We Should Have it So Good as the Capitol Rioters
Hundreds of armed treasonous assassins are more valued than a poor law abiding schmuck just trying to keep his house from going under during a pandemic
by Rich Herschlag
In the days leading up to January 6, 2021 and the days following, the federal government made my life a living hell. Those of you who know me also know this was somewhat of a coincidence. I was nowhere near Washington D.C. and am so progressive one day enterprising vampires will use my blood to make blue snow cones.
The issue was my federal taxes. After running my own engineering consulting business for a quarter century and paying taxes at rates that would make Warren Buffett weep, COVID arrived like a financial Grim Reaper. It was nice to have no work for a few weeks until I realized work was how I paid the mortgage, kids’ tuition, cell phone bills, and kept this 8-cylinder engine called my family running. Just as problematic, my wife and I were stopped dead in our tracks on the renovation of a two-unit crack house we had begun in 2018. Sure, we could still sneak over there during quarantine and sand hundred-year-old oak floors, but try getting fire resistant insulation, arc fault circuit breakers from China, or a plumber.
So I fell behind on my taxes. Way behind. My thought process went something like this.
I’ve been the silent backbone of the economy for decades and never asked for anything. I’m more or less shut in with a wife and two grown kids melting down and doing pirouettes trying to keep the wheels turning. The deferred tax payments are the equivalent of a loan at about 6 percent interest, and not only is that option implicitly part of the stimulus package, in the midst of the worst health crisis in a century the feds would never take the time and effort to hunt down the hapless likes of me.
I had been wrong before but never like this. During repeated phone chats with the IRS agent assigned my case and a period of a few short weeks over which I coughed up about 10 grand as a desperate olive branch, I was told repeatedly there would be no lien put on our home unless I ghosted these kind public servants. And then, right about on January 6, 2021, the lien came down anyway like a sucker punch from a bookie’s enforcer in the very same breath that you handed him a brown paper bag filled with crisp twenties.
The rest of 2021 was a lot like a hangover where you go through the motions of taking aspirin and ginger ale to remain functional until one fine moment you can breathe again without the shakes. That one fine moment occurred on October 13 when my wife and I liquidated the first crack house we turned into a first-rate rental home back in the mid-2010s. The IRS took their cut—about a third—without ever having to demo a putrid thrice-carpeted bedroom littered with used needles.
I would be at peace today with the knowledge that the federal government is a juggernaut with whom no one in his right mind should fuck unless they want to be fucked back a hundred times over, if not for the fact that it’s part of a lie even bigger than the Big Lie. These days, out of a combination of actual patriotism and lingering schadenfreude, I’ve surrendered my hobby of consuming baseball, basketball, and football box scores in favor of a pastime potentially more rewarding but so far more frustrating than rooting for the New York Giants.
Turns out that bastion of liberal faith known as NPR hosts and maintains perhaps the most comprehensive publicly accessible database of arrested Capitol rioters and their legal fates. To date about 740 faux US citizens have been charged, and they are all listed here along with their age, hometown, case summary, charges, and where applicable the outcome. I eagerly check the site at least twice a day.
But each perusal of this spreadsheet typically brings far more hopelessness and resignation than satisfaction—righteous or otherwise. A quick glance lets you know that Stefanie Nicole Chiguer of Dracut, Massachusetts has been charged with “entering and remaining in a restricted building.” That Jeffrey Schaeffer of Milton, Delaware has been charged with “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.” That James Tate Grant of Cary, North Carolina has been charged with “obstruction of an official proceeding.”
Still more maddening, Anthony Joseph Scirica pleaded guilty to one charge of that heinous and recurring crime of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.” and was sentenced to “15 days of incarceration and a $500 fine.” Michael Stepakoff of Palm Harbor, Florida—originally charged with “violent entry and disorderly conduct”—pleaded guilty to the same parading thing (I’ll never hang out at Macy’s on Thanksgiving again) and was sentenced to “12 months of probation, a fine of $742, and a special assessment of (wait for it) $10.”
I would give you more but I’m already pounding shots of Chivas Regal. As my friend Eddie who several years back did a week in the slammer for an unpaid parking ticket once said, you can’t make this shit up. What other charges may be pending for these very fine people on one side? Improper use of a flagpole? Failure to pay state tax on a Taser? Unauthorized defecation on a federal rug?
So what exactly am I saying here? That hundreds of armed treasonous assassins are more valued than a poor law abiding schmuck just trying to keep his house from going under during a pandemic? That the ongoing prosecution of those who would have had the Vice President and Speaker’s heads on a platter is so lenient and empathetic that going forward regular citizens can scarcely scrape together reason for civic faith? That the concept of equal justice in America is a farce? Yes, yes, and yes. Unfortunately, something even worse may be going on.
We may be seeing the beginnings of a misbegotten reconciliation. The unspoken idea—the elephant in the Capitol—is that because we at some point have to “come together” as a nation we might as well begin preemptively by expediting, mislabeling, and diluting perhaps the largest and most troubling caseload in DOJ history. This ugly process doesn’t have to be explicit or for that matter even conscious.
The past five or so years have seen the frog-boiling-in-water normalization of everything from auctioning off presidential influence to extorting foreign leaders to gross contrivance of medical expertise. Tacit quasi-forgiveness of “mischief” loosely justified by white grievance doesn’t seem anything close to far-fetched, especially when you see it every day in real time. Emotionally this approach may feel right to many who simply don’t have the stomach to go through yet another interminable round of agonizing national introspection with a Super Bowl coming up. On a practical level, the long term result of this latest boys-will-be-boys approach to governing may be a more forgiving, harmonious civic reality at least until the next attempted coup.
Yes, my friends, every story like every coin and every mutiny has two sides. By the time we’re done gently airing out the other side to this coin, that same other side will be locking up bloggers for offending Donald Trump Jr. I know, I know, both President Joe Biden and US Attorney General Merrick Garland have given impassioned (graded on a curve) speeches assuring John Q. Centrist that justice would be pursued to its legal limits. And I know tunnel-digging, barbed-wire-stringing Yale Law School graduate Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes has been charged with sedition rather than loitering. I recognize that there is no longer a Bill Barr around to take the January 6 report and condense it to a castrated Cliff Notes for consumption by Tucker Carlson’s lobotomized viewing audience. And I am well aware that three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices joined a majority in ordering the National Archives to turn over the 45th President’s dirty written laundry to Congress.
Nonetheless I can say without more than a trace of cynicism that strictly as a cold-blooded handicapper of political and legal events based on recent and not-so-recent history, a year from today I expect Donald Trump to be playing golf, Rudy Giuliani to be doing drive time radio, and John Eastman to be on a book tour. Why? See Jim Crow, the pardon of President Richard M. Nixon, and yellowcake uranium. Am I even a little bit wrong? Go ahead, make my day.
Aren't you the same centrists who chastized people who have honest criticisms of Biden's tenure? I agree, but this is a part of our point. Needless to say, why I appreciate the tilt, can we finally exist in a world where any politicians need to not have apologitics explaining their inaneness without clucking from you guys?