Friday open thread: Ecce homo

Behold the man.

This petulant, cowering fool is the person to whom millions pledge their fealty. He is their messiah, their scourged savior. This imbecile, this craven buffoon called on thousands to overtake the Capitol and attempt to thwart the will of the voters. 

I often wonder at how people are swayed by men like Donald Trump. How they follow leaders who offer nothing positive, who offer only hatred and grievance. Rather than rectifying what is wrong in their souls, they lash out and latch on to demagogues who promise to punish those they think have wronged them, who have taken away what they know in their bones belongs to them.

With very few exceptions, those who serve in the Republican Party are all cowardly, yellow, gutless. They bray about war and battle; but as we've seen with Steve Bannon at his trial for contempt of Congress, they fold like cheap suits when faced with force and resolve.

At yesterday's hearing we saw cosplay warriors bragging in obscene terms that they had taken the Capitol. There they were, in their fatigues, in their helmets, acting as if they were the Visigoths in the Forum Romanum. When the fact is that when the Guard moved in with flashbangs and tear gas, they all scattered like the pathetic cretins they are and will always be. They came from nothing, they made nothing of themselves, and they will die as nothing, forgotten by a world which has moved on.

Trump, however, won't be forgotten. He'll be remembered as this nation's greatest traitor. He will displace Benedict Arnold and Robert E. Lee from that perch. And he will be remembered as this nation's most pathetic citizen, a man who had every advantage in life but was consumed by so much self-hatred that he had to inflict it on all Americans. In any decent society he would have been relegated to a psychiatric hospital. But in ours, he was born on 3rd base and thought he'd hit a triple. 

These are not people to fear. These are people to crush politically so that they never again endanger this Republic. The emperor has no clothes, and his followers are likewise naked and afraid.

This is your open thread.