I Tried. Close But No Cigar.

 

When I got up yesterday morning I was almost immediately hit by the realization that it was the 6th of January, the day when the final results of two senate runoff elections in Georgia would be announced and the day when Congress certified the Electoral College results, confirming the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

I had a sense that the Dems might get one of the two senate seats, one short of the number needed to pry the Senate out of Mitch McConnell's clutches. The GOP would remain in control of America's legislative agenda.

As for Congress, I had a very ominous sense that the unhinged president who refused to concede and his loyal Morlocks in the Senate could try to derail the confirmation even if they were unlikely to succeed in what looked like an attempted constitutional coup.

It turned out that the Dems won both Georgia seats, an event that ordinarily would have been the story of the day. Yet it was to be eclipsed by an uprising in Washington D.C.

As it turned out I spent most of the day glued to the tube, flipping between CNN's and NBC's live coverage of the Capitol Follies. It began with the massing of the Deplorables on the Elipse from where, behind a wall of bulletproof glass panels, Donald Trump emerged. 

Ordinarily I can take Trump in very small doses. Watching this president you know you're watching a lunatic from an alternate reality, make-believe world that rattles about in his skull. His mental decline has worsened significantly over the past year. 2024? He might be sporting a drool cup by then. I knew it would be something of an ordeal but I chose to watch Trump's address, every minute of it. I grabbed pen and paper to write down, verbatim, some of the choice bits.

Trump predictably lashed out at everyone he deemed responsible for his handsome election defeat. There were the Democrats, obviously. They had rigged the elections even in solidly Republican-controlled states. It was just a bag of repeatedly recycled lies. Trump attacked weak and corrupt officials in  the swing states, reminding the gathered Gullibillies that he had actually won those states by a landslide. He attacked his former A.G., Bill Barr. He attacked Mitch McConnell and weak (i.e. sane) Congressional Republicans, the Treason Caucus excepted. The best part was when he turned his wrath on the Supreme Court, pointing out that they failed him and he had even appointed three of them!  In his mind the Supreme Court worked for him.

Trump then turned his attention to the joint session of Congress about to assemble to confirm the Electoral College results. He tuned the crowd up by rehashing each and every one of his lies and imaginings. He had won the election by a huge margin. His votes - the mob's votes - were stolen. The election was rigged and Congress was about to confirm it. This was the moment that Trump gave the Deplorables their marching orders. He said "We're not going to let that happen."  The mob, his mob, would march on Capitol Hill and stop it. With that, Donald Trump unleashed the insurrection. He knew exactly what would unfold.

The rest, as they say, is history. The mob stormed the Capitol building, overwhelmed what security was on hand, and put the senators and representatives to flight. Trump's mob had done his bidding. It was a good thing some staffer knew to secure the mahogany boxes containing the Electoral College certificates before the Deplorables could get at them. It was also a good thing that the mob didn't get their hands on Mike Pence.

As I watched, it brought back memories of two riots on Parliament Hill that in my brief journalism career I had wound up covering. The first involved railway workers. Parliament was about to reconvene to pass back to work legislation. It was one of those dreadfully hot, humid Ottawa summer days. The angry railway workers gathered on the lawn in front of the Centre Block. I spoke with a few of them and noticed a number were refreshing themselves from bottles in brown paper bags.

I was invited by my colleagues to go to the National Press Club across the street for a bit of lunch but I chose to stay put until they returned. They weren't gone long before the protesters turned into a mob and stormed up the steps of the Centre Block. All that stood in their way was a few Commissionaires and a couple of Mounties in dress uniform. That's what constituted security back then.

As the mob entered the Rotunda, the quick-witted mounties did something brilliant. From the Rotunda there are two hallways. Turn right and you wind up at the Red Chamber. Head left and you reach the House of Commons.  There was really no conceivable way to prevent the mob from ransacking either of them. However, if you go straight ahead there are these heavy, metal doors behind which is the library. The cops got those doors closed and bolted and, by falling back, drew the mob to them.

Before long David Lewis appeared. A short man, Lewis stood on a chair to address the crowd while I watched from my vantage point above the fray. I didn't know much about Lewis but I was astonished at how this little man was able to capture their attention and talk them down. They were still angry but their rage evaporated. They knew that they had been heard. They knew this man understood them and would fight for them when the back to work legislation was debated that afternoon. After a while the crowd left. I don't recall whether they remained on the lawn that afternoon. I was probably too occupied processing what I had just witnessed.

Unlike the crowd that stormed the Capitol yesterday, the railway workers I spoke with were decent people, just deeply frustrated. The liquor didn't help. But it was obvious from the seeming ease with which David Lewis drew out their rage that they weren't thugs like Trump's mob yesterday. The evil manifested when similar thugs stormed the state house in Lansing, Michigan a few months ago was on full display yesterday in the Capitol building. That was seditious. That was an insurrection. And the miscreant pulling their strings was president Donald J. Trump, a man who is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.

I watched through the night as members of the Senate and House returned and then went their separate ways as the Treason Caucus tried to disrupt the proceedings with inane objections. I fixed dinner and then went back. I wanted to watch until the body was lowered into the grave. I wanted to see Mike Pence use that gavel and declare Joe Biden elected president and Kamala Harris elected vice-president. I didn't make it. As the evening dragged on I sat back in my recliner.  I awoke at five o'clock this morning, the TV still on. Close but no cigar.