Safe from this man. Or not.

Diary of the last impeachment

6.35 am

There's inoffensive music where Morning Report should be, but no worries at all! 

I’m on YouTube watching Nancy Pelosi just absolutely serve it up.

She says those domestic terrorists did not appear out of a vacuum. 

They were sent here, sent here by the president, with words such as a cry to 'fight like hell.' Words matter. Truth matters. Accountability matters.

What does she want?

a constitutional remedy that will ensure that the republic will be safe from this man

Safe from this man. Whoever else might have helped write the rest of it, you just know that those three words are surely hers and pure reflex. She knows a clear and present danger to the nation when she sees one.

The president of the United States incited this insurrection, this armed rebellion against our common country. He must go.

Will the couple of hundred Republicans here assembled be in thunderous agreement, do we think?

Just before we press on for the entirely unsurprising answer, let's step outside the Capitol building for a moment.

In this picture of the absolute state of things in Washington we see thousands of troops lined up to protect the United States of America from all enemies foreign and domestic, hold the foreign.

This is what becomes required once you have been - to use the expression of the hour - just feet and seconds from hostage-taking and massacre.

Who was responsible for this? The President, you say? The President wrought this?

Well let us gather this very minute to unite in our horror and denounce and remove him!

Yeah, okay, but about that whole voice of one, united in horror thing: would you settle for all the Democrats and ten Republicans?

Take a bow, Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger for voting AYE and declaring

If this is not impeachable then nothing is impeachable

Undeniable. Incontrovertible. But a bit OTT for most of his Republican colleagues. 

A number of them are just rabid.

Jim Jordan wails that Trump is being made a victim of cancel culture.

Oh please. You say cancel, decent people say saving democracy.

Implausibly he invokes the anything-is-possible can-do spirit of America that took the dream of flight from Kitty Hawk to the moon. In the context of a fascist act of terror that’s quite a memory to invoke, given its nazi rocket scientists dimensions.

Jordan was all dissembling, all deflection, all diminution, as per: a dimwit in an ill-fitting mask standing in the spot where a leader should be.

Precious few of these Republicans are here today to show leadership.

Courageous congresswoman Michelle Fischbach wheedles:

With fewer than seven days remaining in this administration, we should be focused on moving forward and getting back to work on behalf of the American people.

They mouth vacuous pieties. What happened was wrong but now we need to heal.

They’re wrong and they know it. 

They know the truth, but won't say it out loud for fear of upsetting their base -all those voters who have been conned into believing the election was stolen. 

Talk about base concerns.

I condemn the president but I'm not going to vote for impeachment.

Robbing that bank was wrong but now we need to heal.

Running those people over with my car was wrong but now we need to come together and agree that running over people in cars is bad. Also, can someone organise me a new car, mine has horrible dents in it now.

These people, Jesus. The mob had zip ties and weapons and was chanting hang Mike Pence. And they were all the President's men.

If this is not impeachable then nothing is impeachable

Trump is to blame for the terrorist attack.

He did it in plain sight.  

He stoked division in the country, day after day and week after week, year on year. And when they were ready to go, he incited an attack on his own government. 

When they stormed the building his job was to call them off and call in the military.

What he did was watch on TV and say no and no and no, not helping, either because he hates to take action and be seen to get it wrong, or because he was fully into it and would not at all have complained if things had gone much further, just as long as someone else holding the gun made it all happen.

Of all the perturbing scenes in The Handmaid's Tale one of the most chilling is the moment that unfolds in slow motion as Heart of Glass plays and the military opens fire on civilians and it is suddenly clear that the unimaginable is really happening and no-one will be coming to the rescue.

Off-duty police made their way across the nation to be there; will we learn that there were ICE officers too? The mob have all had their images captured by the extensive CCTV and people have been saying how could you be that careless or stupid. But here’s a thought: you might not see it as so much of a concern if you imagined your side would be taking over.

Hysterical and fanciful? Yeah, maybe. Probably.

But let's not forget the phrase of the day: feet and seconds away. Where might things have gone if the mob had taken the Senate? Just how much inside support might then have revealed itself?

11.30 am

Trump releases a recorded statement in which he attempts to play the scoff-inducing role of notionally seeking peace and unity. 

Comically, he’s flubbed what they’ve written for him by skipping past the word enough.

But I cannot emphasise that there must be no violence, no law breaking, and no vandalism of any kind.

This is for sure the kind of Freudian slip where you say one thing and mean your mother.

You cannot emphasise enough, you bonehead, you cannot emphasise enough that there must be no violence.

Anyway the things he’s pretending now to believe in are peace and harmony and he wants the nation to come together in unity. Fair enough. Guess we’ll be seeing you at the inauguration after all then, Champ?

What’s missing from this sorry excuse for a moment of leadership is any kind of expression of a crucial truth:

It was a free and fair election. It was not stolen in any way at all.

He's still not saying it. Nor are most of those feckless Republicans.

It was a free and fair election. Biden won it. People need to hear that. They really do.