58 Days of Subversion
A sequel to “187 minutes of intent”
“I think we need to look at not just January 6 but December and November… those months between the election and the certification of the Electoral College results.”
-A.B. Stoddard, MSNBC Contributor, Nicolle Wallace “Deadline White House,” January 2
58 days of subversion:
Image capture by author
Before we drill down to who reserved and paid for the hotel rooms at The Willard Hotel on the night of January 5, 2021, could not the events between November 9, 2020 and January 6, 2021 offer some perspective on the violent attempt to disrupt the transfer of power in the nation’s Capital?
Often a paradigm shift provides a window of discovery. Such was the case of revamping hospital ER procedure. Successful medical diagnosis is often crimped by stress (I can attest to that, after a visit to a Manhattan ER.) So a medical observer and student of ER procedures at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore borrowed a method used in commercial airlines to prepare for flying thousands of passengers safely from here to there — the checklist. Before every flight pilot and co-pilot go through a fifty-odd plus item/factor checklist.
The medical student proposed employing a similar checklist for delivering medical care in the ER. After nearly a year of bureaucratic wrangling, the ‘ER checklist’ was employed. The number of successful procedures began to climb.
Consider a similar employment of the checklist method to exposing a conspiracy to prevent a successful transition of power.
Prosecutors need one. The alternative of trying to find a ‘smoking gun’ is a fool’s errand albeit a deterrent. No, there are no tapes conveniently stashed in an office vault, (1) key to which is in Rose Marie Woods desk. That was 1971–73. This is 2022.
That was pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, and pre-Pandemic.
And that was when a political party could hold its leader politically accountable.
Prosecutors of the January 6 Insurrection will need a time-line, yes, but also a check list.
What might it look like?
November 9-January 6:
“Tight” Election;
“Divided” Country;
“Aging” President-Elect;
Pandemic isolation;
Unregulated social media;
Unorganized supporter pool;
‘Non-compliant’ court decisions
January 6:
‘No guns’;
Vague outlines for deployment and mobilization of National Guard;
Rally plans;
Access to Capitol corridors, entryways, offices;
Bear spray and fire extinguishers;
Vanguard appears like an inchoate mob;
Leaked communications on January 6–7;
State Capitol Protests — Michigan, Utah;
‘News’ parries the ‘Looks like, smells like…’
Frame-time a response;
‘Reclaim’ authority
The fear is that without such a checklist, we, citizens will tire of the ‘drip drip,’ smoking gun method and go on about our lives as if something but ‘not such a big thing’ happened during the 58 days between November 9 and January 6.
Then, we are not survivors, but co-conspirators.
January 5
1-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes
