One film journalist’s stream-of-consciousness cinematic journey through the pandemic, Part 28 By Laurence Lerman Next time I have to spend a year in isolation, growing restless, I want to do it like a character in an Antonioni film. Following the recent impeachment trial and its galling, if inevitable, verdict on Saturday, February 13, I deflected the results and my growing frustration with a year of pandemic-styled living by launching a stream of fine films by one of the cinema’s most quietly provocative auteurs, Michelangelo Antonioni. I estimated that a well-spaced trio of them would carry me through to Sunday, Valentine’s Day, and the big, heart-shaped box of chocolates I planned to spring on my wife. With a body of work that is at once austere, elegant, enigmatic and haunting, Antonioni’s films, particularly the three that established him with an international audience beginning in 1960, perfectly mirror the times in which we currently live—homebound; trying to get work done, but only making it so far; wanting more but accepting less; trying to inject something lively and affirming into the mix, but continuing to stir in our own ennui; and looking for answers, but unsure if we’d even recognize them if they presented themselves. In Antonioni’s cinema, the modern world and its landscapes, architecture and objects are utilized to convey the distances that exist between people (both physical and psychological), as well as his characters’ state of mind. In telling his tales, many about well-off, well-mannered cosmopolitan Italians, Antonioni—what with his vague narratives, meticulously designed yet sparse compositions and restrained use of dialogue—created a cinematic language that shook up the Italian tradition of neo-realism. It was Antonioni’s kind of deliberate artiness and fuzzy storytelling that fashioned his world of detachment and malaise—not unlike the lives of a good many of us over this past year. Informally referred to as his “Alienation Trilogy,” Antonioni’s 1960 L’Avventura, 1961’s La Notte and 1962’s L’Eclisse were lauded by the film cognoscenti as works that communicated Italy’s sense of post-war disillusionment and, yeah, alienation. Having seen them for the first time in the late Eighties and not having experienced any of post-war Italy’s alienation from three decades earlier, the films didn’t really click for me on any kind of political or even societal level. It was more about the emotions for me, and the isolation of modern life, even when it comes to lovers’ relationships or the crumbling thereof. But watching such screen presences as Lea Massari and Gabriele Ferzetti in L’Avventura, Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau in La Notte, Alain Delon and Rossana Rory in L’Eclisse, and Antonioni muse Monica Vitti in all three, convinced me, if even for only a couple of hours, that living the life of a bored and beguiled member of the Italian bourgeoisie couldn’t be all that bad. Such striking performers! Such ennui! At one point in La Notte, Moreau is queried about her long evening spent at a jazz club, a publishing event and a lavish party, and her sullen reply is, “One must do something.” Even better is that all that exquisite suffering generally transpires in silence, perhaps subtly accentuated with some wind or rainfall or maybe some barely there background music. And the occasional kvetching that does pop up comes forth in hushed, Italian tones, so it doesn’t really sound too kvetchy. Antonioni’s forms and methods aside, there’s also something to be said about his performers’ abilities to communicate their inner lives primarily in expressions and gestures rather than spoken words. To observe Monica Vitti look languorously off to the side when dealing with her sublimated emotions (as she does in all of Antonioni’s films) is one of Italian cinema’s more riveting images, just as it can also be equally seen as frustrating and, again, alienating. But, damn, Ms. Vitti looks great while she’s doing it. Antonioni followed up his Trilogy with more Vitti, more ennui and more emotionally stunted relationships—this time with an industrial shipyard landscape—in 1964’s Red Desert. Existential ennui has never looked as luxurious as it does in Antonioni’s first color film, one that’s designed so carefully that even the produce on a deserted fruit cart or the exhaust belching from a factory smokestack are colored to the filmmaker’s specifications. Antonioni’s three subsequent films following Red Desert were English language productions that were more thematically mindful then heartfelt: the nature of reality seen through a photographer’s lens in the international sensation Blow-Up (1966), the shallowness of the American counterculture explored in the disastrously received Zabriskie Point (1970) and the concept of self in the face of taking on another’s identity, which powers the intriguing Jack Nicholson-starrer The Passenger (1975). All three of Antonioni’s English-language offerings are very watchable, but none pack the malaise-embracing wallop of his Alienation Trilogy, in which we’re not just questioning if the beautiful people’s sour romances are going to survive, but if their participants even care. That feeling carries over to Red Desert, but for me, the silvery lack of color of the Trilogy’s films make for a more quietly stylized kind of listlessness. And Delon, Mastroianni and Ferzetti’s dark, well-tailored Italian suits look awesome in black-and-white. After watching L’Eclisse as Saturday crept past the midnight hour, I drifted off to sleep. When I woke on Valentine’s Day morning, I knew I had left the Trilogy’s lethargic groove behind me. Antonioni ennui as a signpost of a year of quarantined living is good for a couple of nights, but on a Valentine’s Day morning, it’s all about the joys of Godiva. Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile in The New York Times on August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."

Opinion by Jeffrey D. Sachs | CNN.com February 16, 2021 Editor's Note: Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His most recent book is "The Ages of Globalization" (Columbia University Press, 2020). The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author; view more opinion on CNN The Path to Recovery, a new CNN Opinion series by Jeffrey Sachs, aims to help readers understand the nation's economic crisis that has been building for decades and the role that the federal government should play in solving it. (CNN) - President Joe Biden has made a powerful case for his $1.9 trillion rescue package and has promised to follow it up with a longer-term recovery plan. The spending is both necessary and affordable, yet there is a crucial question: how should the US pay for it? The Biden recovery plan covers three important needs. It spends $400 billion to fund the fight against the pandemic, through immunizations, an expanded public health workforce, and other means. It allocates around $1 trillion in payments to working-class families, many of whom have been hit hard by the pandemic. And it adds around $440 billion to help fund the states and cities that can't turn to bond markets to fund their deficits and small businesses that lack access to market capital. This is a solid package of measures and should be approved quickly. Yet, the price tag is sizable -- $1.9 trillion amounts to around 8.7% of the 2021 GDP, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections. This is affordable but is still quite large compared to existing government revenues. Indeed, this single package amounts to 54% of the $3.5 trillion that the CBO expects the federal government to collect in revenues in 2021. Let's remember, too, that this rescue package is only part of our increased spending to cover urgent needs arising from the pandemic. The longer-term needs are also enormous. For decades now, the US has not properly invested in education, skills, infrastructure, digital services, renewable energy and a host of other needs. For this reason, Biden proposed $2 trillion in accelerated spending on infrastructure. So, how should such a big bill, amounting to several trillion dollars, be paid for? There are basically three ways. The first is for the federal government to borrow to cover this spending. The second is for the Federal Reserve to print more money. And the third is to raise taxes, especially on the rich and the corporate sector, and also on public "bads" like pollution. In the end, all three ways will likely be used. The argument for borrowing by the federal government is straightforward: interest rates are historically low, so the interest charges on the public debt are relatively minimal. The public debt at the end of 2020 stood at 100.1% of GDP, the highest ratio since the end of World War II. Yet, CBO expects that the cost of paying for the debt in 2021 will be only 1.5% of GDP, since the average annual interest rate on the debt is only 1.5%. The government should borrow long term (30 years) to lock in the low rates. It makes sense for the federal government to borrow at such low-interest rates. Yet there will be limits to government borrowing as interest rates rise in the future. Just as today's low rates were not predicted by forecasters, the future path of interest rates is hard to predict, too. Higher interest rates could come sooner than expected as borrowers around the world increase their investments to take advantage of the favorable borrowing conditions. The second possibility is that the Federal Reserve prints money to cover the spending. Promoters of so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) believe that the government can spend a lot more money backed by additional money printing. The Federal Reserve has indeed increased the money supply by $1.8 trillion since December 2019. But just as with borrowing, printing money has its limits, too -- since it risks igniting inflation. Leading MMT proponents claim that inflation will remain low as far as the eye can see. They point to the vast numbers of Americans without a job who are yet to be gainfully employed again. Increasing total spending, they argue, can be matched by a massive increase in output and employment, so that there will be no overheating of the economy. And they may well be right. Yet here, too, we can't be sure how big the government's margin of maneuver will prove to be. We are already seeing some significant price increases over the past 12 months in precious metals, grains, real estate and financial assets. These price increases could be early warning signs of more widespread inflation to come from the trillions of dollars of money and purchasing power being pumped into the economy by the Fed and the Treasury. Even if the vast rise in the money supply doesn't cause inflation, it could create new financial bubbles and thereby a new boom-bust cycle. This is what happened in the years leading to the Great Recession of 2008. Years of easy Fed lending and financial market deregulation from the late 1990s led to a bubble in the US housing market. When that bubble burst in 2008, it brought down the banking system and led to a massive contraction. This leads us to the third option for funding the government, sometimes treated as the third rail of American politics -- higher taxes. