They had no choice?

The people have spoken and Donald Trump is our new President elect. 

It makes me sick but I have to live with it. 

Going to sit back, buy popcorn and watch the shitshow.

But that doesn't mean that I will enjoy it. 

Your people?

And some of it is already making me sick to my stomach, particularly the announced January 6th pardons for the people who stormed the capitol and fought with the cops, not to mention threatening to hang the Vice President.

It boggles my mind that people who pretend to be pro law enforcement can make an exception for the outgunned Capitol and Metropolitan Police force who battled all day long in the trenches with these MAGA idiots, sustaining multiple injuries. They deserved better than this.

“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said, saying later about their imprisonment, “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”

Trump said there “may be some exceptions” to his pardons “if somebody was radical, crazy,” and pointed to some debunked claims that anti-Trump elements and law enforcement operatives infiltrated the crowd. 

At least 1,572 defendants have been charged and more than 1,251 have been convicted or pleaded guilty in the attack. Of those, at least 645 defendants have been sentenced to incarceration ranging from a few days to 22 years in federal lockup. About 250 people are in custody, most of them serving sentences after having been convicted. A handful are being held in pretrial custody at the order of a federal judge.

Trump didn’t rule out pardoning people who had pleaded guilty, even when Welker asked him about those who had admitted assaulting police officers. 

“Because they had no choice,” Trump said. 

Asked about the more than 900 other people who had pleaded guilty in connection to the attack but weren’t accused of assaulting officers, Trump suggested that they had been pressured unfairly into taking guilty pleas. 

“I know the system. The system’s a very corrupt system,” Trump said. “They say to a guy, ‘You’re going to go to jail for two years or for 30 years.’ And these guys are looking, their whole lives have been destroyed. For two years, they’ve been destroyed. But the system is a very nasty system.”

Trump had the audacity, when questioned about the January 6 rioters this weekend to say that "they had no choice."

Yes, they did, that is bullshit. And he also says that he wants to jail those that prosecuted the assault. After uttering some thoroughly debunked claims of FBI plants and operatives actually instigating the violence.

Read the tally from the Department of Justice; over 1265 defendants charged, 452 assault arrests, 123 with a deadly weapon, 140 policemen assaulted, 11 assaults on the media, 718 guilty pleas. What are we going to do? We are going to let them go.

Over 140 policemen were injured, read their own words. Three committed suicide after the trauma. What a horrible day for America.

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I was talking to a MAGA friend today who shall remain anonymous this morning, I will call him "Rand." I asked him if he was happy about the pardons and he instantly pivoted. 

"Well, it would be nice if they tried them with the Antifa folks who burned that courthouse in Portland. And besides, nobody died. And Hunter Biden..."

Wonderful. Lets give them all a free pass to wreak havoc on the seats of government and assault the police because those crazies in Portland and St. Louis can riot and get away with it. And talk about false equivalence.

Classic "whataboutism," you did it so we can do it too. Different standard obviously applies when it is mostly white conservatives doing the rioting. Like Trump says, they obviously had no choice. And now they all get their get out of jail free card.

I'm not happy and judges are not particularly happy. Even Republican judges.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan-appointed jurist, has been especially outspoken, warning of a “vicious cycle ... that could imperil our institutions” if Americans, upset with future election results, resort to the “vigilantism, lawlessness and anarchy” that occurred on January 6, 2021. “We as a society, as a community, and as a country cannot normalize the events of Jan. 6.” The judge declared Wednesday that “the January 6 riot was not civil disobedience,” but instead was a “corrosive” and “selfish, not patriotic” affront to the nation, where Americans were “battling (their) own representative government.” He invoked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau as examples of historic American figures who pursued “peaceful” but powerful acts of civil disobedience. “There can be no room in our country for this sort of political violence,” Lamberth said.

All that is pre Trump 2.0. In the new paradigm the January 6th mob were righteous martyrs and persecuted political prisoners.

I think you can be with Judge Lamberth on this or with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

Not both sides of the equation. Stand up and be counted. You think they should let these people out of jail? 

Which side are you on?

Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of a stroke the day after sustaining injuries in the January 6th riot.