Some further thoughts on the Charlottesville riot

I give up.  Every time I think the Trump horror show can't get any worse, it does.  I've wondered for some time what Reagan would have thought of a Republican Presidential campaign being helped to victory by Russian meddling in a US election.  But what would Eisenhower have thought if he had seen the Nazi riot in Charlottesville and the bizarre responses to it by the current Republican occupant of the White House?

What matters in practice is what the Republicans in Congress think of what Trump said. They are the ones who have the power to impeach, since they have the majority. Once enough Republicans support impeachment to form (along with the Democrats) a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate, it will happen. Every incident like this pushes some number of them a little further along toward the decision that Trump is doing the party and the country more damage than they can afford, and that they'd rather have Pence. Every incident like this is one more step toward impeachment.  In this case, it may be a large step.  Quite a few Republican leaders are publicly appalled.

Pence, however, is still trying to triangulate. He's already thinking about 2020. He knows that either Trump will be so weakened that a primary challenge will be possible, or Trump will have been impeached and he (Pence) will be running as an incumbent. Either way, he’s got to avoid pissing off the hard-core Trumpanzees too much, so he has to avoid contradicting Trump too openly.  I don't think it will work.  You don't do nuance where Nazis are concerned.

One point that Trump made does need to be addressed.  He insisted that not all the participants in the pro-statue rally were neo-Nazis or white supremacists. Even granting for the sake of argument that that’s true, all of them were OK with participating in an event with people carrying Confederate and Nazi flags. If I went to a rally and saw that, I’d turn around and leave immediately. Participation implies, at the least, a degree of approval. You just don’t do that when there are Nazis involved.  Others have long observed that while not all Trump voters were racists, they all must have felt that racism was not a deal breaker.  It's the same principle.

All over the country, extremists are feeling emboldened.  This week it was revealed that the FBI has foiled an attempt to detonate a half-ton bomb in Oklahoma City.  The would-be bomber appears to be a "survivalist" crackpot motivated by some incoherent anti-government hatred.  Along with the car attack in Charlottesville and the recent mosque bombing in Minnesota, it's a reminder that wingnut violence and terrorism are a constant threat, paralleling jihadist terrorism in Europe.

Mainstream society is pushing back, though.  After the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer posted a disgusting attack on Heather Heyer, who was killed by the Charlottesville car terrorist (you can read some of the post here, along with plenty more right-wing insanity), the site was kicked off its host GoDaddy and then from Google Domains when it tried to take refuge there.  Reactions to Trump's press conference have been almost unanimous in their revulsion and incredulity.  Rally participants are being identified and, in at least one case, fired.  Nobody wants to have any association with these people.

And as Green Eagle points out, they are operating from a position of weakness.  Dâ'ish (ISIL) runs people down with cars because that's all they have left -- the large pseudo-state they once ruled in Iraq and Syria has been mostly destroyed.  America's white supremacists had an even bigger pseudo-state from 1861 to 1865, which was destroyed; they dominated a lot of state and local governments for a century thereafter, and built the deadliest terrorist organization in US history (the KKK), which is now barely a shadow of what it once was; today, they count it a great success when they can get a few hundred people to go to a rally and drive a car into a crowd.

In a way, it's odd that the Charlottesville riot has been such a wake-up call to so many.  The Daily Stormer was neo-Nazi before it slimed Heather Heyer.  The Alt-Right was the Alt-Right before the riot.  Trump's rhetoric and his bringing people like Bannon and Gorka into his administration told us enough that no one should have been surprised at his latest flatulations.  But if this is finally waking people up -- especially those Congressional Republicans, who have the power to make impeachment a reality -- hell, I'll take it.

[Image at top found via Progressive Eruptions.]