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Americans have been led to believe that higher taxation is not necessary to pay for government spending. Republicans promoted that idea with supply-side economics -- that tax cuts pay for themselves through higher growth and more tax revenues. Alas, this idea was proved wrong time and again as the Republican tax cuts of 1981, 2001 and 2017 all reduced revenues as a share of GDP and widened the budget deficit. In short, it isn't realistic to expect that low-cost borrowing and money printing will be enough to fund the government for the long term. Higher taxes will also be necessary, alongside the borrowing and money creation, to pay for more public services. It's not at all surprising that foreign governments like Canada, the UK, Germany and Sweden, which have higher public spending as a share of GDP, also have higher taxation. The US actually collects the second-lowest tax revenues as a share of GDP of the high-income democracies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). So, here is my recommendation: quickly pass the $1.9 trillion rescue plan and follow that with a bold recovery plan as well, based on long-term investment in infrastructure, clean energy, education and technology. But let us also be ready to raise taxes, especially as interest rates begin to rise and inflation and asset bubbles reveal the limits of money printing. Fortunately, we have many good places to raise tax revenues, starting with corporations that are flush with cash; billionaires who have hit the jackpot during Covid-19; and polluters who should bear the social costs of their damage to society. https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/opinions/biden-covid-relief-who-will-pay-sachs/index.html Next column: The case for taxing the wealthy

By Andy Borowitz February 14, 2021 THE AFTERLIFE (The Borowitz Report)—The late James Madison, widely credited with drafting the United States Constitution, said on Saturday that he was concerned that he made the document’s impeachment clause too hard for idiots to grasp. In his first-ever interview from beyond the grave, Madison said that, when he drafted the Constitution, he thought that he had made the section on impeachment “so clear that even a total numbskull could understand it.” “I remember being in the writers’ room and asking Alexander Hamilton if we should put something in there about how a President should be convicted if he attempts a violent overthrow of the government,” Madison said. “Hamilton was, like, ‘First of all, that’s so obvious, we don’t want to insult people’s intelligence by spelling it out. And, second, a President would have to be a complete and utter psycho to try something like that. You have a wild imagination, my friend.’ ” Madison said that he heeded Hamilton’s advice, but now harbors some regrets about doing so. “I know hindsight is 20/20, but if I had to write the impeachment part all over again, I’d really dumb it down,” he said. Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

By Merrill Lynn Hansen I have been filled with emotion since the events of January 6, and the violent mob takeover of the U.S. Capitol Building. As I watched in real time that afternoon, I knew that a horrible kind of history was being made that day, and that it was our country’s President, Donald J. Trump, who not only had encouraged the violence, but likely was enjoying it. In the days that followed, Trump was silenced for the first time in five years. The U.S. House of Representatives issued its Article of Impeachment and Trump became the only U.S. president to be impeached twice. Trump was banned from his beloved Twitter, which had featured not only very prominently in his courtship of conservative Republicans, but more importantly, in his mutual love affair with the very people FBI Director Christopher Wray in September 2020, described as “the greatest threat we face.” But, unbeknownst to me, at the same time that the Article of Impeachment was being drawn up, Trump was facing a crisis that apparently mattered far more to him than the possibility that he might never be able to hold government office again, let alone run for president in 2024. Trump learned on January 19 that SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), was starting disciplinary proceedings against him, for inciting the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, and for "his antagonism of the union’s journalist members and disregard for the values and integrity of the union.” Trump was notified that he might be barred from ever reapplying for a membership. Not even Lindsey Graham, or House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, would be able to convince the SAG-AFTRA board members that Trump was the greatest film and television star our country has ever been honored to have grace the screen (or that he never intentionally tried to endanger any journalist who printed something truthful about him). What the soon-to-be-former President perceived as a deliberate and vexatious act by SAG-AFTRA was more than he could bear. Without the ability to immediately tweet about what a bunch of losers they were, Trump had to make his anger known by memorializing his usual T witter fit in an actual letter. Being a private citizen apparently has not humbled Trump, or diminished how petty and thin-skinned he is. In fact, the only fairly significant change I noticed, was that he may have had someone type the letter who knew how to use spellcheck. Presumably, that individual had to keep a straight face when he or she saw that the letterhead Trump used on February 4, after his term ended, had the presidential seal on it. I laughed for the first time in a month when I read that Trump had written to SAG-AFTRA’s president, Gabrielle Carteris, and in an attempt to embarrass her, wrote, "While I am not familiar with your work, I'm very proud of my work on Home Alone 2, Zoolander and Wall Street." He mentioned two or three television shows and referred to The Apprentice, his reality TV show, as "one of the most successful shows in television history.” Does Trump not know that I Love Lucy has been shown around the world every day since the 1950s? And does he really think that "You're fired" is as well-known as "To the moon, Alice,” or even "Yabba Dabba Doo”? I’m not sure how many people know that Trump “fired” Dennis Rodman, and Meatloaf on his television show, but the immediate world knows who Marcia Brady is. When I read that Trump wrote of his pride in having appeared in Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, I recalled that in the scene where Kevin, played by McCauley Culkin, asked him where the lobby was, Trump, appearing as himself, pointed his finger and said, “Down the hall and to the left”. I had occasion to see that scene when Trump was campaigning in 2015 to be the worst president in our country’s history, after Marco Rubio had made fun of Trump’s “small hands.” Rubio was of course insinuating they were a sign that Trump had another “small” body part (a fact that was confirmed by porn star Stormy Daniels in her book about her affair with Trump). I couldn’t help but notice his small hand and stubby finger. Hmmm. As it turns out, Trump’s movie career and television career (as illustrious as he thinks it was) only existed because he demanded that he be given a cameo in every movie a director wanted to film at one of his properties. (Many of those went bankrupt and were eventually sold, but never mind that.) I don't know why Trump's performance in Home Alone 2 was snubbed by the Academy, which instead honored Al Pacino with an Oscar for playing an alcoholic blind man who could dance the tango in Scent of a Woman. But to my surprise, I later learned that Trump himself was actually in a scene in Scent of a Woman, which he didn't mention in his letter to SAG-AFTRA. Knowing Trump, the snub by the Academy couldn't possibly have wounded him as much as the cut inflicted by Martin Brest, the director of Scent of a Woman, who literally cut Trump's scene with Al Pacino out of the movie. Brest needed a permit to film at one of Trump's properties, and issuance of the permit was conditioned upon Trump's demand that he appear as himself in a cameo, and that Pacino say, “Hello, Mr. Trump. (It was very important that his name be mentioned.) Actor Matt Damon later revealed that Brest and the crew knew ahead of time that they were going to take an hour, film Pacino saying “Hello, Mr. Trump”, so they could get the permit and then cut the scene. “Hoo Ah.” Apparently, in his letter to SAG-AFTRA, Trump also forgot to mention that his scene in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, was also cut by director Oliver Stone, because of his “absurd” demands. Among Trump’s requests, received on the first morning of shooting, was that he be filmed “under warm golden lighting” to accentuate his “warm golden skin” and “defined jaw line.” He demanded that the cinematographer “shoot Trump face to camera,” to avoid his left hair part, and he requested his own monitor, so he could see himself. (“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”) But the Trump scene that bothers me the most is a scene that was not cut. When Trump had a small part in 1996 in one of my favorite shows, The Nanny, he insisted on a line referring to him as a millionaire to a billionaire be changed. Of course, it’s very possible that at that time, he was neither. Trump ended his “you can’t fire me, I quit” letter to Carteris, with a not-so-surprising "I no longer wish to be associated with your union. As such, this letter is to inform you of my immediate resignation from SAG-AFTRA. You have done nothing for me." The Actors Guild responded to Trump with a crisp two-word letter: “Thank you.” Several days later, on February 6, the SAG-AFTRA board announced that they passed a resolution denying any potential readmission applications by Trump. "Preventing Donald Trump from ever rejoining SAG-AFTRA is more than a symbolic step," said Guild president Carteris. "It is a resounding statement that threatening or inciting harm against fellow members will not be tolerated. An attack against one is an attack against all." The SAG-AFTRA’s board did something that the Senate impeachment proceedings weren’t able to do. They got him to quit! I long to hear Trump say those words (or preferably put them into a letter), so I can say, THANK YOU, Mr. Trump!!!!! Although the twice-impeached-but-never-convicted former president is convinced that his greatest screen achievements are what he bragged about in his letter to SAG-AFTRA, he will FOREVER be remembered for his starring role in the videos shown by the House Managers at his trial. Those will be a part of our nation's history, unedited. (Oops, he wasn't filmed using "warm golden lighting" to accentuate his "warm golden" skin and "defined jaw" in the videos of him telling a mob to march to the Capitol Building to Stop the Steal...) Merrill Lynn Hansen is a legal assistant, living in West Bloomfield, Michigan. She describes herself as a frustrated writer, who wishes she could be Nora Ephron (when she was alive), if only for a day. She is a news-, political- and FB-junkie, a combination that requires a constant reminder that she needs to take deep cleansing breaths when responding to people who don't agree with her.

