Is it time yet?

Can we go ahead and replace the Constitution with the Communist Manifesto now or do we have to wait for Biden to be sworn in?

And, he's off

There is zero chance that a single one of Ted Cruz's stated reasons for doing what he is doing has anything to do with fairness, justice, constitutional democracy or anything else he was elected to protect and defend. 

What we have here is the first day of the 2024 campaign.  Cruz is rounding up the stray Proud Boy cattle.  Trump will be crying about the election for the next four years until everyone with a brain is sick of him or he will be dead.  He will be no use to his the white core of his constituency.  Someone has to pick up the mantle and Cruz is sufficiently malicious and narcissistic to believe he is the anointed one.  So he started the campaign even before Biden is inaugurated.

Four years of Trump whining and Ted crowing.  Here we go.

14

We're not gonna take it
We're not gonna take it

We forsake you
Gonna rape you
Let's forget you better still

Pete Townshend

Thank Dick Cheney

All day I kept imagining what would happen if the military were to get involved.  Not the National Guard but a Division of armed troops in the capital to support the President.  There are, I'm aware, a lot of members of the armed forces who would cheer such an eventuality.  It happens in other countries.  We are not so exceptional as we think.

But with amazing prescience, Dick Cheney and his brethren sent out a letter explaining to the senior leadership of the armed forces that they should sit on their hands and not be involved.  This was the most amazing letter I've heard of in my life.  It may well have changed the course of history but the events of the past four years have been so chaotic it seemed to be business as usual.

The Department of Defense secretaries letter was absolutely not business as usual.  I served under Cheney in the 80's and only later came to really resent him and his politics and his march to near war.  

But, today, I can not convey how important his actions were to the integrity of our democracy.  So I salute him.

I'll denigrate him and his ideas next week.  This week I have a lot of respect for him.