Split screen: Impeachment is all about counter-programming against Georgia trial

By Hal Brown

With House Republicans it's all about egos and eyes.

The clamor to hold impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden is a deafening cacaphony of caca. 

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It's quite a task for people like James Comer and Matt Gaetz to outdo Marjorie Taylor Greene who called for red state succession on the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 for mooning for the media. You may accuse the likes of these Republicans for lots of things but you can't say they are camera shy. You get between them and a camera at your own peril.

Now that Kevin McCarthy has bypassed a House vote (which would go down in defeat) and initiated a House impeachment inquiry (story) it is amusing to watch Greene erupt spewing molten lava like Mt. Kilauea claiming she was pressing for a Biden impeachment inquiry immediately upon taking office: see

Feud erupts between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz over Biden impeachment.

Still, try as they might media hogs like GOP members of the House Gaetz, Comer, Jim Jordan, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert et al, and Tommy Tuberville in the Senate, don't stand a chance of being immortalized in stone. It is Marjorie Taylor Greene who is vying to be sculpted on the Mt. Rushmore of GOP gigantism.

In the coming weeks thanks to Georgia courts allowing live video coverage we can expect compelling, perhaps dramatic, reality TV. The show will be starring well known "celebrities" whose faces are well known like Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheesbro, whose name not his face are familiar. If Trump doesn't get his case removed to federal court, the mega MAGA star Donald Trump, the only defendant who actually has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, will be must-see TV if he's in court, especially if he decides against his lawyers' advice to testify.

He has the star, once defaced and replaced, there, and it is the most prominent attraction:

Read article about the star

Ironically, in order to pry eyes away from the trial if Trump is a featured celebrity House Republicans will have to put on a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus extravganza.

This will be a challenge if their center ring attraction is only Hunter Biden. If President Biden testifies (the last president to appear before Congress was Gerald Ford) depending on what's happening in Georgia I can see the GOP winning the ratings rounds for a period of time. MAGAs want to see their GOP heroes make Joe Biden squirm under their barrage of goofball gotcha questions. Lots-a-luck with that. The president doesn't do squirm.

One crazy place to be will be in the control rooms of the major television  networks where directors will have to decide what to feature on the biggest portion of their split screen when interesting things are happening simultaneously. TV hosts and panelists will have to go back and forth as they talk about the House impeachment and the Georgia trial. Complicating all of this will be any other trial involving Trump which may be occurring at the same time but doesn't have live TV coverage.

The only thing that might wipe the political news off the media is a catergory nine earthquake along the San Andreas fault (aka The Big One) which literally wipes out large portions of coastal California, Oregon, and Washington.

The Far-Right and the Riflemen (and Women)

 

By Hal Brown 

Read on one page.

This morning Raw Story published this article: 

Far-right lawmaker wants to defund Fani Willis: 'I don't want to have to draw my rifle' Click to read.

This is the part of the story that led to the title and some mockery in the comments (my emphasis):

Moore said during a recent conversation with a fellow state senator they discussed “taking action right now because if we don't, our constituencies are gonna be fighting it in the streets.”

“Do you want a civil war? I don't want a civil war. I don't want to have to draw my rifle. I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so, and the first step to getting that done is defunding Fani Willis of any Georgia tax dollars."

This brought to mind the ABC TV western The Rifleman which aired between 1958 and 1963. Chuck Conners played the hero Lucas McCain. Some trivia: Sammy Davis Junior played Tip Corey,  a super fast, black gunman who killed the 5 men the law allowed to murder his father years ago, demands that deputy McCain symbolically throw his badge in the dirt in the episode Two Ounces of Tin (Reference).

The Rifleman was one of the first popular TV shows to feature a single parent raising a child.

Like any Western TV show or film, The Rifleman had plenty of villains and gunplay. But that isn’t what really made the show work. The driving force behind the show was the relationship between Lucas and his son.  

Lucas was a widower raising his son all by himself. Each week, he attempted to deliver justice and do what he considered to be right but also set a great example for his son.  

He may have been handy with a gun, but he only used it when it was absolutely necessary. He was kind, fair, and most importantly, not quick to action. Lucas provided the program’s moral center. 

In the current TV landscape, a character like Lucas may seem ordinary or, to some, boring. But that undersells just how influential Connors’ work in the role was at the time. It was about more than the character or dialogue — it was about the simple fact that it was a father raising his son without a mother. Read more here

The Rifleman was the only TV western hero who eschewed a six-shooter and wasn't the fastest handgun draw in town. Instead Lucas McCain shot from the hip  firing his rifle 12 times in five seconds in the introduction to every show (watch video here) It was in fact akin to what can be done with modern AR-15 style assualt rifles only without the skill required as shown in this demonstration by an expert.

The rifle was a Winchester Model 1892 44.40 caliber. 

The AR style assault rifle which is favored by gun nuts, mass shooters, and far right zealots doesn't require the skill of a fictional TV hero to shoot with deadly consequences. Bozos Boebert and Greene pose and post pics of themselves with thse big black badboy blasters and AR-15 pins are worn by members of Congress to express their far-right bonafides. 

Male or female, whether they are in pictures or wearing pins the AR-15 says to liberals "I'm more macho* than you." The message is that you should fear me because I'm a mighty monster and you're a minuscule mouse and I can mash you into mush.

It more than rhetoric coming form Trump and Trump wannabes portending violence if he ends up going to prison. These words are already leading some people to "draw" their AR-15 rifles. Chaucey DeVega writes in Salon today:

Over the weekend, for example, a white supremacist murdered three Black people in Florida. National security and other experts continue to warn that there are millions of Trump's followers and other members of the right wing who support and are potentially willing to engage in acts of terrorism and other violence – including a second coup attempt, civil war, or insurgency, to put Trump back in office. From: Don't look away: It's a mistake to ignore Donald Trump's interview with Tucker Carlson "The discussion normalized violence as a response to political disappointment"

Would it be that the heros of the MAGA GOP were truly as rightious as  they were in the early TV Western shows like The Rifleman. Instead they play at being righteous, but they are really saying they are holier then thou with the thou being everyone they think is twarting their agenda.

You can watch the first episode of The Rifleman, The Sharpshooter, here. In it Lucas (Chuck Connors) and Mark McCain (Johnny Crawford) finally find the ranch they have been looking for, but the ranch comes with a price, and Lucas may have to decide between the ranch and his son's life.

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* The term macho has had a masculine connotation, however consider this book from 2003 which may have portended the likes of Boebtert and Greene: 

A remake of the cult classic tongue-in-cheek RPG. A new and exciting development in d20 Modern that is set to raise more interest than a certain well-known lingerie advert. Macho Women with Guns puts its scantily-clad and inordinately-proportioned heroines through situations tighter than a Baywatch swim suit, with machineguns in hand and grenades between their teeth. A light-hearted journey through a post-apocalyptic world where women call the shots and men cower to their will. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Macho Women with Guns features everything required in a great night of humorous guns, women, bombs, women, attitude, and more women. So slip on your thigh-high boots, pad your bra out with shotgun shells, and head into the new and terrifying world of Macho Women with Guns.

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