By Jessie Seigel / Washington, D.C. Maybe it was the sight of Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri ostentatiously putting his feet up on his desk in the gallery of the Senate, in an immature display of “you can’t make me take this crap seriously.” Or maybe it was hearing one too many disingenuous legal arguments that really suggested the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have minded if Donald Trump had invited the Proud Boys and their friends to come to Washington, D.C. on January 6 to tear up the Capitol and kill a police officer. But for whatever reason, by Friday, day four of the impeachment trial, Lead Democratic House Manager Jamie Raskin had clearly had enough. Raskin, never at a loss for an elegant turn of phrase, instead delivered some blunt talk to his recalcitrant GOP counterparts. “Come on, get real,” he demanded from the podium. “We know that this is what happened,” And he was right. Everyone knows that Donald Trump summoned a mob and sicced them on the Congress to block the counting of electoral votes so that he could remain in office despite losing the election. And if Trump’s mob murdered his Vice President and the entire legislative branch of our government, so much the better. It was the incitement of a coup in plain view. The entire Congress lived it, and anyone with a television was able to see it as it happened. If it had succeeded, democracy in this country would now be dead as well. But heaven forfend that the Republicans as a party show one ounce of honesty, integrity, or honor. On Saturday, with 67 votes (two-thirds of the Senate) needed to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors based on his incitement of insurrection, only seven Republicans found the conscience and courage to vote with the Democrats for conviction. Forty-three Republican senators looked the other way and voted to acquit, leaving the final tally at 57 to 43. A clear majority, but that vote and 10 cents won’t buy you a cup of coffee in the Congressional cafeteria. Never before have I seen such a parcel of rogues in our nation. (And I’ve seen the Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Administrations in action.) Chief among rogues: Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Machiavelli supreme, the master of bait and switch. As Senate Majority Leader during the Trump Administration, McConnell single-handedly prevented the Senate from conducting a trial while Trump was still in office, and then had the chutzpah to vote that trying Trump after he left office was unconstitutional—a state of affairs McConnell deliberately created. That same Senate vote—which went against McConnell—determined that this impeachment trial was constitutional, a final decision that the senatorial jury was bound to accept. Nevertheless, McConnell used his stance that it was not constitutional as his excuse to vote for acquittal, placing his own “judgment” above the law—his personal form of jury nullification. Some might say McConnell’s was only one vote, but as the leader of his party, he holds tremendous sway over his members; wherever he leads, most will follow. Pretending to be undecided on the facts, McConnell told his members they were free to vote their conscience. But 42 of them preferred following McConnell’s lead, as opposed to investigating whether they themselves actually have a conscience. And McConnell’s hanging his vote on an alleged legal technicality gave his members an out to do the same. After the vote falling short of conviction was completed, McConnell added insult to injury, giving an extensive speech on the Senate floor in which he agreed that the House Managers had proved their case that Trump incited the insurrection, enumerated some of the horrors perpetrated in the Capitol attack, and suggested Trump could still be charged with a crime. McConnell stated that Trump was practically and morally responsible for provoking the invasion of the Capitol and called his actions a disgrace. If hypocrisy were a liquid, McConnell and his Republican cohorts would be drowning in it. As Ralph Ellison famously wrote in Invisible Man, “The end was in the beginning.” The Republican senators, led by the Hypocrite-in-Chief, dropped worrisome signs like breadcrumbs from the very beginning of the trial, leaving hints that their unquestioning fealty to the President was going to be an insurmountable obstacle for the House Democrats, no matter their legal skills, their rhetorical gifts or video dexterity. But the trial week, as recounted in this daily diary, was an up-close-and-personal history lesson for the American people, who can be forgiven for wondering if they are in any shape, after the pandemic, brutal economic times, and having to put up with Donald Trump for the past four years, to weather any more red-letter dates. MONDAY—Anticipation One would expect universal agreement that attempting a coup—as in instigating a mob attack on Congress while they are in the middle of counting electoral votes, in order to stop their count and keep your legitimately elected opponent from taking office—qualifies as a “high crime” in a democracy. So it was hardly a surprise that on January 13, the House of Representatives impeached then-President Donald Trump—who had done just that—for inciting violence against the government of the United States. But now, enter from stage right: politics. It has been commonly assumed that the Democrats won’t be able to wring from their Republican colleagues the two-thirds Senate majority needed to convict Trump. Based on this widespread assumption and the notion that the trial therefore has only symbolic value, some reporters pressed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week: why bother to go through the exercise? The Speaker’s indignant answer: “Why bother? Ask our founders why bother. Ask those who wrote the Constitution…ask anyone who cares about our democracy why we are bothering…Our founders were fearful of a demagogue—a demagogue and a mob.” Pelosi added that it can’t be known what the Senate will do when they have not yet heard the case, and that the House impeachment managers, acting as the prosecution, will present their case in both the court of the Senate and the court of public opinion. Then, said Pelosi, “We’ll see if it is going to be a Senate of courage or of cowardice.” I’m with Nancy. I am a lawyer. I became a lawyer because of a love for our democracy, and a belief in the pursuit of justice regardless of any and all odds against it. I believe that win or lose, Donald Trump’s impeachment trial will be pivotal in determining whether, a few years hence, we will still have a democracy. But more than that, even if Republican craven cynicism wins out and prevents a conviction—maybe even because of that possible result—it is necessary that we stand up as a nation for what is true and what is right. Tomorrow, Trump’s trial in the Senate begins, and we will see what the senators are made of. TUESDAY—From the Sublime to the Ridiculous Today was supposed to be spent in dry legal argument on the constitutionality of the impeachment and the Senate trial. Instead, we were treated to a beautifully cogent and moving presentation by the House Managers, and utter buffoonery by Trump’s defense team. Lead House Manager Jamie Raskin, and fellow House Managers Joe Neguse, and David Cicilline, presented facts, law, and a 13-minute video of the attack on the Capitol more chilling than any I had seen on the news. The video not only showed more of the attack, but showed it close up, making us feel like we were in the middle of that claustrophobic mass of bodies pressing together and pressing forward against a pitiful number of Capitol police. We could also hear oh-so-distinctly the bloodcurdling chants of the marauders as they hunted down representatives and senators, as well as the screams of a policeman trapped and crushed in a doorway. Citing numerous precedents and analyses by conservative constitutional scholars, the House Managers argued persuasively that an impeached official can be tried after he or she has left office. They argued that refusing to try Trump for his actions would create a brand new “January exception” to the Constitution, inviting a president to do anything he wants on the way out the door, including “lock that door” to keep power. In his closing argument, Raskin quoted a speech in which Abraham Lincoln said, “If division and destruction ever come to America, it won’t come from abroad. It will come from within.” Raskin added that in that same speech, Lincoln passionately deplored mob violence and mob rule, saying that it would lead to tyranny and despotism in America. Jamie Raskin also spoke poignantly of his personal experience during the attack, of his youngest daughter and his older daughter’s husband, who came to the Capitol to keep him company after the burial of his son the day before, and to watch him give a speech. She asked first, will it be safe, in view of the expected protesters? Raskin told them that of course it would be safe. They’d be inside the Capitol. Raskin spoke of how they had been separated, his daughter and son-in-law forced to shelter in House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office while he was in the House chamber, unable to get to them. Later, when reunited, Raskin said, he told his daughter how sorry he was and promised that “it would not be like this again, the next time she came back to the Capitol with me.” He said she replied, “Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol.” Raskin began to break into tears as he stated his daughter’s response, but regathered himself quickly. It was clear that the tears were not only in memory of that immediate situation and his daughter’s feeling, but what her response signified about the stain on our democracy. On the other side, Trump’s two attorneys, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, acted out an inept imitation of the “good cop-bad cop” scenario. Speaking first, Castor tried to be ‘folksy,” at best a poor man’s version of Andy Griffith’s Matlock. Castor spent most of his allotted time in idiotically transparent flattery of the senators, and puerile meanderings about passion not overtaking reason and that impeachment, trial and conviction may result in political pressure to respond in kind. Schoen, the “bad cop,” presented his defense with a fury. He tried to blur the distinction between impeachment and trial, arguing that because Trump is out of office, impeachment occurred too late. However, impeachment, as opposed to the trial, occurred while Trump was still in office. Then, contrariwise—as Tweedledum might say, or was it Tweedledee?—Schoen also argued that the House rushed to impeach too soon, without investigation and hearings, thus denying Trump due process of law. However, impeachment is akin to indictment. You get your due process—your chance to launch your defense—not before indictment but at trial. The Trump defenders also deliberately misrepresented the position of legal scholar Brian Kalt, making it seem as though Kalt’s writings supported their position that you can’t try a president pursuant to impeachment after he’s left office. But Kalt actually had set out that position in order to argue against it. As if to copy Raskin, Schoen ended his presentation quoting Lincoln and sniffing back tears. But the quote Schoen chose was a banal truism, and his tears were over Longfellow’s overly sentimental poem, “The Building of the Ship.” Meanwhile, it was reported that throughout the House Managers’ presentation, certain Republican senators were deliberately refusing to pay attention. Apparently, during the video presentation, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and some others studiously shuffled through notes, stared at their shoes, or otherwise deliberately avoided looking at the screen. This made today’s presentation by the House Managers rather like the proverbial throwing of pearls before swine. Nevertheless, constitutionality of the trial on its merits was upheld by a vote of 56 to 44. Only six Republicans voted with the Democrats, but that was one more—Bill Cassidy of Louisiana—added to a small group that might judge the merits of the case with open minds. Cassidy said he had been convinced by the relative quality of the legal arguments. WEDNESDAY—The Case Against Donald J. Trump: The Facts Today, the House Managers set out a chronology of Trump’s perfidy that is overwhelming. It spans months, with words and deeds calculated to keep him in power whether he won or lost the 2020 election. The recitation of his manipulations is so complex and runs so deep that it is almost impossible to encompass it all. But here goes: The Set Up: As early as the summer of 2020, Trump began selling his supporters the lie that he could only lose if the coming election was rigged. This became louder and more strident as the election season progressed. In July, when the President had fallen 15 points behind in the polls, he not only refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost to Joe Biden, he claimed “the ballots are a disaster” and said, “…there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.” By Any Means Necessary: On election night, when the vote tally began turning against him, Trump directed his supporters to “stop the count.” They followed his direction, menacing election vote counters in several states. Trump tried to pressure state legislatures and election officials in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, to change the vote count or how they chose their electors, in order to ensure he received their Electoral College votes. He even applied pressure as low as local election boards. An avalanche of lawsuits were filed on Trump’s behalf to challenge the election results. Of 61 suits, all but one were thrown out of court as frivolous and/or without merit. Even in that one, the court found that any change in the votes resulting from it would not change the election result. Trump moved on, threatening various state and election officials with criminal prosecution if they did not “find” him votes and trying to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence into decertifying votes and sending the process back to the states. Because Pence had no legal power to do so, he refused. When Trump ran out of nonviolent legal and illegal avenues, he activated his violent followers. He had already primed