… don’t kill me! party.

There is a disturbing reason Republicans in Congress are giving for refusing to break with President Donald Trump: They fear for their lives.

According to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), this is a major reason why more House Republicans aren’t voting to impeach [or, more recently, convict] Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.

“The majority of them are paralyzed with fear,” Crow said in a Wednesday MSNBC appearance. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, found in his own reporting that “Crow was right.”

The sheer availability of weaponry in the United States increases the risk of terrorism. Terrorist groups in other democracies have usually scrambled to find weapons; the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for instance, had to resort to getting arms from Libya.

*****************

And David Frum:

Hundreds of millions of firearms are housed in American garages, basements, and attics. Delusions and disinformation still flow through social media. For a long time, however, mainstream politics has been barricaded from violence not only by the moral resistance of decent people—but also by the pragmatic calculations of even cynical politicians that violence does not pay.

That pragmatic calculation has been weakening. In 2018, the present governor of Montana won a House race after he violently attacked a journalist for asking him an unwanted question. More and more politicians campaign with firearms at their side. The taboo on political violence, already weaker in the United States than in many peer democracies, is weakening further. Among other things, Trump’s impeachment trial offers an opportunity to reassert that taboo, to denormalize mayhem and murder as the route to power.

So it’s not only Trump who is on trial. It’s his methods—and all who aspire to adopt his methods as their own in the political contests ahead.

A just-engaged Yale grad student, a committed environmentalist, an Army veteran, a man of heart and soul, is gunned down on the streets of New Haven.

There’s been a “spate of gun violence” in the city.

If the National Rifle Association weren’t so busy infighting and stealing from itself and all, it would be in a position to take note of the story out of the Scranton suburbs, where a maddening, incessant noise problem was solved by a gun.

Neighbors in adjoining houses – a single man in one house, a married couple in another – had been screaming across their lawns at one another for some time – insults, obscenities – until the ill will among them really escalated during a recent big snowstorm.

“The Goys were shoveling the snow from their parking spots, shoveling the snow across the road, and throwing the snow onto Spaides’ property,” [neighbors] said in their statement.

… Spaide asked the couple to stop, sparking a heated exchange of words. James Goy apparently threw a tool at Spaide that he had been using to clear snow from his car…. When James Goy approached Spaide with a raised fist, Spaide reportedly retreated into his house and fetched a gun…

[D]espite seeing Spaide with a gun, James and Lisa Goy continued shouting names at him from the middle of the street.

Spaide allegedly opened fire on the couple, shooting both of them multiple times. Officials said Spaide then went back into his house and retrieved another firearm, which he reportedly used to shoot them again.

Wow. He must have really been angry. Popped them multiple times, then went inside and got another gun and did it all over again.

Then he killed himself, natch.

So– thank God he had a gun! I mean, guns! The neighbors had had it up to here with the shrieks and obscenities. Now, if you visit that street on the outskirts of Scranton, things are back to normal.

************

Spaide’s second gun was an AR-15 – cuz nothing finishes off the neighbors – already maybe dead from his pistol? – like an AR-15. People who argue that civilians don’t need AR-15s have clearly never been there, in the thick of snow-removal battle, against unarmed neighbors.

GREENETWEETS

Sing it with me.

Alas MccCarthy you do me wrong
To cuss me out discourteously;
I’ll take my rifle oh so long
And scare you bad, you pussy.

Greenetweets were my delight,
Greenetweets were my murder threats
Greenetweets were all my joy
Now must I delete my Greenetweets?

I have been ready at your hand
To grant whatever thou would’st crave;
I’ve scrubbed my mock of wee dead babes
Your love and goodwill for to have.

Greenetweets were my delight,
Greenetweets were my murder threats
Greenetweets were all my joy
Now must I delete my Greenetweets?

Must I erase my hate for Jews?
My trait’rous love of rioting crews?
Oh please don’t make me have to lose

My dearly beloved Greenetweets.

Maskless, armed Marjorie Taylor Greene has, with her staff, belligerently confronted a fellow Representative in the shared hallway outside their offices. By order of the Speaker, for this person’s safety, her office has been moved to a different floor from Greene’s.

Apparently security officials are also looking into placing Greene into constraints when she is on federal property.

Dr. Anthony Fauci weighs in on Marjorie Taylor Greene.

… one AK-47 at a time.

***************

Correction: AR-15. Sorry, Marjorie! I know how important your choice of weapon is to you! Please don’t kill me!

… to be a real moneymaker for the federal government, now that fines will be imposed on House members unable to resist even for an hour or two the peculiar arousal of up close and personal arsenals. Friends and family have tried all kinds of interventions, but Lauren Boebert’s craving for glocks has now become a financial and reputational emergency, costing her so far $5000 in fines as she goes into a swoon at the Capitol metal detector and becomes a national laughingstock.

That amount will rise with each daily infraction, until her salary falls to something like $20,000 a year, but farcical as this daily public mental breakdown may appear, addiction is no laughing matter. Much as she might like to avoid personal and professional disaster, Boebert has no more control over her screaming fits at the detector, and her efforts to illegally evade it, than Jeffrey Epstein did over his daily need for sex slaves.

