hubris is interesting

 

Left:  Rudy Giuliani

Center:  President George W. Bush

"Hubris is interesting, because you get people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great things, and then something goes wrong - they just don't know when to stop."

~ Margaret MacMillan, Canadian historian

Day 4

of January 6 Committee hearings

They had the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives in to take questions from the committee.  (I was thinking that was done Under Oath, but was not sure -- today I saw, Yes, it's Under Oath.)

The Speaker's name is Russell "Rusty" Bowers.  He spoke very seriously, calm, and straightforward, doing his best (I thought) to answer questions in a way that could illuminate the events for all of us.

He described getting phone calls from Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election -- they were asking him to "find" more votes and get different electors and change the voting result in Arizona from a Biden win to a Trump win.

State Rep. Bowers told them No, he was not going to do that, because it would go against the oath he took when he was elected to public office.  He has to stick by the rules, he tells them.

        Giuliani and Trump said "OK," then they called back later, on another day, and asked him again.

        When they take that oath, it's on the Bible and you say, "so help me God."  (Trump and Giuliani:  "God?!  Don't listen to Him!  Listen to us!"  lol)

Trump tweeted about Bowers' refusal, and after that Bowers got death threats, he testified.  

So many e-mails and texts at his office that they couldn't work, and at his home every Saturday, people came around and said in the neighborhood that he was a pedophile and other bad stuff, to try and punish him for not going along with Trump's attempt to overturn a free and fair election.  

Some guy came on a Saturday and pestered Speaker Bowers' neighbor, while showing a gun.

While they were trying to talk Bowers into doing what they wanted, Bowers asked Trump and Giuliani if they had evidence of what they were saying.  Giuliani said, "We have a lot of theories."  But did they have evidence? -- Bowers persisted.

        None was produced.

This is unique in our history, although we've had crazy stuff before -- slavery, the Civil War, Ku Klux Klan, etc.

        But this current thing is kind of new.  Carl Bernstein (Watergate reporter and co-author of the book, All The President's Men) said Donald Trump is "the first seditious president."

After the evidence part of the testimony, a committee member asked Speaker Bowers what his impression was, of what the White House was doing, and he answered, "Well it reminded me of that book, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight."  Like Trump and his people were just running around, saying whatever.

..."a lot of theories"...

        (The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, written by journalist Jimmy Breslin, is the story of Papa Baccala, a Brooklyn Mafia boss, and Kid Sally Palumbo, a would-be capo who "couldn't run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers' cars.")

Meanwhile -- Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City who held things together on 9-11, now has a You Tube channel where he sits and speaks into a camera.  The video I watched, he did a commercial in the middle of it, then went back to what he was talking about.

Unbelievable.

A stunning bounce from sterling credibility in 2001 to virtually no credibility in 2022.

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