the pump. In the September 29 presidential debate, Trump told the Proud Boys, a militant white supremacist organization, to “stand back and stand by.” They stood by all right; one Proud Boys group went into action for him on January 6, leading the attack on the Capitol. Between December 14, when the Electoral College counted votes, and January 6, when Congress assembled to certify those votes, Trump spent $50 million from his defense fund for ads to “Stop the Steal,” which ran up to the day before Congress met. Trump persistently tweeted messages like “Big protest in D.C. January 6. Will be wild.” The original organizers of the January 6 rally at the Ellipse had no permit to march to the Capitol. It was only when Trump got involved in planning the rally, that the plan to march on the Capitol (minus any permit) was developed. The House Managers pointed out that the White House was actively monitoring the exact websites where insurrectionists placed their posts. Thus, Trump and his operation were aware of who was coming to his rally and with what intention. The night before the attack, Trump tweeted: “I hope the Democrats and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO [Republicans in Name Only] section of the Republican party are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C. They won’t stand for a landslide election victory to be stolen.” This was a threatening warning. The Attack: House Manager Stacey Plaskett presented a blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute account of the attack on the Capitol, both inside and outside the building. Her presentation showed how it progressed in real time: frantic audio of Capitol police communications as they were being overrun and they called—fruitlessly—for aid; video of the vast horde the Capitol police faced, as well as the beating of a Capitol officer as viewed from his body-cam. The actions of the Capitol Police during this onslaught give true meaning to the words “stand your ground.” Facing overwhelming odds, the officers endured horrific violence but continued to protect the Capitol and the members of Congress against the insurgents for hours. Plaskett presented video showing how close in time (minutes) and geography (some 100 feet) a lynch mob came to where Pence—a particular target—was hiding with his family. Likewise, House and Senate members escaped only moments before their chambers were overrun. Affidavits later produced by law enforcement revealed that the marauders acknowledged they were looking for Pence to execute him and for Pelosi to put a bullet in her head. But they also would have killed anyone they found. Trump’s Response During the Attack and After: Trump watched it all on TV. But for those needing help at the Capitol, Trump had no response and nothing to say. He never said, “Stop the attack.” He refused to call in the National Guard. Trump turned a deaf ear to calls from besieged senators and congressmen trying to contact him for help, as well as members of his own staff begging him to call off his mob. But to Trump’s supporters—his white supremacists, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other domestic terrorists who were attacking the Capitol? To them, he tweeted more attacks on Pence, who his acolytes were, even then, hunting down to murder. He retweeted his instigating rally speech. He tweeted more incendiary messages, disingenuously ending them with “stay peaceful” or “remain peaceful.” Trump made calls to newly installed Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, whom the President had supported in his contentious campaign, asking him to make additional objections to certification even while the Senate was being evacuated. Finally, Trump tweeted to his followers a message really meant, in Capone-style fashion, as an I-told-you-what-I’d-do message to his opponents: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love and Peace. Remember this day forever.” Trump’s every action demonstrated that he deliberately planned his incitement as a last stopgap effort to keep power. It is clear that, in inciting this insurrection and certainly in refusing to defend Congress, Trump violated his oath under Article II of the Constitution “to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.” And how did the 44 Republicans who voted not to have a trial react to the House Managers’ presentation? Josh Hawley sat in the gallery throughout, putting his feet up on the chair in front of his desk and ostentatiously going through paperwork to make a show of his determination not to listen to any of it. Lindsey Graham tweeted that “most Republicans found the presentation by the House Managers offensive and absurd.” Offensive? I guess in Graham’s mind, committing offensive action is fine, inciting murder is fine, attempting a coup is fine—it is only the exposure of any of that which is “offensive.” I will grant it unlikely that any amount of evidence will be accepted by senators who appear to have decided how they will vote before the trial even began—Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Josh Hawley, and maybe Tommy Tuberville, or Rand Paul. But that leaves 37. Will there be not even 17 among the 37 left who have some honesty and integrity in them? Who will care more for saving democracy than for their own petty power? THURSDAY—The Case Against Donald Trump: The Law Today, in a preemptive move, necessary because they will not have an opportunity for rebuttal apart from closing statements, the House Managers laid out a legal analysis of the arguments Trump’s defense team, based on their brief, will likely make. Lead House Manager Jamie Raskin reminded the Senate jurors that the issue of whether the trial is constitutional had been decided finally and without appeal by the Senate’s Tuesday vote; any return to it would not only be frivolous and wrong, but irrelevant to the jury’s consideration of the case. In three cogent arguments, Raskin and House Manager Joe Neguse easily refuted the defense team’s anticipated First Amendment argument that Trump’s speech at his June 6 rally was political speech and that, like any ordinary citizen, he has a right to say whatever he wants. First, they pointed out that the First Amendment right to free speech is not an issue in this case. At issue is whether Trump’s speech violated the oath he took—written into Article II of the Constitution—to faithfully execute his office and “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” They argued that Trump’s months spent using his presidency to spread his Big Lie, his incitement of insurrection, and his refusal to protect Congress, a coequal branch of government from the onslaught he had caused, broke that oath. Raskin stressed that public servants are not the masters of the people. The people are their masters. But that means little if a president, attempting to stay in power, can “ignore the courts and run over the legislative branch with a mob.” As Raskin said, quoting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, “You don’t get to ride with the cops and root for the robbers.” Second, nobody has a First Amendment right to incite a riot. And finally, the House Managers noted that Trump’s incitement was aimed to interfere with their free speech rights. They were sent to Congress to represent the views of the people, and Trump forced them to stop debating, stop speaking, and run for their lives. The House Managers also made short shrift of the likely defense that Trump was denied due process. Impeachment is akin to indictment. While opportunity for an accused to speak may be provided, that is a privilege, not a right. They stated that Trump is receiving all the process he is due in the Senate trial. The House Managers pointed out that the House did not, as the defense team’s brief suggested, delay in delivering the impeachment document to the Senate. Rather, Mitch McConnell recessed the Senate, refused to bring that body back into session to receive the impeachment document and proceed to trial, and had the Senate inform the House that if a clerk of the House tried to deliver that document, he or she would be turned away at the door. If it weren't for McConnell, the trial could have been conducted and likely concluded while Trump was still in office. The House Managers pointed out that Trump’s willful encouragement of violence was part of an established pattern: (1) Trump saw that the groups he was mobilizing had committed violence before; (2) at his many rallies from 2015 on, he urged his supporters to be violent, saw how his incitement electrified them, and explicitly sanctioned rally violence after it occurred; (3) Trump encouraged violence against other public officials, specifically attacking Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and increasing his vitriolic barrage even after the plot to kidnap and kill her became public. Noting the similarities, the House Managers suggested that the siege of Michigan’s state Capitol was a road test for storming the nation’s Capitol. In addition, Trump never once condemned the attack, showed any remorse, or took any responsibility for it. He repeatedly referred to his various actions, including those on January 6, as totally “appropriate.” Trump ended a long tweet posted the day after the attack with: “And to all of my wonderful supporters. I know you are disappointed, but I also want you to know that our incredible journey is only just beginning.” If Trump considers his attempted coup appropriate, and this is only the beginning of his journey, he will have no qualms about trying it again. As House Manager Ted Lieu said, “I’m not afraid Donald Trump is going to run again. I’m afraid he’s going to run again and lose. Because he’s going to do this again.” The House Managers enumerated future dangers created by the attack. The various extremist groups—many of whom are on the terrorist watch list—may be forming alliances through their coordination of this siege. Materials were stolen—laptops and documents that could endanger national security. Intelligence agencies will have to investigate what was taken and what might have been done with it. Foreign adversaries were able to see a trial run of how easily they could attack the Capitol. And our adversaries, like Russia and China, are already using the event for anti-democratic propaganda purposes. But what one would expect to be of most intimate concern for the Senate jurors is their own near deaths by mob. If the attackers had succeeded, not only would they have murdered the three people directly in line to succeed to the presidency (Pence, Pelosi, and Leahy), they could have murdered the entire Congress. Well, except maybe for Hawley, Cruz, Marjory Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, and a few others—assuming, despite the heat of the moment, they recognized them. The insurgents would have physically destroyed our democracy. The House Managers have raised this concern in indirect language, and I can understand that no one wants to say the extreme unthinkable out loud. But there is a part of me that wishes they would turn to the Republican senators, look them straight in the face, and say: “The mob was not just coming for us. The mob was going to kill you. Are you going to give Trump a chance to do that again?” Raskin closed the day, stating that in the history of humanity, democracy is rare and fragile. That for most of history, the norm has been dictators, autocrats, bullies, and tyrants that take over the world. With joy in his face and his voice, Raskin said that the very first Article created by the Constitutional Convention—Article I—states that the sovereign power of the people is deposited in the Congress. Not the presidency. The Congress. The president’s core job is to faithfully execute the laws the Congress passes. He added that our Founding Fathers were so fearful of presidents becoming dictators that they put the oath to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution in the Constitution itself. The interests of the people are what count. Raskin left the senators with the words from Tom Paine’s “American Crisis” (updating the quote slightly at Speaker Pelosi’s suggestion): “These are the times that try men’s and women’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink at this moment from the service of their cause and their country; but everyone who stands with us now, will win the love and the favor and affection of every man and every woman for all time. