Oh man. Rudy Giuliani is wearing a wacky filter over his glasses — look at this bizarre comparison he made:

Earlier this month the New York Mayor whipped up a crowd of angry Trump-supporters shortly before they marched the Capitol in Washington DC, telling them ‘let’s have trial by combat!’ Speaking about the comment, which referenced challenging Democratic election officials attempting to count the votes and confirm Joe Biden as president, Giuliani said he was instead referencing the HBO series and its character Tyrion Lannister (played by Peter Dinklage). He told The Hill’s White House reporter Brett Samuels: ‘I was referencing the kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England. ‘When Tyrion, who is a very small man, is accused of murder. He didn’t commit murder, he can’t defend himself, and he hires a champion to defend him.’

I’m trying to wrap my head around the phrase “documentary about fictitious medieval England”. None of that works. Game of Thrones not a documentary, nor does it claim to be, and while loosely assembled from scattered bits of Western European history, it’s not about England. But what do I know, I’ve only been to that country like 4 times, which is not an adequate sampling. Maybe I just happened to miss the dragons, and I’ve only made a couple of forays north of Hadrian’s wall, are there gangs of wildings and zombies up there?

But that’s not even the most delusional thing he said.

Trying to make his comments seem any better, Giuliani – who went on to claim that antifa was behind the violence and that Mr Trump bears ‘no responsibility’ for the events – attempted to explain he meant a combat ‘between machines’ and not people. He went on: ‘It incited no violent response from the crowd. None.
‘The crowd didn’t jump up saying, “Lock him up, throw him to jail, go to hell.” I’ve had speeches where people jump up and say, “lock him up.” It was not an emotional — it was not an emotion-inspiring part of the speech.’

There was no violent response from the crowd, except that right after his speech they marched on the capitol, crashed through the fences, smashed windows, dragged policemen into the crowd and beat them, and killed a guy. Yeah. Not violent.

This has been a common assertion by right-wing news liars. Ben Shapiro has claimed it, so has Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, it’s a common refrain. But we’ve all seen the videos — that was a violent, angry mob, shrieking and wrecking and looking for blood. Read this harrowing account of the insurrection in the New Yorker.

“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” one man yelled. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another man, wearing a do-rag that said “fuck your feelings,” told his friend, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over. It’s gonna come to that. Next week, Trump’s gonna say, ‘Come to D.C.’ And we’re coming heavy.”

Later, I listened to a woman talking on her cell phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”

Although the only shot fired on January 6th was the one that killed Ashli Babbitt, two suspected explosive devices were found near the Capitol, and a seventy-year-old Alabama man was arrested for possessing multiple loaded weapons, ammunition, and eleven Molotov cocktails. As the sun fell, clashes with law enforcement at times descended into vicious hand-to-hand brawling. During the day, more than fifty officers were injured and fifteen hospitalized. I saw several Trump supporters beat policemen with blunt instruments. Videos show an officer being dragged down stairs by his helmet and clobbered with a pole attached to an American flag. In another, a mob crushes a young policeman in a door as he screams in agony. One officer, Brian Sicknick, a forty-two-year-old, died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. Several days after the siege, Howard Liebengood, a fifty-one-year-old officer assigned to protect the Senate, committed suicide.

…

During Trump’s speech on January 6th, he said, “The media is the biggest problem we have.” He went on, “It’s become the enemy of the people. . . . We gotta get them straightened out.” Several journalists were attacked during the siege. Men assaulted a Times photographer inside the Capitol, near the rotunda, as she screamed for help. After National Guard soldiers and federal agents finally arrived and expelled the Trump supporters, some members of the mob shifted their attention to television crews in a park on the east side of the building. Earlier, a man had accosted an Israeli journalist in the middle of a live broadcast, calling him a “lying Israeli” and telling him, “You are cattle today.” Now the Trump supporters surrounded teams from the Associated Press and other outlets, chasing off the reporters and smashing their equipment with bats and sticks.

No violent response from the crowd, my ass.

The insurrectionists are back-pedaling frantically. Charlie Kirk is claim now that it was “stupid” and “unwise” to invade the capitol, but not criminal. They didn’t mean it! Another benefit of the collapse of Parler (and it’s sloppy coding) is that their plans in the runup have been exposed, and while I can agree that they are “stupid”, the intent is transparent. A sampling:

Is anyone surprised that Amazon and Apple removed all support for Parler?

