comment: >
  
  
  The select committee’s report focuses on the protagonist in this malefic drama. That is understandable; Trump, after all, was the indispensable man in everything that unfolded. But not enough attention has been focused on the Republican Party, which was institutionally indispensable to what happened on January 6.
  I say that not only because Trump was the leader of the Republican Party when he engineered the insurrection but because the GOP stood with Trump at every moment in his corrupt and corrupting presidency. Republicans defended him, supported him, empowered him, deflected attention away from him, and made excuses for him. For that reason, they are partly responsible for the insurrection.
  But that wasn’t all. The weeks after the horror of January 6—when Trump was set to leave office defeated and disgraced—would have been the obvious time for the Republican Party to finally break with him. But it didn’t. (Even Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, understood what had happened. He texted on the evening of January 6 that the day’s events were the result of a “sitting president asking for civil war.”)
  Only hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate voted to overturn the election results. Only seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; 17 were needed. (A conviction would have barred Trump from ever again seeking the presidency.) And on January 28—only 15 days after House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the violent assault on the Capitol—McCarthy visited the former president in Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before him. McCarthy believed that staying close to Trump was essential for him to become House speaker, a dream that remains in doubt.
  But even that wasn’t the end of the offenses. Because the Republican Party maintained a cultlike devotion to Trump, at least until the disastrous results of this year’s midterm elections, it decided to criticize the Select Committee’s investigation and impede its work where possible, including ignoring subpoenas to testify. That was expected, I suppose, because during the Trump era, the GOP was a battering ram against truth and reality.
context: The GOP has become the party of conspiracy theories and propaganda >
  
  ...and low IQ. >
  
  "Bonus"?  Violence was clearly the goal.  No other purpose can be reasonably deduced. >
  
  No, no!  The crowd was actually chanting, “Hang Mike Pence’s portrait”! >
  
  Reality is what we say it is - Karl Rove
  Stop acting like this is new. >
  
  
  We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.