The Mob Was a Hunting Party. They Came to the Capitol to Kill People.

[Nevilledog]

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Charles P. Pierce
@CharlesPPierce
The evidence is now undeniable. What we saw on Wednesday was the definitive proof that what broke into the Capitol last month was a hunting party. They came to kill people.

The Mob Was a Hunting Party. They Came to the Capitol to Kill People.
The evidence against Trump is now undeniable. For four years, this country was flirting with apocalypse.
esquire.com
6:04 PM · Feb 10, 2021

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35474702/trump-impeachment-trial-videos-evidence-incitement-insurrection/

The third day of The Second Impeachment was, as the late Jimmy Breslin once said of the case against Richard Nixon, a burial job. The steady, methodical case presented by the House managers, illustrated by security video and audio recordings heretofore unseen and unheard, makes it quite plain that, for four years, the country was flirting with apocalypse, stuck in the close-in suburbs of armageddon. Watching in angry fascination all Wednesday, I couldn’t get out of my head Starbuck’s musings, as the first mate watches Ahab lash the Pequod through a typhoon against all common sense:

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him?

The evidence is now undeniable. What we saw on Wednesday was the definitive proof that what broke into the Capitol last month was a hunting party. They came to kill people. “Hang Mike Pence” was not a metaphor. Hearing the hunters caroling, “Nannnnnn-cy? Nannnnnnnn-cy?” in that horror-movie sing-song was to hear the trilling of murderous intent. They came to the Capitol to kill people. Mitt Romney probably was saved by Officer Eugene Goodman, and this was before Goodman saved everyone else. (A security camera caught Goodman encountering Romney outside the Senate chamber as Romney was headed unwittingly into the teeth of the mob. Romney pivots like genuine Barry Sanders and beats feet in the other direction.) Rep. Jim McGovern had a near thing in the Speaker’s lobby. There could have been a massacre of the legislators, our own Guy Fawkes Day made complete. The heroism of the Capitol Police and the Washington Metropolitan Police is now immortal in a building in which practically every closet and bit of wainscoting are immortal, because this was a hunting party that came to the Capitol to kill people.

The House managers brought this evidence through a series of enormously gifted storytellers, and storytelling always has been an important part of legal proceedings. This was particularly true of Stacey Plaskett, a former NYC prosecutor who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands as their delegate to the Congress. Plaskett was tasked with connecting the events at the Capitol with the violence that was a subtext to the former president*’s entire political career. To do this, Plaskett brilliantly employed the episode in which some Trump supporters, including Proud Boys, ran a Biden-Harris bus off a Texas highway.

PLASKETT: Sometime after 12:30 p.m., a caravan of more than 50 trucks covered in pro-Trump campaign gear confronted and surrounded cars carrying Biden-Harris campaign workers and a Biden-Harris campaign bus as they were traveling down Interstate 35 from San Antonio to Austin. According to witnesses, this caravan repeatedly tried to force the bus, you saw and you see in that video, to slow down the middle of the highway and then to run it off the road. What that video you just saw does not show is that the bus they tried to run off the road was filled with young
campaign staff, volunteers, supporters, surrogates, people, and as the Trump supporters closed in on the bus, a large black pickup truck adorned with Trump flags suddenly and intentionally swerved and crashed into a car driven by a Biden-Harris volunteer. News of the event went viral on social media. The President of the United States, in a campaign, saw his own supporters trying to run a bus carrying his opponents campaign workers off the highway and to physically intimidate people in this country campaigning, and here was his response the next day:

The President of the United States tweeted a video of his supporters trying to drive a bus off the road. You will recall in that first video that I showed you there was no sound. The one that he tweeted had a fight theme song played to at the president—the president put that music to that video. He added at the top, "I love Texas!" By the next evening, that Tweet that he did had been viewed 12.6 million times, and it wasn't just the Tweet. On November 1 at a Michigan rally with a slew of reporters the president talked about that incident again.

Plaskett was spellbinding. None of this was normal, her presentation said, perhaps the last and most serious use of that phrase in reference to our four-year slow-dance with the palest of the pale horsemen. The day was a feast of shame for every Republican in the Senate chamber, even the ones who have come around at last, even the quick-pivoting Mitt Romney. This, the evidence said, this is what you and your politics have wrought. On. January 6, Donald Trump gave a speech, and hell followed after him.


*the end*

[Iliyah]

1. K & R . . .

my family and friends are in agreement. If the capitol police man was not there at the right time for Romney, I believe he would not have been with us today and many more.

[Irish_Dem]

2. And Trump gave them the hunting license. A license to kill.

[Blue Owl]

3. K&R

[Cha]

4. Yes.. Incited by the Traitor! Rt TY

[crickets]

5. Goodman saved so many people that day.

He was the linchpin on the inside, the one out of all the wonderful Capitol police, who just happened to be covering the hallway that turned out to be so incredibly important. The other officers who shepherded people to safety and provided cover for the Congressmen running out are also to be highly commended, not to mention those outside.

Watching and listening to the video evidence today was just brutal. I teared up many times today. I didn't cry, but I just feel so sore and wounded inside. Anyone, anyone who was watching and listening today and remains unmoved is not normal.

For trump and Repubs, today was "a feast of shame" indeed.

[MustLoveBeagles]

6. K&R

[DSandra]

7. Lynching seems to be a part of white privilege in America

That they didn’t even think about the consequences of murder and attempted murder speaks volumes.

[Sogo]

8. Yeah.

You don't usually walk around with the parts and pieces of a platform for hanging someone in your backpack.....

It was planned.