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; but we have this saving consolation: the more difficult the struggle the more glorious in the end will be our victory.” Raskin then wished the senators good luck in their deliberations. Let us hope they take Thomas Paine’s words to heart while they do. FRIDAY—The Defense of a Demagogue The trampling of the rule of law by the Trump legal team and Trump supporters in the Senate should not, I suppose, surprise or shock me. But the fact that last night, three senatorial jurors met with the defense team, most likely on strategy, is so totally outrageous that it makes me sick. Even though no better than that could be expected from the likes of Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee. And where did their Senate leader, Mitch McConnell stand on this? McConnell, who prevented a trial from taking place while Trump was in office, but voted on Tuesday that this trial is unconstitutional because Trump has left office—and then seemed to turn around, telling his caucus to vote their conscience on the facts. Except for that statement, McConnell has remained almost as silent as the Sphinx throughout the trial, and certainly as inscrutable. One must wonder what he might be up to behind the scenes. Were Graham, Cruz, and Lee given the nod to step in and instruct the totally-out-of-their-depth defense counsel in Republican attack techniques? In any event, the tutorial from the Graham-Cruz-Lee school of lawyering must have worked. Today, rather than defend their client, the defense team went on the offensive, using the usual Trumpian tactic of projecting one’s actions and motives onto one’s opponents. So they repeatedly claimed that the impeachment has been political revenge by House Managers and Democrats who hate Trump; used a look-over-there-what-about-them strategy, showing video of violence at civil rights demonstrations over the summer juxtaposed with Democratic politicians’ statements in support of demonstrators; and again and again played an overly long video showing Democratic politicians speaking the word “fight”—some at rallies, some apparently in their own living rooms—often taking them out of context in order to make it appear that they were advocating violence. Their point: they were only arguing that Trump, like these officials, has a right to free speech. But context is everything. Proximity in time and location are essential to incitement. Those Democrats in the defense’s video were not addressing audiences armed with guns and bats and other weapons, and they did not point to a government building where the business of the people was taking place and send those armed people to that building with their weapons. Not to mention that none of the Democrats in the video did more than speak—let alone spend $50 million to bring rioters to the Capitol. And none of the statements in the video resulted in a riot. The defense team used another Trumpian tactic: the lying and twisting of facts. Trump attorney Michael van der Veen made the absurd claim that the first rioter arrested was a member of Antifa, but was released. Trump attorney David Schoen claimed that the House Managers kept the new, previously unseen videos secret until they presented them to the Senate, and so deprived the defense of an opportunity to review the videos for defense preparation. But under the rules set up for the trial, the defense did receive them prior to trial and had opportunity to review them. The defense also questioned how the House Managers got copies of the previously unseen videos when allegedly no one else did. They asked, why weren’t they released publicly? One might ask, why didn’t Trump release them? He was still president when rioters’ actions were caught on those videos. Could it be because he knew it would make him look bad? As for their actual legal arguments, the defense maintained that nothing in the plain text of Trump’s January 6 speech explicitly encouraged his audience to do anything but assert their rights peacefully and patriotically. Sticking with the Trumpian tradition—and frankly, the frequent Republican tradition—of accusing your opponent of what you yourself are doing, the defense said repeatedly, “We have reason to believe” the House managers manipulated evidence and their videos; “we have reason to believe” they presented manipulated tweets. Their evidence amounted to two possible small errors related to tweets, at least one of which the House Managers corrected before submission. They also played Trump’s blame game, arguing that the media’s negative coverage of security actions at the Lafayette Park demonstration last summer might have been responsible for there being less of a security presence at the Capitol in January. They tried to blame Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for not requesting the National Guard despite advance concern about trouble. But Mayor Bowser had no jurisdiction or power to request National Guard to protect federal property like the Capitol. When help was requested from D.C., it sent the District’s police to the Capitol’s aid. Indeed, at least 65 District police officers were injured protecting the Capitol. The defense claimed Trump is the most law-and-order president ever and played video of him repeatedly saying the words “law and order” to prove it. But if Trump was such a strong supporter of law and order and the men in blue, why didn’t he come to their aid? Why was it Mike Pence and not Trump who had to call in the National Guard to help them? The defense team argued that Trump was immediate in his call for calm, urging the rioters to stay peaceful and support the capitol police. But Trump was doing what he always does at his rallies. He stokes anger, rouses his audience to violent action (in prior rallies, it was against individuals in the crowd), and then adds some ameliorating phrases to provide himself with plausible deniability. The bottom line is, as the House Managers noted, when Trump wants something done, he states it clearly and loudly. He knows how to shout “Stop the count,” and “Stop the steal.” But rather than say “Stop the attack,” he expressed his vitriolic complaints and then ended, with the mild and inaccurate “stay peaceful.” (Inaccurate because you can’t “stay” peaceful, if you were never peaceful in the first place.) This was weak tea. Post Presentation Questioning by the Senators: Senators from each party alternated in asking questions. Republicans asked questions of the defense team and Democrats posed questions to the House Managers. For the most part, the questions appeared to be leading questions gauged to give the recipient an opportunity to remind the senators of the arguments they previously made or further hit home their points. The exception was a question posed by Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to the defense team. They asked, exactly when did Trump learn of the breach of the Capitol, what specific actions did he take to bring the rioting to an end, and when did he take them. They asked that the defense team please be as detailed as possible. Attorney Castor for the defense answered that he had no information to speak of, and tried to blame the House’s alleged rush to impeachment with no investigation into that matter. But this is information Trump would have had. The House Managers are not supposed to do the defense team’s work for them. Nor are they supposed to make Trump’s case for him. That is the job of his defense team. One hopes that Republican senators in addition to Collins and Murkowski take note of Castor’s disingenuous evasion of the fact that he has no answer. SATURDAY—The Verdict on Trump and the Verdict for the Nation Today, 57 senators voted to convict Donald Trump. Although this fell 10 votes short of the 67 (two-thirds) needed to convict Trump, seven Republicans—Richard Burr, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey—joined the Democrats, making up a bipartisan majority for conviction. Mitch McConnell voted against conviction. Then he stood on the Senate floor and presented his own very lengthy recitation whose contents would make you think he was giving the House Managers’ closing argument for them. Delivering his pronouncements in the tone of an indignant mortician, McConnell restated their facts and interpretations as if they were his own. He hit all their highlights from the various horrors perpetrated, to the attackers foreseeable belief that they were acting on Trump’s instructions to Trump’s guilty knowledge and intent, refusal to act, and endangerment of Mike Pence and the police. McConnell called Trump’s actions related to the riot a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” And he said, definitively: “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.” But be sure to note McConnell’s hedge: “practically and morally responsible.” No mention of legal responsibility. After reciting all the horrors Trump set loose, McConnell pretended he was a judicious statesman preserving the proper constitutional role of the Senate. He said oh-so-sincerely, “If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge.” McConnell then sententiously claimed the factual question of incitement was moot because: “Trump was the president when the House voted. Though not when the House chose to deliver the paper.” Of course, the House never “chose” when to deliver the paper. McConnell chose when they would be allowed to deliver it. To me, most insulting of all was McConnell saying “I believe the Senate was right not to grab power the Constitution doesn’t give us.” The Senate didn’t interpret its power in that way or make that decision. The Senate voted that the trial was constitutional. It was Mitch McConnell and his Republican minority that thwarted the constitutional power of the Senate. Later, the House Managers gave a press conference, stating that although the Senate did not convict, this had been the most bipartisan impeachment and trial in the our country’s history, and that a clear majority voted that Trump was guilty of incitement. Raskin noted that even Mitch McConnell had acknowledged that they made their case on the facts. They felt they had won in the court of public opinion and the court of history. In the midst of this muted victory lap, the House Managers were joined at the podium by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She would not ordinarily intrude on their press conference, she said, but she had to set the record straight. Clearly and rightly outraged by McConnell’s prevarication about the cause of the trial’s timing, Pelosi said of the impeachment document, “We’re told it could not be received because Mitch McConnell had shut down the Senate…For him to get up there and make this indictment against the president and say ‘I can’t vote for it because it’s after the fact’…the fact [is] that he established that it could not be delivered before the inauguration.” Both as a lawyer and as a layperson, I have been so impressed with the superb work done by all the House Managers. The outcome of the trial makes me think of Steven Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in which Webster, the world’s most eloquent lawyer, beats the devil by managing to find the remnant of decency in a jury of the damned. In this impeachment trial, the House Managers were far more eloquent than Webster ever could have been. But here, the damned stuck with the Devil. Jessie Seigel is a fiction writer, an associate editor at the Potomac Review, a reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books, and a dabbler in political cartoons at Daily Kos. She has twice received an Artist’s Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for her work. But, Seigel also had a long career as a government attorney, in which she honed her analytic skills. Of this double career, Seigel would say, “I guess my right and left brains are well balanced.” More on and from Seigel can be found at The Adventurous Writer, https://www.jessieseigel.com.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs The students of the great philosopher Aristotle walked alongside the master as he expounded his wisdom, thus becoming known as the Peripatetics, those who walked the pathways of Aristotle’s school. Fast forward 2,350 years, and I find myself peripatetically hanging on to the words of today’s great masters, this time on audiobook, while I circumambulate Central Park’s walkways on a daily reprieve from Covid-19 isolation. During these walks, I have been savoring the brilliance of today’s outstanding historians and their recent books that shine a new light on America’s complicated past. One of these wondrous masters is historian Martin Sherwin, professor of history at George Mason University. Prof. Sherwin is the world’s leading historian of the Atomic Age: the scientific development of the atomic bomb, its use against Japan, and its role during the Cold War. Forty-five years ago, Sherwin wrote a scintillating account of the diplomacy of the early phase of the nuclear era in The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance, renamed in later editions A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies. In 2005, Sherwin coauthored with Kai Bird the book American Prometheus, the definitive biography of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director at Los Alamos and “father of the atomic bomb.” Late last year, he published Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’ve logged dozens of hours on the three books, and have been utterly spellbound by Sherwin’s astounding capacity to understand historical events in the fullness of context: not only what happened, but what each participant understood about the events, and how and why crucial decisions that define our age actually came to be. Gambling with Armageddon is riveting: terrifying, fascinating, and often shocking. It tells the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, explaining the roots of nuclear brinksmanship back to 1945, and then describing the harrowing events during the crisis itself in October, 1962 on essentially an hour-by-hour basis. This story has never before been told with such depth of knowledge, breadth of historical understand, and sheer doggedness in tracking down the truth. I hung on every word for 18 hours and 50 minutes. You will too. As a virtuoso historian, Sherwin has a remarkable knack for compellingly letting us know that the past is not quite how we remember it. The problem is not about our forgetting what we knew or thought we knew; the problem is that we never knew the truth, not as events were unfolding, and not afterword, because truth is elusive, and deliberately hidden from view by crafty disguise, manipulation, confusion, and misdirection. I did not know until listening to Sherwin’s magnificent book how Adlai Stevenson, in October, 1962 played a powerful, perhaps decisive role in saving the world. Nor did I appreciate the important role of UN Secretary-General U Thant. John F. Kennedy, I am relieved to say, is also a hero of Sherwin’s account, a relief for me as a lifelong fan of JFK and the author of a book about JFK during 1963 (To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace, 2013). Our digital age offers not only the treat of such wonderful audiobooks, but also the chance to Zoom with the writers of these marvelous tomes. After listening to Sherwin’s books and those of several other historians, I decided to launch a book club and podcast this year to share the joy and wisdom of these marvelous writers. Later this month, on February 24, I will be discussing another new dazzling history, The Color of Law, written by Richard Rothstein. The author is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Rothstein’s book is captivating in its insights into America’s racist past. I thought I knew much of that history, but Rothstein takes our awareness and knowledge to a new level in his tour de force. Perhaps I’ll see you as a fellow peripatetic on the Central Park walkways listening to these mesmerizing books. If not in the Park, please join me in the online Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs in discussions with these amazing authors. Throughout the year, we’ll have a chance to listen to and converse with leading thinkers who are helping us understand our past and our way forward. Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor at Columbia University.