Boebert’s the loudest, but she’s far from the only House member melting down every day at the metal detector. Fine-wise, we’re talking real money, which UD proposes Pelosi donate to a fund for the victims of gun violence.

The ONLY one; and he represents people way over THERE… over on the far right… the eastern shore… which is BARELY Maryland… Let’s call it Tidewater West Virginia or something …

Back over here, in MARYLAND, we don’t elect stinky doodoos who do a doodoo in front of the Capitol police days after a violent insurrection because they MUST be allowed to break the rules and carry their guns onto the House floor because what if there’s another insurrection and he can be of assistance to the Proud Boys? Pence is gone, but someone’s gotta pop Pelosi…

Cosmic convergence, too, with one of this blog’s perennials, His Holiness Adrian Vermeule — who shares with Andy Harris an adoration of Hungary’s dictator, Viktor Orban!

But now it’s … BANKRUPT!

Farhad Manjoo frets over the power of the reactionary paranoid media and how it’s leading our people astray, but it ain’t that. That’s a symptom. That’s merely their reading material.

There are two primary causes of violent insurrection in today’s America:

1. Arsenal Sadness: Most people solve the problem of arsenal sadness by unlocking their arsenal and killing themselves, or their wife, or both, with a selected weapon from it. They are sad because they have spent decades, and tens of thousands of dollars they don’t have, amassing a world-class armory, and have been unable to use it. It sits, a seething reproach to their promise to themselves that someday they would spray some setting with bullets and everyone would pay attention to them. These people have what used to be called an itchy trigger finger. They are actively looking for occasions to pop someone; they open carry in desperate hopes that in the course of this or that ordinary day they can whip out their semi-automatic and do a wee-wee on the Waffle House lawn. Scaring people with their AWS-16 Beowulf just doesn’t do the trick anymore; they’re still sad. What better target than the national leadership of American democracy? It’s cathartic; it’s a culmination; it’s a hoot. If Stephen Paddock hadn’t prematurely shot his wad in Las Vegas, he’d have been blasting his way into the Pence family secure location on January 6. Ditto Adam Lanza.
2. Stupidity: This is the most thoughtful analysis of American stupidity UD has found. Yes, it is a long read; yes, it is somewhat pedantic. But the author captures better than anyone I know the roots and significance of the globally recognized idiocy of many Americans, their hatred of intellectuals, and their love of Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, and Tommy Tuberville. Like the almost seventy percent of Americans who cannot name our three branches of government, Senator Tuberville, pride of Bama, cannot … name our three branches of government. I would not be surprised if Senator Tuberville thinks he sits on the Supreme Court. The archē-idiot, the person who took the ultimate, most powerful, opportunity to do good in the nation and the world and turned it into the foulest, most degenerate, most pointless killing field this country has ever seen, directs these people in their political activity. He shows them where to point their Beowulfs.

Oh solutions. Solutions. Yes, yes, solutions!

Fuck if I know.

“GOP lawmakers are paralyzed with fear”

Ask yourself why a rich successful guy, facing very minor charges (unlawful entry; curfew violation) stemming from his effort to overthrow the government, came home to Georgia and apparently blew his brains out. “There’s blood everywhere,” his wife told 911, and there certainly would be if he used one of his SKS-45s to do the deed.

Judging by his house, the dude could have afforded excellent lawyers who would almost certainly arrange things so that he’d have to pay some eminently affordable penalty or something… So what the hell?

Let us speculate.

One possibility is that he was so devastated by his failure to destroy America that he saw no further reason to live. The event itself was heady stuff; he felt part of a righteous revolution. But within hours Nancy Pelosi – who should by rights have been dead by the end of the day – was not only alive but still presiding over the house. The anguish that settled upon him on his return to intolerable normalcy overcame him.

Another possibility is simply that this man, like his idol, is mentally ill. His violent extremism held off the inevitable violent suicide for awhile (there are several effective ways to off yourself; ask yourself why this man chose the absolute bloodiest, visiting piercing trauma upon his family as they discovered what he did to his head) by establishing a cult within which he could “normalize”and play out his fantasies. The failure of the cult’s attack on democracy shattered this man’s tenuous hold.

Another possibility goes the other way: shame. When the party’s over, and you see precisely the damage you’ve done to yourself and the people you love — hey, maybe even the country you love — you feel overpowering shame.

Yes, Utah is one of those big manly gunned-up states (also Montana, Wyoming, Alaska…) where you better not mess with me cuz I wanna mess with me. Suicide, ho!

UD firmly believes that a lot of men buy guns with their own eventual suicides in mind. The suicide option may not be at the forefront of their thinking as they amass scads of weapons; but you know that implicit in the wide-open-spaces nihilist’s life (drinking, driving pointlessly about at high speed, divorcing like crazy, alienating everyone around you) is a clear endpoint, an obvious moment somewhere in your late fifties, early sixties, when you lose your bad boy bounce, you’re all alone, and the winters are long.