Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The Washington Post has constructed a video timeline of the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol that is absolutely stunning.  Here's part of their introduction to the video:

At 2:12 p.m. on Jan. 6, supporters of President Trump began climbing through a window they had smashed on the northwest side of the U.S. Capitol. “Go! Go! Go!” someone shouted as the rioters, some in military gear, streamed in.

It was the start of the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. The mob coursed through the building, enraged that Congress was preparing to make Trump’s electoral defeat official. “Drag them out! … Hang them out!” rioters yelled at one point, as they gathered near the House chamber. [snip]

To reconstruct the pandemonium inside the Capitol for the video above, The Washington Post examined text messages, photos and hundreds of videos, some of which were exclusively obtained. By synchronizing the footage and locating some of the camera angles within a digital 3-D model of the building, The Post was able to map the rioters’ movements and assess how close they came to lawmakers — in some cases feet apart or separated only by a handful of vastly outnumbered police officers.

The Post used a facial-recognition algorithm that differentiates individual faces — it does not identify people — to estimate that at least 300 rioters were present in footage taken inside the Capitol while police were struggling to evacuate lawmakers. The actual number of rioters is probably greater, since the footage analyzed by The Post did not capture everyone in the building.

Federal, State and local authorities are rounding up as many of these violent traitors to democracy as can be identified, and all we can say is "Lock 'em up!"

Alec MacGillis looks at the insurrectionists through their videos, at the extent of their delusions, and concludes after one middle- aged man spouts about his reason for being in the mob:

He didn’t appear to know about the deaths and extent of the violence. He had only his vantage point. But we now have many more vantages. And they give us the picture of what happens when something that was gathering across the land for years, and recklessly and cynically fomented by those who knew better, reached a culmination. There undoubtedly were some dangerous organized elements within the mob that attacked the Capitol. But what is scariest about these videos is that they show the damage that can be done by a crowd of unorganized Americans goaded and abetted by the leaders of an organized political party. The radical fringe is a cause for concern. The thousands of regular people whipped into a murderous rage is the real nightmare.

Axios also has a lengthy "collapse of the President" tick tock from election night onward that's worth saving.

Nicole Hemmer writes in "The Final Mess" that, following an election that didn't fully repudiate Mango Mussolini, it was up to him to do it to himself:

For those who supported Joe Biden, his victory in November was tinged with disappointment. President Trump had been beaten, but Trumpism had not. Trump won 74.2 million votes, expanding his 2016 tally even in defeat. Republicans had narrowed the Democratic margin in the House and had the chance to hold control of the Senate. Biden’s win fell short of the overwhelming, Reagan-beats-Mondale or LBJ-beats-Goldwater level that would have fully repudiated Trump.

But after two months of efforts to overturn the results, the attack on the Capitol finally did what the election could not: It made Trump — and the GOP — toxic. Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook pulled the plug on the president’s accounts. The Girl Scouts started trying to break the lease for their headquarters in a Trump-owned building in New York. A credit-card-processing company stopped handling donations to Trump’s campaign. Major corporations like Marriott and Comcast announced that they would end or suspend donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the election results. And 10 Republicans in Congress voted to impeach the president. GOP leaders who had stuck by Trump for his whole term indicated that they might abandon him. It is an ending befitting a Greek tragedy: Only Trump could bring about his own downfall.

There's reporting that delusional Donnie is looking to raise a yuuuge amount of money for his presidential library (scam alert!):

President Donald Trump is relaying to supporters and GOP donors that he wants to raise $2 billion for a presidential library and museum, according to The Washington Post.

No official announcements have been made, but the presidential library is "likely" to be in Florida, home of the outgoing president's Mar-a-Lago resort and the most probable political base for the his eldest daughter and son, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. [Ed.: snicker]

The Post reported that Trump wants Dan Scavino, social media director and White House deputy chief of staff for communications, to lead the ambitious effort. The president is reportedly convinced that he can raise the necessary funds through small-dollar donations from his political base.

The reported goal is far in excess of the price tag for other presidential libraries. Former President George W. Bush raised just over $500 million for his "Presidential Center" in Dallas, which is expected to be the same amount it will to cost to build former President Barack Obama's own library in Chicago.

We've already posted on a virtual reality version of what that library should look like.  Also, a dedicated Trump Twitter library.  More ideas here.

Daniel Dale could provide a plethora of Mango Mussolini's lies for that library.  Here, he just curates the 15 most notable, including this:

The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before

They were almost always male. They were almost always large. They were almost always blue-collar. And, according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.

Trump's series of Tears Stories -- which sometimes doubled as "Sir" Stories -- helped me understand his lying as a kind of performance art.

The stories were oddly grandiose, like something you'd hear from a two-bit foreign strongman. They were also pure shtick. Trump was like a touring stand-up comic, refining and re-using his favored dishonesty bits until they stopped working for him.

Finally, a visit to Infidel 753's link round- up is highly recommended as a smorgasbord of wide- ranging topics of interest every week.