Should I stay or should I go

The rats? They're leaving. Well, some of them are.

A real rat, really swimming

We are watching a boatload of D.C. resignations including, just yesterday, Acting Sec. of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who might have been serving in that capacity illegally, anyway.

Before him, Department of Education Sec. Betsy DeVos; Department of Transportation Sec. Elaine Chao (Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife); former chief of staff/current Special Envoy to Northern Ireland Mick Mulvaney; deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger, and a host of others farther down the food chain have left town after a group of domestic terrorists launched a deadly attack against the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday.

Those insurgents were aided and abetted by the boss, Pres. Donald J. Trump, who so far has shown no sign of, well, anything but what we’ve come to expect.

But rather than principled stands against a despot, these mass resignations seem more as a real-life example of rats leaving a sinking ship, a phrase that this Merriam-Webster piece tells us started life as “rats leaving a falling house.”(It seems that mice and rats — and certain members of Trump’s administration — have a unique ability to sense when a house is about to fall down.)

A blow-up rat, really ugly

Some rats refuse to swim. Trump, who is facing a list of charges — including impeachment on Wednesday, should Vice President Mike Pence not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him — has shown no inclination to leave — or apologize, or even acknowledge the chaos he has created.

Meanwhile, polite conversation among people who still support Trump usually starts with condemning Wednesday’s violence, and then the conversation slides (more like “oozes”) quickly into comparisons with Black Lives Matter protests, with the claim that — gosh! — #BLM is more violent than Wednesday’s attempted coup.

I watched one of these fraudulent conversations unfold last night, on a Zoom meeting of Mansfield, Conn.’s town council, of which my son is a member. The council — which is majority Democrat — was discussing what seemed like a fairly standard resolution that condemned the Capitol attack. Things got interesting, fast. One of the Republican councilors said he was actually in D.C. to protest the election (but rushed to say he left when things got hairy). Another Republican councilor chimed in with the #BLM/Insurgent comparison, and for a moment, I thought I’d misheard.

I hadn’t.

Le sigh…

There are all kinds of issues with making such a statement. For one, it’s not accurate. A September report from U.S. Crisis Monitor called #BLM an “overwhelmingly peaceful movement,” and:

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent. In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

But of course, if you only sup from Certain Media Troughs, your view of these last few years’ multiple #BLM protests is mostly that of burning cars, and physical clashes. Limiting your media diet to, say, Fox or any Sinclair station means you have shrunk your world view to the radius of a sphincter, and it is ridiculously challenging to see out of such a small aperture, she said, sweetly.

More importantly, #BLM — a response to generations of inequality — can not be compared to a deadly riot fomented by a failed politician. Pretending they are similar is intellectually lazy, whataboutism at its worst. #BLM protests are based on the reality of our country’s historic inequality. The failed coup was based on the lie that November’s election was fraudulent.

Real. Fake. Real. Fake.

There is no comparison, and that Mansfield councilor who tried to make the argument looked really stupid doing so. (Side note: Connecticut cleaves to a kind of election rule that limits the number of seats members of a majority party can hold on an elected body. So that means that in some towns, a Republican who gets less votes than the lowest-vote-getting Democrat will win an election.)

For what it’s worth, Mansfield’s resolution passed, though not, as the Democrats had hoped, unanimously.

As we know, rats are carriers of disease, and there is talk about armed protests coming to every state capital as we approach Inauguration Day. Here, too, we expected no less. The most effective rat-eradictor right now would be members of the Republican leadership going on camera, taking to social media, using every outlet available to them to tell people that the election was fair, the insurrection was disgraceful, and everybody ought to go the hell home.

But the leadership has shown little interest in doing what needs to be done. For now, we add them to our already-long prayer list, as we brace for the next few days. Stay strong.