W. Niederhut

I love that line from U2's 1988 Rattle and Hum concert film where Bono says, "Here's a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We're stealing it back!"

Here's a review of Congressman Adam Schiff's new book, Midnight in Washington. Let's recall that Schiff served on the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee during the suppressed Russia-gate investigation and Trump's Nunes Memo stunt. Schiff vehemently disagreed with the whitewashed GOP HIC Report on Russia-gate in the spring of 2018. Does anyone else remember when Republican Congressman Mike Conaway reported that the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee had not looked for evidence of "collusion," and had found none? 🤥 So much for Jeff Carter's incessant pettifoggery denying the facts about Russia-gate, Ukraine-gate, and Trump's January 6th coup attempt. Midnight in Washington Adam Schiff’s Insider Account of the Fight to Save Our Democracy https://www.thebulwark.com/adam-schiffs-insider-account-of-the-fight-to-save-our-democracy/ November 17, 2021

No one has won one of these prestigious awards since Rob Wheeler did a year or two ago, but I would like to nominate Jeff Carter and Benjamin Cole for 2021 Donald J. Trump Golden Toilet Awards for their tireless forum deposits in defense of former U.S. President Donald Trump... 🤥 The Donald J. Trump Golden Toilet Award

Nice try, but no cigar, Jeff. Removing Pence to Andrews AFB on January 6th would not have constituted incapacitation. At most, it would have delayed Pence's certification of Biden's election-- probably to buy Trump and his Bannon/Eastman goon squad more time to work on Pence to implement their Eastman coup plan. The Trump coup plan outlined in the Eastman and Ellis Memos, (only recently made public-- contrary to your "five months of breathless speculation" meme above) was to have Pence object to the Electoral College vote tallies for several states which had been targeted by Trump's "Stop the Steal" propaganda campaign prior to January 6th. The concept was to have the election outcome determined by a House vote, with one vote per state. You also seem to be unaware that Trump and Eastman tried to directly leverage the threats to Pence and Congress during the attack to alter the certification of the election. For example, Eastman called or texted Pence's aid during the attack to advise Pence that he was in danger because he refused to cooperate with the (Eastman) coup plan! Similarly, in a phone call with Kevin McCarthy during the riot, Trump told McCarthy that the mob cared more about the election outcome than McCarthy did... Hint, hint... Time for you to go back to the drawing board to concoct another inane theory about what happened on January 6th. 🤥

So ironic that Trump and Robert Mercer's notorious grifter, Steve Bannon, would be blathering now about "signal-to-noise" ratios. Not surprisingly, Bannon is suggesting the diametric opposite of the truth. The actual "signal" here is that Trump, Bannon, et.al., conspired to overturn the election-- even inciting a violent attack on the U.S. Congress. The "noise" is the Fox/GOP propaganda denying and downplaying what really happened on January 6th.

The Eastman and Ellis Memos establish that Trump was conspiring to sabotage the certification of Biden's election on January 6th. Secondly, although Trump is desperately fighting to stonewall the investigation, there is ample evidence that Trump and his inner circle actively incited the violent attack on Congress during the certification proceedings. You have dodged the facts that I posted for you over the weekend, including the fact that Congressman Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) wore body armor on January 6th, while urging the Trump mob to, "March down to the Capitol and kick some ass!" Trump, Giuliani, and others also actively incited the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. And Trump watched the attack on television for three hours, repeatedly ignoring requests for intervention. His interim SecDef, Chris Miller, refused for three hours to send the National Guard to the Capitol. And the Secret Service, apparently, attempted to remove Pence to Andrews AFB.

Jeff, Once you've dug yourself into a deep hole, stop digging. It's obvious that you haven't really studied the film or witness testimony about January 6th, including the harrowing experiences of members of Congress, many of whom had to barricade themselves in their offices and/or hide under desks. (Either that or you are deliberately misrepresenting the facts.) And your weekend timing in claiming that there was no coup plot was particularly absurd given the new reports about Mark Meadows and the Ellis Memo.

Geez... As I just explained to you, Micah, the original clinical observations that were foundational for the modern Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Psychiatric Disorders happened mainly in Europe-- not the U.S.-- e.g., Kraepelin in Munich, Eugen Bleuler in Zurich, Krafft Von Ebbing in Vienna, et.al. And there is, in fact, a great deal of cross cultural data about psychiatric disorders. Secondly, the diagnostic criteria of psychiatric disorders were never merely "behavioral," as you imagine. They have always included characteristic signs and symptoms-- e.g., disturbances of affect, mood, volition, cognitive functions, delusions, and hallucinations, etc. The brain, like all organs in the body, may be subject to inherited and/or acquired infirmity and dysfunction. Why would that not be the case? 🤥

Actually, Micah, this isn't accurate at all. The subject is not really relevant here but, briefly, the diagnoses of modern descriptive psychiatry were formulated by long term clinical observations of syndromes and the correlated courses of various mental illnesses-- viz., schizophrenia (i.e., dementia praecox) manic depression, melancholia, systematized paranoia, etc. The father of modern descriptive psychiatry was Emil Kraeplin, whose foundational Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry became the basis of the modern DSM. His diagnostic classification of psychiatric disorders was based on 40 years of careful observations in a Munich psychiatric hospital. A related foundational work was Viennese psychiatrist Ricard Von Kraft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis-- a vast compilation of (mostly European) clinical case reports-- which served as the basis for the DSM classification of sexual paraphilias. The original DSM has been repeatedly refined during the past few decades, incorporating more data about syndromes -- phenomenological, epidemiological, familial, genetic, and, increasingly, biological correlates of psychiatric disorders.

