I commend you for finding within The President's 73-minute speech “peacefully.” I get Facebook puzzles like that all the time: Find the M in a grid of Ws. When you find the B among the 8s, reply “Found it.” The media is so shallow. Anyone could have found “fight.” It's there 23 times. But you found “Peacefully” and I feel certain that those who didn't actually enter the Capitol Jan. 6 did so because they too found “peacefully.” Trump sent them and then told them, stop.
I have only one other experience watching a riot on TV, August, 1968. The government spent two years trying to send its organizers to prison, but you and I both know they were sent, because during the trial, the late Abbot Hoffman quoted Lincoln's first inaugural address, “When the people grow weary of their constitutional right to amend the government, they shall assert their revolutionary right to dismember and overthrow the government.” Now, before reading an account of Hoffman saying that in court, I had thought Lincoln had used his first inaugural to somehow avoid what looked likely. But I know a dog whistle when I don't quite hear it. Lincoln wanted the Confederacy to break away. Talk about a Republican Southern Strategy! It didn't start with Bob Mardian, Bill Rehnquist and Pat Buchanan!
So I want to do my very best Jack Crabb: You go right ahead. Acquit President Trump. Endorse the speech at the Ellipse. Doodle your Asian nation maps on your notepad, I'm sure wishing that the Navy had allowed you to swim to shore so you could fight. Write off the broken glass, and fight to declare DNA testing on the feces smeared on the capitol walls as an illegal search and seizure. Applaud the officers who protected you, and wash your hands a few times because one of them wasn't there to hear. Avoid eye contact with everyone who cleaned up. Federal workers, you know.
Above all, I really need you to legitimize Nov. 3 to Jan. 6. I need to know, next time, when money and media manipulation and mob mentality overcome my candidate and I am faced with accepting a president who – hypothetically – stole his fortune from the government and old people, has intentionally wrecked his state's unemployment and worker's compensation systems, persecuted public schools, defied Fair Districts amendments that were passed the same election he won but by bigger margins that he will ever have, bullied county election officials into deleting legal voters from the rolls, and selectively closed polling places so that persons of color had to stand in line seven hours for what took mere minutes in The Villages? Well, I'd have the right to assemble an army and do my best to block ratifying, knowing patriots like you would refuse to accept a state's electoral vote even after I had put your life in danger. We'll now have that precedent, to do pretty much everything short of killing someone. Succeeding anyway. And who knows? Your precedent can even be used to create that one.
On to Little Big Horn.