Despite the snarky title of this post Wednesday’s assault on our government is a deadly serious incident. Violent, right-wing reactionaries stormed our nation’s capital with the intent to prevent the transfer of power to next president who had been legitimately, freely, and fairly elected. They did this after months of lies from the head of our government who himself had been supported by his party in these lies of ‘stolen’ election. Even after the invasion of the congress with Representative, Senators, and journalists in fear of their lives, and people had died, more than 100 Republican Representatives still voted to disenfranchise millions of Americans and to overthrow this election. As I write this five people have died from this riot, this act of political terrorism, and cowards who were more than happy to bask in the glow of Trump’s abuse of power are scuttling for safety and demanding they we respect them as principled people. They are not, they are merely self-serving, greedy, cowards that are now seeking to save their skins and careers after standing by and watching this man corrupt his office and refuse to take any rational action to save lives during the worst global pandemic in a century.

It is a blessing that this action was performed by idiots but we are far from safe even after Trump is expelled from the office and a sane person replaces him.

Trump is the accelerant for the bonfire that is burning down our political house but he is not the arsonist. A sane, healthy, and reality-based political party would not have been ripe for Trump brand of white-grievance, fascistic politics. Trump walked in and took controls of a base that had been built over decades, one that the elite like Hawley and Cruz thought they could command and are even now trying to wrest back from him. That base, the ones that been encouraged to think Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, that had been taught to never trust any source outside of the Conservative bubble, that had fully supported every action to make it harder for the ‘wrong’ kinds of people to vote, are the same people who stormed the capital and waved treasonous flags during their putsch. This is not conservatism. Around the world there are sane, rational conservative political parties. This is the modern GOP, it is vile, it is racist, and it is solidly anti-democratic. Trump did not create it; he merely took it off its mask and revealed the monster underneath.