Is It Worth Getting Out The Crayons?

     I was going to refute in extensive detail a commenter who loftily informed me that "January 6 was not an insurrection" because there weren't stacks of dead bodies and no buildings got burned to ground.  But it's simpler than that:

     Sorry, old boy, there is no ineptitude exception for insurrectionists.  The mob that stormed the capitol was seriously lacking in command, control and communications -- not to mention intelligence -- but they did have a clear aim: to interfere with the certification of Electoral Collage votes and to apprehend or hang one or more elected official (the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House),  They didn't succeed.  They were poorly organized, despite the presence of members of a few militia-type organizations.  Too much would-be brass, too many undrilled troops, zero sergeants -- and you won't go too far without noncoms.

     You know what we call unsuccessful bank robbers?  Bank robbers.  You know what we call the perpetrators of unsuccessful robberies, like the guys who broke into a local gun store and found all the guns in the store's vault or armored display cases?  Burglars.  If a man runs up to you on the sidewalk, sticks a gun in your face and demands your pocketbook, he's an attempted robber even if a car comes around the corner and he panics and runs away.  (That happened to me, and while I was sure glad to not be shot and to keep the $2.75 in cash money that I had at the time, the perp had nevertheless committed a crime.)

     You don't get a pass for being lousy at it.  People were injured and killed.  Historical properties were damaged.  I watched real-time video, handheld stuff, security cameras, some professional coverage, whatever the networks could lay hands on.  It was a mob assault with the intent of overthrowing the normal functioning of the Federal government and installing a different President than the one who had been duly elected.  And not just duly elected, but repeatedly challenged in court and every challenge found meritless.  Every recount -- even the ones most suspicious of the results and set up to be well outside normal channels -- found the same winners and losers as the original counts.

     The candidate the mob tried to put in office had lost the election.  That makes their actions an attempted coup -- an insurrection.

     How sad for your bloodlust that it wasn't as productive of carnage and otherwise terrible as it could have been, I guess, though at the time, I thought the country had a very narrow escape from a truly dire outcome, and I still do.

     I am stunned that the instigator of that insurrection has been given another chance at the office.  Win or lose, his party will come to regret it.  History shows that autocratic usurpation never comes to a good end; the only question is how long it will take and how many people will be maimed and killed before the sickness has run its course.

     I'm telling you now, you don't escape a wood-chipper by jumping into the maw and hoping to ride it out, and you sure don't avoid the guilt by volunteering to gas the thing up and push the starter button.