Geez, Jeff... You can't be serious. Apparently you've never heard about the (John) Eastman Memo, or the Trump team's Willard Hotel Command Center activities relating to the January 6th MAGA march on the Capitol. Or the fact that Congressman Mo Brooks wore body armor on January 6th, before urging the crowd to, "March down to the Capitol and kick some ass!" Or Steve Bannon's prior public statement that "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow," (January 6th) in order to "kill the Biden Presidency in its crib." Or the White House/Secret Service directive to remove Mike Pence from the Capitol building to Andrews AFB before the election could be certified. Or the fact that Trump refused to intervene to protect the Congress for three hours while watching the violent insurrection on television at the White House-- while his interim Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller, repeatedly declined to send National Guard troops to the Capitol. It was all some sort of Deep State ruse to legislate a restriction of grievances and petitions?! 🤥 Sure... All things considered, your (above) opinion on the January 6th coup attempt makes about as much sense as your persistent denial of Putin's GRU op to intervene in the 2016 U.S. election in order to put Trump in the White House. But, at least, you're not alone. Benjamin Cole seems to be equally unaware of these facts, despite the repeated attempts to point them out to him in our discussions here.

Matt, January 6th is, truly, the stuff of history-- including the Fox/GOP attempts to deny and downplay its significance. When, in the course of American history, has a sitting POTUS (and his party) ever attempted to overturn the results of a U.S. Presidential election? When has a POTUS ever incited a mob to attack the U.S. Congress and lynch a Vice President? When has a Vice President ever been forced to hide for five hours in a garage underneath the U.S. Capitol in order to escape from an angry lynch mob?

Chris, The Republican propaganda establishment has been relentlessly attacking Biden's age this year, in a variation on the way they relentlessly attacked Obama's ethnicity and Hillary's gender. (Remember the Karl Rove/Fox/Rush Limbaugh meme about Obama being a Muslim?) Where were these Republican concerns about presidential dementia during the Reagan and Trump years? 🤥 But, to answer your question, no, I don't believe Biden and Trump are in their cognitive wonder years. Yet, there is a vast difference between the two men in their experience and knowledge of domestic and foreign policy issues, not to mention values and commitment to the public good. The Fox Trumpagandists keep pushing their "Biden is demented" meme-- even televising Deep Fake edited videos of Biden's speeches.* Yet, Biden has consistently delivered exemplary addresses to the nation-- before and after his Inauguration-- which debunk the Fox dementia advertising. As for your question about Nietzsche, in a nutshell, he was a brilliant philologist and early interpreter of European Christian civilization in relation to paganism, but, IMO, his ethics were deeply flawed, and his metaphysics were absurd-- e.g., advocating amor fati on the basis of his concept of the "eternal return." Nietzsche viewed Christian humanitarian ethics as "slave ethics." Kindness and compassion are weakness. Presumably, we should return to the pagan era when humans were killed for sport in the ludi. (We're slowly getting back to that ethic in our modern neo-pagan era.) *

On the contrary, Chris, wisdom and judgment typically increase with age and experience. Of course, the trajectories of judgment and cognitive impairments vary greatly from person to person. A young person may be judicious, and an elderly person foolish, but, as a rule, people acquire more wisdom with age and experience-- if they have a capacity to learn from their mistakes. For example, when I was a sophomore in college, I admired Nietzsche. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now... 🤥

Lock him up!

Didn't Roger Craig go on to win three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers? 🤥

Good op-ed published at Russ Baker's Who What Why website yesterday about the subject of this October 6 thread. It was written by Brian Baccus, an attorney from Texas. Kudos. We are not alone in the cosmos. The JFK Assassination and the Conspiracy Theory Experts at the Washington Post https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/the-jfk-assassination-and-the-conspiracy-theory-experts-at-the-washington-post/ November 11, 2021

Interesting. I learn something new every day on this forum. My dad rarely talked about the war, and I never saw Huston's film San Pietro until after my father died (in 2004.) I knew from reading a memoir written by his colonel that my father's 753rd Tank Battalion was involved in a deadly frontal assault on the German lines at San Pietro, and I assumed that the film showed the actual footage of the tank attacks. Of course, the most gut-wrenching part of the film San Pietro was the before and after footage of the fateful march of the Texas 141st Infantry up that hill. Incidentally, my father was a rare survivor of the war from the 753rd Tank Battalion. They lost over 75% of their original men from Fort Hood, Texas during the course of WWII -- from North Africa to Italy, then up the Rhone Valley (Operation Dragoon) and into Germany.