What I find ominous, though, is that only a few in that sample mention the 6th of January — most were focused on the 20th, the day of the inauguration. Next week. Will the Washington DC police finally take these threats seriously? Will the bad guys try to sneak in by mingling with the inauguration crowds? Are some of the planning acts of terrorism against random people?

Maybe they just want to make sure that the inauguration is even smaller than Trump’s. Mission accomplished, I suspect: I wouldn’t recommend attending.

I sure won’t. That’s the day after my classes begin!

The list of awardees of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is kind of a mixed bag already — for every Anthony Fauci there’s an Antonin Scalia, for every Toni Morrison an Irving Kristol, for every Jesse Jackson a James Watson. It’s political, it’s by whim and by credible honor, it’s a mess. It’s nice to see someone you favor get the recognition, but it’s never been anything but a too-freely given token that a president liked you.

Now it’s that much more meaningless. Donald Trump is handing one out to Jim Jordan, the cowardly hack who looked the other way as student athletes were sexually molested, the political leech who is one of the far right hard cases who still insists that Trump won the last election, who even now refuses to admit that there was no “steal”, and whose ambition far exceeds his ability. He’s the perfect Trump apparatchik, in other words.

Boy, Trump is determined to leave a thick layer of slime over everything as he exits, isn’t he?

Maybe nobody else remembers the movie Being There, but I thought of it when I read this account of the president’s day last week. While the Republic was falling into chaos after he had incited a mob to march on the capitol, while his aides and cabinet and senators were desperately trying to get him to respond, what do you think he was doing? He was watching TV.

But as senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who — safely ensconced in the West Wing — was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.

“He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” said one close Trump adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”

Even as he did so, Trump did not move to act. And the message from those around him — that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost — was one to which he was not initially receptive.

This is what he does and has been doing for the last 4 years: TV, golf, rallies to feed his ego, and appointing incompetent sycophants to high office. Oh, and tweet. That’s it. That’s all he has done. If only we’d known we could distract him into total paralysis just by running video of him talking 24 hours a day.

They couldn’t get him to mobilize the national guard. They couldn’t get him to do anything, other than send out a reluctant tweet. He didn’t even want to do that!

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., the group finally persuaded Trump to send a tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he wrote. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

But the Twitter missive was insufficient, and the president had not wanted to include the final instruction to “stay peaceful,” according to one person familiar with the discussions.

He was persuaded to make a short video, which he poisoned with his own views.

“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said in the video, released shortly after 4 p.m. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”

You can tell his sympathies were entirely with the insurrectionists. He wanted a democratic election overthrown, he is openly pandering to a violent mob.

He mustered the energy for another tweet (how pathetic), and this one was even worse, declaring once again that he was the rightful winner of the presidential election, in a landslide no less, and declaring that he was the victim of an injustice. This was not going to quell the violence.

At 6:01 p.m., Trump blasted out yet another tweet, which Twitter quickly deleted and which many in his orbit were particularly furious about, fearing he was further inflaming the still-tense situation.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so ­unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

This is all so revealing, and it tells you what he is going to do after the 20th: he’s going to go on tour, making more false claims and inciting more violence and rage. He fired up the QAnons and Trumpkins and right-wing militias and religious fanatics, and he’s going to keep on doing the same thing, and because he doesn’t have the authority of the office of the president to prop him up, he’s going to have to make increasingly extreme and inflammatory comments…to get back on TV. Because that’s what he really wants.

All this recent talk of healing and reconciliation is going to accomplish nothing as long as they let this walking talking bomb stroll about in public, and as long as enablers like Cruz and Hawley and Graham are allowed in congress.

Aww, poor Florida Man (Adam Christian Johnson). After fleeing Washington DC, it looks like he figured he’d shave to avoid recognition…only it didn’t work.

Now the regret and rationalizations are setting in as the FBI tracks these traitors down and arrests them. Actually, the rationalizing started early.

Asked why they were storming the Capitol, one woman became angry, saying they weren’t storming, and that that was a “media narrative.” They were just making their voices heard, she said. Then she continued climbing over a wall.

They hold the presidency, the senate, and the supreme court, and they still think their voices aren’t heard. I’m personally a bit tired of constantly having to hear these shrieking assholes.

Three revealing hours in the life of Kevin Sorbo:

He’s a perfect reflection in miniature of the whole right-wing universe…stupid, dishonest, and constantly rationalizing their bad behavior with blatant projection.

At long last the braying bloviator has been silenced.

I am not impressed that Twitter took this long and only found the courage to tell him to shut up in the waning weeks of his presidency.

I wonder if he’s going to get a Parler account now?