Right, except the protesters were sheep led by Trump and his Republican goons. This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.

Stephen Colbert did a great job of bringing this up in his interview with ex-prosecutor Sen. Klobuchar who went straight back to work with her traitor colleagues. She dodged the question of whether more public officials should be prosecuted with a tactful deflection of laying it all on Trump. That bugged me.

https://youtu.be/5PiA9mJommE?t=414

>This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.

Yes it can be, given that Republicans have always framed their arguments in terms of "preventing electoral fraud" and not "overthrowing democracy." You may personally feel like the former is a pretextual cover for the latter but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.

>the former is a pretextual cover for the latter

Setting aside completely how I feel because it absolutely does not matter, the question should be, was it the latter or wasn't it?

> but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.

Exactly. And for this to be the standard for how we certify the truth is at the heart of American absurdism. It's how we let politicians, big banks, Wall Street, et al get away with being full of shit. And I am not exaggerating. The partisan impeachment vote, Wells Fargo's fake bank account, and the financial crisis are all examples of absurdism.

Here is Matt Gaetz after the raid. Do you know why they applaud? Because he gave them the well formed arguments they need to get away with betraying their country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfmyACLmZ7s

None of this is an exaggeration.

It's not merely that the prosecutions aren't going to happen, it's that they're not going to receive widespread support among legal experts because that's the tricky thing about the law - you can't just throw people in jail based on tribal hatred, you have to actually assert a definition of concepts like "sedition" or "incitement" or "terrorism" that apply universally and are prosecuted consistently. And there's not going to be a functional definition of these terms that applies especially to the speech of Republican politicians or rioters in the past couple months.

I am not talking about tribal hatred or matters of perspective or what the public thinks or votes about anything here.

I am talking about the masterminds and their intent. Trump clearly intended to steal the election. Wells Fargo and Wall Street clearly intended to cheat for profit.

It's as if intent doesn't matter, when it truly is the source and agency of the bad actors. Wrongful intent continues to enjoy protection in America under the "tricky things about the law", to borrow your words.

You shouldn't be able to steal something just because the lawyers agree with you. In America, that's how it's done (probably everywhere else too, but).

Are you saying you think this was a failed coup? On what basis? It looks nothing like the coups I'm familiar with.

Trump has always gotten away with the things he was gravely incompetent at on the basis of his incompetence. This is just another case. He was pushing Pence to use power he didn't have. His allies all pushed the fraud narrative. And he provoked a riot that proceeded to follow his orders and storm the capital.

This is what a weak coup looks like in 2020 America. None of the action above were based on preserving order or upholding the constitution or fullfilling his oath of office or protecting our democracy or being in the right. It was a power grab doomed from the start, but never the less, a power grab and a sorry attempt at a coup.

That's an interesting and reasonable perspective. If you stretch the definition of a coup to include totally incoherent, incompetent, ineffectual raging that could never actually achieve the outcome, it could qualify. But it still feels like a stretch to me based on what I know of coups (sadly some personal experience there).

I also think calling it a coup inflames tensions and risks credibility for no real benefit. A sober and precise description of events is damning enough.

The struggle over vocabulary is evident. The truth is it could be called all or none of these things. There was a professor on NPR who also said how each term (terrorism, insurrection, coup) has legal connotations. But I call BS on all of it. Getting people to not say coup is already evidence of damage control against the factual, universal, objective, scientific "coup-ness" nature of it all. Semmantics is always arguable, but I am not lying, I have no agenda, and I am not gaming anything with how I express the situation. Like with most "normal" people with no power or say in the situation.

But of course, whether anything crosses legal lines in accordance to legal vocabulary is all these bent politicians are concerned about, because that's the only thing that would stop them by landing them in jail. That's why most of them are lawyers. The non-lawyers have a hard time surviving. We'll see what happens with Trump.

Both points apply to both sides.

That's a fair position to take. We just have different definitions of what constitutes a coup.

I certainly agree politics is way too corrupt and the constant lawfare is harmful.