Footnote. One of those government services WWII films was John Huston's, The Battle of San Pietro, (1945) which features live footage of several of the Sherman tanks in my father's battalion (the U.S. 753rd) getting blown up in a direct frontal assault on the N-a-z-i trenches. The 753rd lost 17 tanks in that battle.

IMO, Trump was always a Trojan horse for the Koch-owned GOP. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump campaigned on the theme that he was the only GOP candidate who was not beholden to the Koch Robber Barons, because he claimed to be financing his own campaign. What an utter joke. The reality is that all of Trump's policy decisions as POTUS were based on kick backs and rewards for his wealthy donors. And his only legislative "achievement," despite having a GOP-controlled House and Senate, was the 2017 tax cut bill for corporations and billionaires-- which was largely written by corporate lobbyists.

Journalist Describes 'Wild' Unpublished Photos of Mike Pence in Hiding on January 6th: 'Holed Up in a Basement Garage' www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/journalist-describes-wild-unpublished-photos-of-mike-pence-in-hiding-on-jan-6-holed-up-in-a-basement/ar-AAQxRn1?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531 November 10, 2021 Journalist Jonathan Karl says he has seen unpublished photographs of Mike Pence that were taken by a White House photographer while the then-vice president was in hiding during the deadly rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. During the mayhem as Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol — interrupting an electoral vote count with hopes of overturning the 2020 election results — the vice president, Second Lady Karen Pence, their daughter Charlotte Pence Bond and staff members absconded into a hiding place with seconds to spare thanks to the help of Secret Service agents. While some of the rioters at the Capitol chanted about wanting to "hang" Pence, the vice president and at least some of his entourage were moved to an undisclosed location. In his book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, out on Tuesday, Karl says he saw images captured by a photographer who stayed with Pence and describes the place where the vice president and others hid for "approximately five hours." "The photos show Pence in a barren garage. There were no windows and no furniture. This was a loading dock with concrete walls and a concrete floor," Karl writes. During an appearance this week on The Late Show, Karl elaborated with Stephen Colbert. "I saw all of the photographs and by the way, it is wild to see that he was in a loading dock in an underground parking garage underneath the Capitol complex," Karl said. "No place to sit, no desk, no chairs, nothing. He was in this concrete parking garage with his family. This is the vice president of the United States and he's holed up in a basement."

Ben, I'm not aware of anything that MacLean has written on that subject, but I suspect that she disapproves of unwarranted government surveillance of the citizenry. Her area of expertise is social and political history.

My question, Matt. Why haven't they subpoenaed Mike Pence, himself? And the Big Orange Kahuna? I doubt that Pence would willingly answer any crucial questions about January 6th, but they should, at least, ask them. America in the age of Trump is like an alcoholic family where no one dares to ask the orange paterfamilias if he got drunk last night and pissed on the Christmas tree... 🤥

Ben & Dennis, As a follow up to your comments about Professor Nancy MacLean, I should mention that she is an unusually informed source of information about the social and political history of the current GOP. Before MacLean published her highly acclaimed history of the Koch Machine-- Democracy in Chains -- she wrote a book about the history of the reincarnation of the KKK after 1915. As most people know, the reincarnated KKK was a very popular, powerful political movement, even in places like Colorado and Indiana-- a white supremacist prototype of modern day Trump-ism. https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Mask-Chivalry-Making-Second/dp/0195098366 As for the misanthropic libertarian Koch Machine, it bought the GOP during the past decade. More specifically, the Kochs bought control of the U.S. Senate in 2014, which is still largely controlled by our American plutocracy-- 50 GOP Senators + Manchin + Sinema. And they bought the SCOTUS, including the truly disastrous 5-4 SCOTUS rulings on Citizens United and Shelby v. Holder. While I agree with the Michael Hudson/Jeff Carter commentary (above) about the current corporate Democratic sabotage of the progressive agenda, it largely ignores the elephant in the room. To wit, 50 GOP Senators have repeatedly sabotaged the Freedom to Vote Act, the Build Back Better legislation, and any attempts to roll back the 2017 Trump/GOP tax cuts for billionaires.

Thanks for speaking up, Ron. Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean is not a mass media pundit or a talking head. She's a bona fide scholar. IMO, we should all look to reputable scholars, historians, and economists for informed perspectives on current events, rather than getting our ideas and opinions from political pundits. Disclaimer: I'm biased about MacLean because she and I both graduated magna cum laude from Brown University as undergrads. I didn't know her, because she's a bit younger than I. (She later earned a Ph.D. in history, whereas I went to med school, but I did major in American Studies at Brown-- as did John F. Kennedy, Jr., who enrolled at Brown the year I graduated.)