By Andy Borowitz February 11, 2021 WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senator Marco Rubio revealed on Thursday that he got his highest score ever on Candy Crush Saga during the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. The Florida lawmaker said that he has been playing the video game for years but had never been able to focus on it the way he has during the first two days of the trial. “Ever since the impeachment trial started, I’ve really been in the zone,” Rubio said. “Just totally locked into Candy Crush.” The Republican said that he hopes to surpass his best Candy Crush score when Trump’s defense attorneys start presenting their case, on Friday. “I’ll be able to concentrate on my game even better once the House managers stop playing those noisy videos,” Rubio said. “Bruce Castor is super easy to tune out.” Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

Another Shooting in the Middle of Fifth Avenue? By Alan Resnick I just prepared my lunch and am sitting down to watch the opening act of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. But I’m not entirely sure why I’m watching. I’m certainly not watching to determine Trump’s guilt or innocence. He planted the seeds for the January 6th insurrection even before he was elected, when he stated that the only way he could lose to Hillary Clinton was if the election were rigged. Many just attributed the comment to a massive insecurity complex or as a defense mechanism for protecting an outsized ego. But they were wrong. Trump revived this attempt to undermine our democracy even before Joe Biden was nominated as his opponent, and carried it through the campaign season, even after his electoral drubbing on November 3, Sixty meritless lawsuits later, he was still promoting the Big Lie that the election had been stolen. Trump continued his attacks on the integrity of the election in December via his Twitter account until it was mercifully deleted. And then Trump gave his final marching orders at his “Save America” rally on January 6th, the day the election results were to be certified. He referenced fighting multiple times during his speech, and invited the throng to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, claiming he would be there with him. (Of course, he did not march with the masses, choosing to watch the fire he had started burn on TV.) I’m also not watching because I’m interested in reliving the events of January 6th. I happened to be watching the certification of election results on that afternoon, simply because, even though it was just a formality, it was something that was not typically broadcast. And then a riot ensued, and I watched in horror and despair as the People’s House was attacked by fellow citizens. It is expected that there will be a heavy use of video clips from that day as part of the prosecution’s case. I have no need to see them again. And I’m not watching because I’m expecting Donald Trump to be convicted by the Senate of “incitement of insurrection,” as it certainly seems to be a done deal. On January 26, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky tried to force a vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial. His motion was killed by a 55-45 margin, meaning that 45 Republican senators had decided the trial was unconstitutional before it even began. Talk about spitting into the wind. In spite of all this, however, I will watch. At a minimum, it’s history. And it should be great political theater. Today’s hearings centered on the question of whether a president can, under the Constitution, be tried by the Senate after he has left office. In the opinion of almost every legal scholar, post-presidential impeachments and convictions are constitutional. There are nine impeachment managers, none of whom served in this role during the first trial. Nancy Pelosi has appointed Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who taught constitutional law for more than 25 years at American University, as the lead manager. He reportedly began drafting the articles of impeachment the morning after the January 6th insurrection, one week after the suicide of his son. I was hoping that Raskin would perform as admirably as Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor in the previous trial. Raskin opened and closed his team’s two-hour argument and he was spectacular – poised yet emotional, articulate, self-deprecating, and powerful. As expected, about 13 minutes of his opening presentation involved a video of the events of January 6th. It was chilling in its graphic depiction of the violence and the language of the rioters. I wished the broadcast I was watching had a split-screen display of the video and the senators’ reactions to it as it was playing, but no such luck. I wanted to know which senators were watching and engaged and which senators couldn’t or wouldn’t watch. I was particularly curious about what Trump acolytes like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, and Marco Rubio were doing while the video was shown. I was ecstatic when Congressmen Raskin posed one of the many questions I hoped would be raised during this trial: “If this wasn’t an impeachable offense, then what is?” Raskin’s closing was heart-breaking. He recounted returning to Washington for the election certification on January 6th, just a couple of days after burying his son. One of his daughters and his son-in-law accompanied him because they knew he was still emotionally raw. Prior to leaving, his daughter asked him if Washington would be safe that day, as she had read that Trump was holding a rally in the morning. Raskin assured them that it would be. But then the riot ensued and Raskin was separated from his daughter and his son-in-law, he on the floor of the House and they in a fellow representative’s office. When the insurrection had been quelled and they were reunited, Raskin told his daughter that this would not happen again when she returned to the Capitol. But his daughter told him she did not want to come back to the Capitol. His voice cracked as he detailed this story. The lawyers representing the President then had two hours to present their argument. Their defense can be boiled down to a simple phrase – “Yeah, so what?” Did Trump’s actions and words both before and on the day of January 6th incite an insurrection? Yeah, so what? He’s a private citizen now (even though he still demands he be referred to as the 45th president rather than the former president) and therefore can’t be held accountable. Did the President talk about the need to fight for freedom multiple times during his diatribe on the morning of January 6th? Yeah, so what? His political speech was protected under the First Amendment, he only mentioned fighting a few times, and he was speaking figuratively, not literally. The first lawyer to speak, Bruce Castor, spent almost 50 minutes in what can charitably be described as a rambling series of random thoughts. Trump’s other lawyer, David Schoen, used his time to make a fiery partisan speech and recite a poem by James Wadsworth Longfellow, which left him in tears. Both leaned and slouched on the podium as they spoke, much as their client did when he was in office. Perhaps this was some form of a shout-out to Trump or maybe it was a secret code. Then the senators voted. The vote was 56 to 44, with all 50 Democratic senators and six Republican senators agreeing that a trial would be constitutional. Even after that horrific video was played showing their workplace being stormed and ransacked, their colleagues and staff hiding under tables, police officers getting killed and speared with an American flag, 44 Republican Senators said: “Yeah, so what?” Only a simple majority vote was necessary. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators. That means another 11 Republican senators will have to be convinced to convict, after they’ve already in effect said that the trial is moot. And there’s no guarantee that those six Republican senators who said the trial was constitutional will vote to convict. Mitch McConnell, the hypocrite’s hypocrite, was one of the 44 senators to claim that the trial was unconstitutional now that Trump was out of office. Of course, he previously refused to have the case be heard by the Senate in January while Trump was in still office. And he later in the evening gave his blessing to his fellow Republican Senators to “vote their conscience.” What a mensch Mitch is. I ended the day simultaneously inspired and despondent. Jamie Raskin and his team left me with great hope for truth, justice, and the American way. And those 44 senators left me depressed and disgusted over their cravenness and timerity. I’m not sure how much I will watch of the actual trial. Republicans seem intent on sweeping this whole despicable episode in history under the rug as quickly as possible in the name of moving forward and unifying the country. Democrats want to move past this and get back to the business of trying to enact President Biden’s agenda. I want the impeachment managers to make their 16 hours of prosecution as personal and uncomfortable as possible for those 100 senators sitting in judgment. After all, those senators are in the unique position of being both jurors and witnesses. For example, I’d like the impeachment managers to ask senators to think about whether the riot would have occurred if someone other than Donald Trump incited the throng at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6th. Would the mob have stormed the Capitol if Donald Jr. gave the same speech? How about Rudy Guliani, with hair dye dripping down the sides of his face? Or how about Ivanka? I’d like the impeachment managers to ask the senators to think about how they would vote if the ballot was secret rather than public. I hope the impeachment managers asks the senators what takes priority, their sworn oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic, or furthering their own careers and winning their next election by not upsetting their voting base? I want the impeachment managers to challenge the senators to ask themselves if they will be able to look in a mirror, at their spouse or significant other, or at their children after they vote. I’d inquire as to how each senator would like to be remembered for their time in office. I’m also curious how Trump’s attorneys will use their 16 hours. Given yesterday’s presentation and the simplicity of the “Yeah, so what?” defense, it’s hard to imagine that their presentation will require more than a couple of hours. Perhaps they will spend the rest of the time telling stories or having Schoen recite more of Longfellow’s poems. I’m curious about more one more thing, although it won’t be brought up as part of the trial. I’m curious if Susan Collins, the Republican Senator from Maine, still believes that Donald Trump learned anything from his first impeachment. Alan Resnick is an industrial psychologist with over 40 years of professional experience. He and his wife are sheltering at home in Farmington Hills, Michigan. He is passing the time by cooking, exercising, catching up on friends’ recommendations of must-see TV and writing.

FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile in The New York Times on August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."

By Debra Turner Have you become a pandemic cook or baker during our year like no other? Me too!  Certainly we are not the only ones with countless hours at home, our social lives halted and restaurants unable to open as before. But at least one reality hasn’t changed: people still need eats and treats. So let’s grab the kitchen tools and make breakfast. I have a delicious recipe for cinnamon rolls that I’ll include below, but sometimes I don't think to start it the night before in order to eat cinnamon rolls for breakfast. That's where this recipe from Chef Frankie Celenza of Struggle Meals comes in as a delicious alternative! His recipe takes less time to render a delicious, hot gooey cinnamon pastry with cream cheese frosting. Instead of making homemade dough that rises overnight, and then again in the morning, day-old bread is cubed and baked crispy. Then you cook a simple vanilla custard to pour on top and bake it in a cast iron skillet until bubbly and brown in the oven. Following is Chef Frankie's recipe with my tweaks in red, lightening it up a tad. (I never have cream or cooking spray at home, so I make the substitutions typed in red. Feel free to make the dish his way or mine: Chef Frankie's Cinnamon Roll Casserole Ingredients: 12 ounces leftover bread (about 8 cups), cut into 1-inch cubes 3 cups whole milk – I substitute skim milk. 2 cups heavy cream - I substitute condensed milk. 1 cup light brown sugar - I use 1/2 cup brown sugar, since after you drizzle frosting on top at the end, it is sweet enough. 3 butter packets I omit the butter. Instead I butter the cast iron skillet for the butter taste. 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract 5 large eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup powdered sugar 4 ounces cream cheese, softened 2 butter packets - I omit the butter. I don't miss it in frosting drizzle. 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 3 tablespoons whole milk - I use skim milk. Directions: 1) Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Spray a 12-inch cast iron skillet with nonstick spray. I substitute butter to grease the pan. 2) Add bread cubes to the sheet pan and toast in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Remove and set aside. Turn the oven up to 350 degrees F. 3) Heat milk, cream, brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, salt and vanilla in a large saucepan on low, stirring until butter is melted and sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and cool slightly. 4) Transfer bread cubes to the prepared cast iron skillet. Whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Slowly drizzle the milk and cream mixture into the eggs, continuously whisking to temper the eggs so they don't coagulate. Pour the mixture over the bread. Press down on the bread to make sure it’s fully soaking in the liquid. Soak for 20 minutes. 5) Bake until the top is golden and pudding is set, 1 hour and 25-30 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature. 6) Combine the powdered sugar and cream cheese in a large bowl and stir well with a rubber spatula. Add the butter, vanilla, and whole milk and stir until smooth. There are 8 servings, and the recipe can easily be halved for smaller gatherings. When you think ahead, and feel like letting dough rise, here is my recipe for baking a batch of cinnamon rolls using the popular Sullivan Bakery no-knead method for baking a loaf of bread, as featured in the New York Times: Homemade Cinnamon Rolls Ingredients for the sweet dough: 3 cups all-purpose flour 1/4 teaspoon quick-rising yeast 2 tablespoons sugar (or honey) 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon of vinegar (helps dough to rise better) 1 1/3 cups of warm milk 3 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons vanilla Directions: 1) Put all the dry ingredients in a large wok (or mixing bowl if you don't own a wok). Stir together uniformly. 2) Beat the egg in a cup and add to the dry mixture. 3) Add the rest of the wet ingredients. Mix into a dough (using your hands if you wish). 4) Cover (I use the glass lid of a wok) and let it rise in a warm place (I put it inside my oven with just the pilot light) overnight, for about 12 hours. 5) After the dough has tripled in size, flour and oil your hands and the dough, so you can work with it. Turn it out on a floured cutting board. Roll it flat into a rectangular shape. Ingredients for the filling: 1 cup brown sugar 1 tablespoon cinnamon (Optional: nutmeg, ginger, allspice to taste, nuts; melted butter to brush rolled dough) Directions - continued: 6) Combine the brown sugar and spices in a bowl. 7) You can either brush a little butter on the rolled-out dough (or use water, if you don't want the calories. The butter will add flavor. Also, the filling will stay without moistening the dough, so you can skip this step, but a little butter on pastry will always improve the taste!) 8) Spread the filling evenly on the rolled-out dough, avoiding the very edges. 9) I like to break up a few pecans (or walnuts) and scatter them as part of my filling. 10) Roll the dough and fill up like a cigar--tight enough for it to hold together, but not too tight. If the dough sticks to the cutting board as you roll it up, simply scrape it gently with a spatula. 11) Next cut into 8 pieces with a sharp knife (or use dental floss). A trick is to cut the roll of dough in half, then cut the halves into halves until you get 8 even pieces. 12) Arrange them in an oiled cast iron skillet (or round baking pan). 13) Cover and let rise for 2 additional hours. 14) Bake in a preheated 350-degree F. oven for 30 minutes. 15) After the rolls are done, take them out of the oven and let them cool for at least 10 minutes. This is the time to make the frosting. Ingredients for frosting: 1 cup powder sugar 2 teaspoons vanilla 1 tablespoon milk 1 tablespoon of butter Directions - continued: 16) Using a fork or electric mixer, mix the ingredients into a smooth frosting and spread on top of the rolls. My family doesn't like super sweet pastry. We have trained our palates to like less sugar. However, you can always double or triple amount of frosting you make. Weekends during our pandemic go beyond Saturday and Sunday! Whether you feel like letting dough rise or make the less-fuss “casserole,” homemade cinnamon rolls are a treat at a family breakfast. You control the ingredients and know exactly what’s in it. You might like to take what you can’t finish home . Oh, that’s right--there’s no need to carry it home. Nowadays, we are always and forever at home. Debra Turner is a freelance writer and blogger. She contributes articles to The New York Post's City and Business sections and to other publications with a financial versus quality-of life-emphasis. She writes a lifestyle blog called The Savvy Shopper. With a focus on value, budget and smart decision-making, it covers Health, Beauty, Fashion, Food, Home and Entertainment. For over a decade, Turner worked in the editorial departments of Time, Fortune, Money, People and Real Simple, the Time Inc. consumer magazines, plus did a stint on the Warner side of Time-Warner, at Warner Bros. Inc, in the film publicity department, as well as at the record labels: Warner Bros. Records, Atlantic Records and Electra Records. Turner graduated summa cum laude from Bellarmine University with a B.A. in history, and was a congressional intern in Washington, D.C. for Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Lies Are More than Loony - They’re Lethal By Jessie Seigel / Washington, D.C. Nancy Pelosi said the “enemy is within the House of Representatives.” The Speaker is right. The House is riddled with coup-mongers and their seditious supporters, who are threatening both the lives of their colleagues and our democracy. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, promoter extraordinaire of QAnon conspiracy theories and practitioner of harassment and death threats—including language suggesting that Speaker Pelosi should be executed for treason—is supreme example No. 1. This week, Greene’s actions caught up with her. Despite a last-minute speech stating—without apology—that she no longer believes the lies she’s promoted in the past, the full House voted yesterday to boot her from the two committees—Education and Labor, and Budget—to which she had been assigned. The vote was 230 (including 11 Republicans) to 199. In her post-removal press conference on Friday, Greene swiveled at full tilt between playing the sweet, smiling suburban mother persecuted for old misunderstandings, the God-loving penitent, and the smugly defiant bully. At times her delivery sounded like she was a doppelgänger of Donald Trump, attacking reporters rather than answering their questions; suggesting, sour grapes-style, that because of the Democratic majority, being on the committees would have been wasting her time, while simultaneously claiming that being taken off the committees stripped her constituents of representation (untrue since Greene still can vote in the House); and interspersing her litany with barely disguised racist rhetoric. Her most telling comment, though, was in a tweet preceding the conference: “I woke up this morning literally laughing, thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving someone like me free time…Oh this is going to be fun.” One could almost see Greene her rubbing her hands together in villainous glee. Initially, when House Democrats demanded that House Republicans discipline Greene for her threatening behavior, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said only that he would talk to Greene privately about it. Whatever the feckless McCarthy said to Greene, it had no effect. She continued her belligerent stance. On Monday night, House Democrats gave Republicans an ultimatum: strip Greene of all her committee assignments within 72 hours or the Democrats would bring the issue to the House floor in a resolution. Republicans met, and not only determined not to remove Greene, but after she had spoken to them, gave her a standing ovation. This, while they considered removing Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership post for merely having the temerity and honesty to have voted for Trump’s impeachment. While Cheney was not removed, 61 of her Republican colleagues voted to do so. Furthermore, the vote on Cheney was by secret ballot. How brave the Republicans are when they can hide what they are doing. Since the Republican caucus refused to take responsibility for disciplining Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Democratic majority was forced to bring a resolution to the full House. While Republicans argued that this action would set a precedent for House majorities to remove minority members from committees at will, the Democrats pointed out that the real precedent is that anyone who threatens violence to other members of Congress must be held accountable. Many added that if a Democrat advocated murder of another member of the House, they would be the first to vote to remove them from committees and even expel them from the House. On Thursday, in a last-minute effort to sidestep the House vote, Greene presented a self-serving, self-pitying justification on the House floor, saying that the Democrats were planning to “crucify me in the public square for words that I said and regret, a few years ago.” She claimed that she had been misled by QAnon and stopped believing its lies in 2018. But Greene promoted such lies long after that, even posting on social media a photo of herself with an AR 15 assault rifle in front of images of Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Octavio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, with a caption stating she was the “Squad’s worst nightmare” as a campaign ad in 2020. Greene’s tepid attempt at a whitewash was further negated by her defiant