Notes, 1-23-21

The calm in the United States and the world is almost palpable. I’m not aware of a tweet from the new president. Our copy of The Epoch Times arrived today; I thought it was early, but it was dated Dec. 30. A page 1 headline, “Car Caravans Forming for ‘Historic’ Protest in Washington,” was about the demonstration to happen during the Jan. 6 Electoral College vote to confirm Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory at the polls last November. History will record that that vote was interrupted by rioters who stormed the Capitol, thanks in part to the seeming ineptitude of the Capitol Police and whoever guides them.

The honeymoon of President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden (the first first lady who will continue in her previous job, teaching in a community college) and Vice President Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, continues, although the news media are allowing them to get some rest and do what they have to do in private while members of the press corps get some rest as well. (Some of the new president’s initiatives must have been prepared in the months after the November election, when critics were wondering why there was little visible activity on his part.)

Many headline writers preparing the front pages of last Wednesday’s morning papers had one written for them by the then-president-elect. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said Tuesday in Wilmington, Del., before leaving for Washington. What it means time will tell. It sounded promising.

Leonard C. Goodman is not sanguine. In a column written for Economy for All and released on Inauguration Day (Wednesday), Goodman, a criminal defense lawyer, says big corporations run the show in Washington and will continue to—they simply want continued control in a more decorous Washington. Headlined “Trump’s Second Impeachmentment Shows the World the Power That Corporations Have Over American Politics,” the piece provided context missing in most of the news media. Click HERE for it.

And for those scratching their heads over the success of the “Stop the steal” protesters in breaching the protection for the impeachment vote, Goodman notes similarities between the security failures of 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the 2021 storming of the Capitol.

“An investigation into the failures of law enforcement before and on January 6 is critical,” he wrote. “Especially since [then]-President-elect Biden has already announced plans to pass a new Patriot Act to combat ‘domestic terrorism.’ In other words, just like after 9/11, our government wants to reward its own incompetence by expanding its powers. History teaches that agencies like the FBI will use their expanded powers to hunt down and neutralize the left. In the 1960s, the FBI used programs like COINTELPRO to harass civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and to crush the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and the American Indian Movement, all under the guise of weeding out ‘extremism.’”

Goodman included a link to his Dec. 18 column headed “Democrats and ruling by fear,” written more than two weeks before the riot at the Capitol. In it he casts a wary eye at the new president’s choice for secretary of state, Antony Blinken. I recommend reading the two columns chronologically, starting HERE. 

What will President Biden’s “domestic terrorism” act look like. Once the news media gets a deserved rest, readers and viewers and listeners may look into it. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 was enacted when fear gripped the nation following the attacks blamed entirely on Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the seeming incompetence of U.S. national security elements. The Republicans, one could conclude, were ruling by fear as they took advantage of the attacks and the anthrax attacks.

The feared violence in various state capitals last Wednesday at the hands of pro-Trump extremists didn’t happen, thanks in part to preparedness on the part of governors’ having National Guard troops at the ready. So some things can change.

   

This morning’s edition of NPR’s “Weekend Edition” had an interview with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who called for a “thorough and fair investigation” of Senate colleagues (among others) for stridently alleging, without evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Presumably those accusers, who include Sen. Ted Cruz, will advocate a bipartisan investigation to try to turn up irrefutable evidence that it was. 

And at some point Congress may demand a thorough and fair investigation of the 9/11 attacks (in 2018 the Senate unanimously passed a resolution asking declassification of considerable evidence being withheld by the FBI and the Department of Justice about the 9/11 attacks).   

— Mark Channing Miller

p.s. Many Sunday papers carried this Associated Press story by Jonathan Lemire, headed in one of them “Biden gets to work as problems loom.” (Added Sunday evening.)