Today is Sunday, February 6, 2022. The Republican Party has descended to new lows over the weekend when it censured the only repugnicans who are pursuing the truth of the dreadful events leading up to January 6, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, through the Republican National Committee (RNC) statement attacking both courageous representatives for their participation in the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack. The RNC had the audacity to write that “Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution [my bolding] of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.” I have no fucking idea what the last part of the outrageous statement is actually saying, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all lies! Have you never heard such poppycock from a major political party that is wallowing in an alternate reality of their very own, along with their contemptible leader? This shameful development is covered in an article in my online edition of Vox by Ellen Ioanes in “The GOP’s January 6 lies have reached a fever pitch.”

To counter such bullshit from the repugnicans, Mehdi Hasan, on his Saturday night MSNBC program, played the videotape of one “ordinary citizen,” Ryan Nichols, who was arrested in the sacking of the Capitol. The video shows him brandishing a crowbar and features him using extremely foul language in his supposed quest to take over the Capitol on grounds of taking back his “freedom.” Another clip shows him walking with other “ordinary citizens” to the Capitol where he unleashes more foul language and speaks about inflicting harm on lawmakers who he deems are opposed to his freedom objectives, most specifically Vice President Mike Pence who would not go along with the insurrectionists to overturn the election.

Were these violent supporters of the former president engaged in “legitimate political discourse,” do you think? Were their aims peaceful or were they out for blood? What do you think? It’s all on tape, folks, but your repugnican elected officials seriously think these repulsive criminals were innocent protesters or even patriotic guardians of the Constitution. Do they think most Americans are that stupid and would accept their revised narrative of January 6? They probably most assuredly do. Sadly, there is a stratum of society that will accept their alternate version of the events of January 6 and it’s a crying shame.

The RNC conveniently forgets to mention the five people who lost their lives in the peaceful protest and approximately the 140 other people who were injured in the attack. This situation occurred, the RNC would have you believe, in the pursuit of “legitimate political discourse” by these raving lunatics, oops, sorry, “patriots.”

There are a few establishment repugnicans who have spoken out against the censure like Senator Mitt Romney, to give them their due, but it’s still few and far between. Others have expressed dismay at the idea of a future – Heaven forbid! – President Dumpf pardoning January 6 rioters, as he so loudly stated at that rally of his in Texas last week, but far too many repugnicans have bought into Dumpf’s narrative that they even attacked Mike Pence for accurately disputing on Thursday that he could have overturned the results of the election.

The propulsion of another absurd narrative about the state of those “peaceful citizens” who are being charged with crimes relating to their breaking into the Capitol is coming from ardent supporters of Dumpf, especially from two of his most loyal lackeys, Reps. Matt Gaetz (Where is his indictment already?) and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are leading the revised story that January 6 attendees are being mistreated while they await their day in court. So it’s people like Gaetz, Greene, and would-be members like Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance (I sold my copy of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy because I can’t stand him anymore) who have described the Capitol rioters as “political prisoners” and have not been charged with crimes (they have).

A professor of history and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Alex Keyssar, told Vox in a Sunday interview that “There is no room for dissenters from Donald Trump’s views in the Republican Party,” as events from this week resoundingly illustrate. Keyssar told another outlet, Politico, in a 2021 retrospective in December, that the January 6 insurrection accelerated “the downward spiral of American political life” and set off an “intensified, rancorous struggle over the preservation of democratic values and institutions.”

Keyssar maintains that Dumpf’s insistence on pursuing his self-serving narrative of victimhood and taking the Republican Party down with him doesn’t just affect the GOP, but it affects the functioning of democracy and people’s ability to participate in it. Keyssar points out that Dumpf’s calculated version of history, the fiction of a rigged election, is directed only toward one aim and that is a complete restoration to power.

The polarization of the two parties right now has emboldened some places to propose laws targeting voter fraud that can have the real-world effect of making it more difficult for disenfranchised communities, including Black people and those in poverty, to vote. Keyssar also believes that the constant effort to delegitimize the election does serve to negate the peaceful means of changing power, which could foretell further violence in one form of another. He ominously concludes, “If you discredit the mechanism of elections, then what are you left with? Force.”

Everyone is talking about the suspension from The View of one of its principal hosts, Whoopi Goldberg, for her incredibly misinformed comments on the Holocaust that followed a discussion by a Tennessee school district to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning serialized nonfiction graphic novel Maus. This happened on the January 31, 2022 show. The book should never have been banned, as we all know. But during the discussion of the book banning, Goldberg made this ill-informed comment, “Let’s be truthful about it because Holocaust isn’t about race.” She said, “It’s not about race, it’s not about race, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man.” The cohost of the program, Ana Navarro, immediately corrected Goldberg, saying, “But it’s about white supremacists going after Jews.”

As a result of her comments, Goldberg received an immediate two-week suspension from ABC News president Kim Godwin. While many people support Goldberg being suspended for two weeks, someone she has just criticized the other week for his supposedly insensitive comments regarding COVID-19, Bill Maher, came to her defense on his program Friday night. I watched it and I would have to say I tend to agree with him. Maher believes she should have not been “canceled” for two weeks so that she could reflect and learn about the impact of her comments on those that were hurt by them. He viewed it as insulting to punish a 65-year-old for saying what she did. Goldberg did issue an apology of sorts on the Stephen Colbert Show, but some people did not view it as sincere as it could be. But let’s be clear here: the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany was orchestrated by Hitler and his party because they viewed the Jewish race as wholly inferior and subhuman. The Germans under the Nazi Party saw themselves as the “master race” and wanted to expunge the Jewish community altogether. It’s inconceivable that a woman of Goldberg’s background and intelligence didn’t know this fact. This sad situation revolving around a possible banning of a book aimed to educate high school students about such a watershed moment in world history and the flap over Goldberg’s insensitive comments about it illustrate how rampant anti-Semitism has become in this country and elsewhere. Anti-Semitism is not a thing of the past, it is still a big issue today. What we need so crucially right now is a stepped-up program of reeducation on this topic as the events of that dark period in European history continue to fade with the passing of time.

The argument against Goldberg’s suspension is that there are so many other people than her making worse statements on such outlets like Fox News and elsewhere which even contribute to people losing their lives and these people are never suspended – ever. People like “Fucker” Carlson, Laura Ingraham et al. Why are these commentators never punished for their outright lying? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for misleading the public? When there is an equal balance of accountability meted out to those who wield such influence in the media, then we can suspend people like Whoopi Goldberg for issuing such flagrantly wrong statements, but not before.

Anyway, it’s getting late here. For those who might be interested to know what transpired yesterday: I was entertaining my Long Island friend, “Jake,” who stayed quite a long time. He actually stayed about 12 hours since he left at 2 a.m. and arrived around 1:45 p.m. We had dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, Ocean Palace, on Queens Boulevard. When we returned, I put on the 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, in the bedroom so as to introduce Jake to our new television set. He preferred seeing this version over watching the 2021 adaptation with Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchard. We also commemorated the 50th anniversary of our friendship which goes all the way back to my junior year at Christopher Columbus High School in Mr. Berman’s chemistry class, in 1972. Jake reminded me of this anniversary by giving me a gold key ring with the number 50 on the bottom. It’s certainly a very long time to know someone, don’t you think?

Have a good week.

Stay safe and be well.

This display was found in the Strand last week. Very sickening, I think.