tweet shortly before her appearance: “It’s not just me they want to cancel. They want to cancel every Republican. Don’t let the mob win.” Talk about projection. In the House debate on Greene’s fate, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland emphasized the seriousness of the issue at stake, presenting a poster of Greene’s photo showing her posed with the assault rifle next to images of the House’s progressive “Squad.” Addressing his GOP colleagues, Hoyer said, “When you take this vote, imagine your faces on this poster…Imagine it’s a Democrat with an AR-15. Imagine what your response would be.” Thursday evening, the House voted to remove Greene from all of her committees. The vote was 230 to 199. Only 11 Republicans voted with the Democrats for removal (Adam Kinzinger (Ill), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa), John Katko (NY), Fred Upton (Mi), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Carlos Gimenez (Fla), Chris Jacobs (NY), Young Kim (Calif.), Maria Elvira Salazar (Fla), Chris Smith (NJ), and Mario Diaz-Balart (Fla). Tellingly, Liz Cheney was not among them. Some have said that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a lunatic and an outlier. Because McCarthy did not rein her in, during the week before the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell uncharacteristically weighed in, saying that her “loony lies and conspiracy theories are a cancer for the Republican Party and our country” and that she is “not living in reality.” He suggested that her behavior interferes with the “robust debate on substance that can strengthen our party.” Of course, McConnell’s own contribution to “robust debate” is to squelch it when it comes from Democrats. The mainstream GOP’s real concern is optics. They don’t want the Marjorie Taylor Greenes to be the face of their party. They want them to stay hidden behind more respectable faces. In reply to McConnell, Greene posted on Twitter, “The real cancer for the Republican Party is weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully. This is why we are losing our country.” Greene is neither a lunatic nor an outlier. She is a cynical political operative who most likely does not believe any of the conspiracy theories she spouts, but is a natural at using The Big Lie, the same tactic used by Trump and fascists the world over. It does not matter how ridiculous the lie is so long as you repeat it over and over; the bigger the lie, the better. And if you are taken to task for the consequences of your lies, lie about your lying—and play the victim. Greene is not an anomaly either. She is emblematic of what the Republican party has become. Her response to the overture of Linda Beigel Schulman exposes Greene’s game. Schulman is the mother of Scott Beigel, a teacher who died protecting his students in 2018 against a mass shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla, In an interview last week on Weekends with Alex Witt, Schulman said that she had recently talked with Greene by Zoom. In their conversation, Schulman said she asked Greene, “Do you really believe that Parkland and Sandy Hook were false flags and staged?” (A “false flag,” a popular conspiracy term, is an act committed supposedly for one purpose, with intent to hide its true purpose and source.) Schulman reported that Greene’s unequivocal response was “No. I do not.” Schulman then asked Greene if she would come on air with her and make that statement publicly. Greene would not. Soon after, under pressure, Greene did an interview on the right-wing One America News Network, acknowledging that the murders were not false flags. Greene’s statement was clearly an effort to mitigate the damage Schulman’s account had done. In 2018 and 2019, before ever becoming a member of Congress, Greene endorsed the manufactured conspiracy theory of QAnon that the Democrats are part of a secret clique of child traffickers. Greene expressed support for the execution of prominent Democratic politicians, and “liked” a comment on her Facebook page suggesting a “bullet to the head” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And in a speech she posted on Facebook Live before going to Congress, Greene said Pelosi was “guilty of treason…a crime punishable by death.” In 2019, Greene also harassed David Hogg, a student survivor of the Parkland massacre. When Hogg, only 18 years old at the time, was in Washington, D.C., to advocate for gun control, a video showed that Greene followed him down a Capitol Hill street, calling to him that she carried a gun in her purse for her protection and accusing him of trying to take away her Second Amendment rights. Greene has claimed that the 2012 mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and at Hogg’s high school in Florida in 2018, as well as the 2017 killing of 58 people in Las Vegas, were hoaxes staged to turn people against Second Amendment rights. These denials of mass murder place Marjorie Taylor Greene in a league with Holocaust deniers. But that mindset should be of no surprise since Greene has also engaged in anti-Semitic slanders. The Jewish Journal reported in January that in 2018, Greene shared a video on Facebook that “advanced the ‘great replacement’ theory, which falsely alleges that Jews are conspiring to undermine white countries by bringing in nonwhite immigrants.” She has also used serpentine logic to advance the bizarre claim that a vice-chairman of Rothschild Inc. used Pacific Gas and Electric’s technology to beam down solar energy—a Rothschild-funded space laser—in order to cause the destructive California wildfires. Suggesting that the Rothschild family commits nefarious acts for profit is one of the traditional lies used to defame Jews. Furthermore, not only is Greene not an aberration, but her election was strongly supported by members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, including right-wing Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, one of the Freedom Caucus’s founding members. In fact, if one puts the bizarre quality of Greene’s’ provocative rhetoric to one side, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene share exactly the same goal—upending fair election results. Though the loss of her committee memberships has, for the moment, deprived Marjorie Taylor Greene of one of her platforms, she is not the only dangerous Republican insurrectionist in the House. At Trump’s infamous Save America Rally on January 6, the very day electoral votes were being counted, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama incited the crowd of thousands with the words, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass…Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?” Likewise, Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona traveled around the country for weeks after the election, promoting the coming Trump rally and other such events at least a dozen times, repeatedly calling Biden an “illegitimate usurper” and claiming that Trump was the victim of an attempted “coup.” (Republicans never seem to tire of accusing their opponents of what they themselves are actually doing.) At one rally in Phoenix, Gosar had delivered a call for action, telling the crowd that they planned to “conquer the Hill” to save Trump’s presidency. By some reports, Gosar has had connections to the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing extremist organization, which claims, based on conspiracy theories, that the federal government is trying to destroy Americans’ liberties. Moreover, the New York Times reported that Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado also has close connections to militia groups, including the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia movement that advocates gun ownership and resistance to the federal government. On the day of the Capitol attack, Boebert encouraged the mob by posting, “Today is 1776” on her Twitter feed, a clear call for rebellion. She also reportedly tweeted about Speaker Pelosi’s movements during the attack. When, after the failed insurrection, metal detectors were installed outside the House chamber and Boebert set off one of them, she refused to let her bag be searched. Given that she had previously advertised her plan to carry a Glock in the District, this was threatening behavior. While House Republicans continue to side with these extremists actively, by silence, or by trying to dismiss their actions and “move on,” House Democrats are taking these anti-democratic dangers seriously. On MSNBC’s Politics Nation, several days before the vote on Greene, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said that if House Minority Leader McCarthy did not change course (which clearly McCarthy did not) the House would “look at the actions of every single one of these House Republican seditionists who are responsible for providing aid and comfort to the insurrection.” Dealing with Greene was a good start. The rest must be investigated and held accountable as well. The Senate also seems to have its share of Republican seditionists. Seven Senate Democrats have filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee requesting an investigation of Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley under the Senate Code of Official Conduct. That Code states senators must “put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department.” Cruz and Hawley not only objected to the counting of Electoral College votes, but maintained those objections even after the attack on the Capitol, thus perpetuating the stolen election lie and adding to a perception that the insurrectionist cause was legitimate. The complaint emphasizes that Cruz and Hawley likely knew the stolen election claims were false even while they were publicly legitimizing them. The complaint also states that Cruz and Hawley not only raised funds based on their efforts to challenge the count of electoral votes within the few days and even hours before the vote—they solicited funds during and after the insurrection. Hawley’s campaign even sent a text message after the Capitol had been breached stating he was “leading the charge to fight for freedom and fair elections.” Although objections to the counting were within a senator’s rights, the other actions of Cruz and Hawley raise disturbing questions about their possible connection to the attacks. It is heartening that both House and Senate Democrats are taking action. But the public statements of many Democratic lawmakers, particularly those in the Senate, as well as some liberal commentators, have still too often sounded like they were pleading with Republicans to do the right thing, framing the situation as one in which the Republicans need to make a choice about what and who they are. However, with very few exceptions, it is clear that the Republicans have already made that choice a thousand times over during the last four years. The Democrats need to stop behaving publicly like they are in denial about it. The effort to upend democracy is well in progress. A war is being waged here on numerous fronts. And though action—legal, nonviolent action—is of the greatest importance, words and their tone are also a necessary form of battle. For truth to prevail and democracy to survive, the public needs less reticent decorum and more straight talk. Our leaders need to call out fascism wherever it shows its ugly, dangerous face, and expose it however it tries to hide. Jessie Seigel is a fiction writer, an associate editor at the Potomac Review, a reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books, and a dabbler in political cartoons at Daily Kos. She has twice received an Artist’s Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for her work. But, Seigel also had a long career as a government attorney, in which she honed her analytic skills. Of this double career, Seigel would say, “I guess my right and left brains are well balanced.” More on and from Seigel can be found at The Adventurous Writer, https://www.jessieseigel.com.