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1/ I have to say that I'm feeling sickened by so many people's apparent ability to digest last week's events into normal partisan politics. Just don't do it!
2/ The GOP side is most shocking--"the riots this summer were worse." I mean, by some metric that's true, but urban riots are unfortunately a familiar (bad!) feature of contemporary civilization. Wednesday's madness was brand new and far more existentially threatening.
3/ But D side also very bad. "This is just a slightly worse version of what the GOP has been doing ever since Gingrich." Huh? Sorry, that's crazy. The GOP has enough to be ashamed of, in its direct support of DT, without needing to pretend that all it's ever done has led to this.
4/ What we need now isn't to "move on," and we shouldn't be excusing some of the bad behavior that led us to where we are now. But we have a very strong interest in *de-normalizing* last week's events, and more broadly some of the more deranged features of DT's presidency.
5/ If you are determined to say that anyone who has ever been associated with the GOP, in any way, bears some of the blame for last week, you are going to make that de-normalization much harder to carry out. Or even if you want to limit things to Trump voters.
6/ Given my political commitments, I could never, ever have considered voting for Trump, in any election, ever. But, you know what, lots of people with perfectly good political commitments made different choices. That doesn't mean they support the storming of the Capitol at all!
7/ "We" (the respectable political establishment) should say to Trump voters: "Whatever your concerns, however huge your distrust, surely you could not have wished for this!"
If they say: "Oh yes we could!" Then, fine, drum them out of respectable political life.
If they say: "Oh yes we could!" Then, fine, drum them out of respectable political life.
8/ I think it's much smarter to say: "Wow, even by Trump's own standard, he totally went off the rails last week. Even if you cheered for his staring down the establishment before, that was something completely different, and has to be treated as completely beyond the pale."
