, the encounter between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

“The actuality is continually outdoing our talents and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist,” he wrote. “All the machinations over make-up, rebuttal time, all the business over whether Mr Nixon should look at Mr Kennedy when he replied, or should look away — all of it was so beside the point, so fantastic, so weird and astonishing, that I found myself beginning to wish I had invented it.”

Roth was observing something new that came with the rise of television but also something old, something that dates from the founding of America. The creation of the United States was an act of imagination. It was a country founded by people who thought they were creating a new story, a new world. And within it, boundless opportunities for each individual to create a narrative for their own lives.

Whether that is a reasonable description of history (the treatment of native Americans and, of course, slavery suggests not entirely) it is how Americans — certainly white Americans — have always seen themselves. Each of them is the author of their own American dream.


The greatest American contribution to modern culture has been Hollywood. The movie industry was founded by immigrant Jews moving west to create their own empires based on selling fantasies that they, as impresarios, would control through the studio system. The great stars became the American ideal: from Gary Cooper to Bette Davis.

In his recent book History Has Begun, Bruno Macaes argues that with television, this addiction to stories began to eat politics. Gradually the news became another form of entertainment and the skill of political figures lay in their ability to tell compelling stories to voters and to cast themselves as the hero.

Macaes notes that Kennedy was the first politician in this mould, an observation also made by Norman Mailer, who remarked on Kennedy’s arrival at the 1960 Democratic convention: “America’s politics would now be also America’s favourite movie, America’s first soap opera, America’s bestseller.” But it was with Nixon’s downfall that politics as entertainment truly arrived.

Nixon was, as Macaes notes, “the sort of presidential character a novelist would create”, brilliant but flawed, outwardly ambitious yet inwardly psychologically tortured. Watergate was a crime caper, high farce and human tragedy rolled into one, and all played out on TV with a smoking gun — the infamous Nixon tapes — bringing the drama to a climax. When the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan set his sights on the White House, the studio boss Jack Warner is said to have quipped: “No, no, Jimmy Stewart for president, Ronald Reagan to play his best friend.” But many others thought Reagan perfect casting after Watergate — handsome, a little bit cowboy but not too much, genial and uncomplicated. Reagan himself used to say that he couldn’t understand how anyone could be president without having been an actor.



Democrats who want to work for a Democratic president now see themselves as characters in the TV drama The West Wing, which depicted an idealised liberal administration. Meanwhile, the Trump White House resembles the Apprentice boardroom, with participants fighting each other until Donald Trump interrupts to tell them that they are fired.

It is fascinating that in his 1998 book Life (The Movie) the film historian Neal Gabler identifies Trump as a pioneer, the first businessman to understand that “in order to compete with entertainment, one had to turn oneself into entertainment”. This observation was made not just 18 years before his presidency but six years before he even became a reality TV star.

If the observations of Macaes and others point to something important in the American psyche, how do they help when considering last week’s events? I believe they provide insight, a warning, and a guide.

First, insight. If Gabler is right in Life (The Movie), entertainment has taken over to such an extent that many Americans see themselves as being in movies of their own lives. In the era of social media, it is not surprising that they seize the power to write their own script.

QAnon, the online conspiracy theory to which many Trump supporters subscribe, is like fan fiction, with endless riffs on Trump and increasingly bizarre plots about the skulduggery of his enemies. The contributors to this script have the pleasure of being the heroes of it, setting out to cleanse the nation. Like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, they have woken and are gradually peeling away layers of deception. The deep state behaves as it does in every film but will prove no match for the hero.

This is why the Capitol rioters seemed so unbothered about being filmed, stealing the speaker’s podium while smiling for the camera, complaining about being “maced” while carrying out a revolution. There was actually merchandise for this show, T-shirts with “Civil War 6 January 2021” printed on them. In some way it wasn’t real to them, just the season finale of America.

The second thing this analysis provides is a warning. Next week Granta will publish a book called The Fatherland and the Jews. It consists of two pamphlets published in Germany by my grandfather Alfred Wiener in 1919 and 1924. He alerts his readers to the danger posed by conspiracy theories, giving as an example the falsehood that the Kaiser had been a Jew because a (non-existent) affair between Queen Victoria and a doctor called Wolf allowed Jewish blood to enter the royal family. One day, he believed, such theories would lead to violence.

In the same way, the blurring between fiction and reality is a terrible danger to Americans. As the Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “post-truth is pre-fascism”. For years the mob shared conspiracy stories with each other and then, no longer able to distinguish between fantasy and reality, they used guns and violent incursion to provide their own denouement to the plot.

And finally, this is a guide for Joe Biden. He might be tempted to believe that what happened last week must not be allowed to divert him from his big challenges and that he should seek instead to heal and move on. That somehow, with Trump gone, the danger has passed. He should not yield to this temptation.

For this isn’t a diversion from his big challenges; it is his big challenge. He must confront the opponents of democracy with the consequences of their actions and bring some sort of reality back to people who seem to have lost touch with it.