Sure, but Junebored has been the loudest voice on these boards proclaiming that this all amounted to the same thing that Boxer did in 04/05...so my post is pointing out his hypocritical bullshit.
I will be the first to admit that I did not foresee what happened at the Capitol on 1/6. I thought we might have a bunch of MAGA types walk over to the Capitol, chant a little bit, maybe get rowdy and turn over some trash cans, and that would be it. Never in my wildest imagination did I think you'd have a breach of Capitol security by individuals with a clear intent to capture or kill Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, or anyone else they could get their hands on.
I was obviously wrong.
However, I have a day job that does not involve making plans to keep the peace. For that reason, I do not have access to the intelligence that our elected officials do. Based on the many articles I have read about this incident, there was clear evidence on social media that something serious was going to happen on 1/6, and our intelligence community was keenly aware of this. I think it is safe to assume that this intelligence was shared with the people who were in charge of planning for the event, including Bowser. Yet despite this intelligence, she decided the best course of action was to have a relatively light show of force, in part, because she didn't like the optics of having armed national guardsmen be in charge of crowd control.
Because I did not have the information the people in charge did, I can be critical of them despite the fact I did not foresee this event. For example, I did not foresee 9/11, but I can be critical of W because he had access to intelligence information from August 2001 giving clues that something big was going to happen.
As to your other point, I agree that Bowser was not responsible for the delay in getting the guardsmen on the ground. When the shit hit the fan, she requested that additional guardsmen be deployed. There were delays in that happening. As I understand things, the cause of those delays is not clear. At least one article I have read has suggested that the delay was caused because approvals were needed all the way up the chain because of the mission change from logistics to armed support. I have also read articles suggesting that the delays were attributable to Trump's intentional actions and that, in the end, Pence actually stepped in and gave the order. I don't think we fully know exactly why the delay occurred or why it was so long. In any event, Bowser was not responsible for that delay.
The entire reason I started posting about the security issues on was because of the suggestion that the lack of force was somehow race-based. Over the summer, you had armed guardsmen on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial during the BLM marches whereas here the guardsmen were relegated to logistics, so people were arguing that this disparate treatment was racist. That's hogwash. The reason for the relatively light show of force here was because Bowser didn't like the optics of having armed guardsmen interacting with the public. Whether she was right or wrong is a discussion for another thread, but that decision was not the product of racial animus.
Finally, I think you know that it is unfair to characterize my position as "this all amounted to the same thing that Boxer did in 04/05." My position, prior to the events of 1/6, was that Pubs' challenge to the certification--which I disagreed with--was similar to Dems' challenge to the certification in 2001, 2005, and 2017. I had hoped that pointing out Dems had previously challenged the certification of Pub electoral victories would cause people to think a little more critically about what was going on. Pub congresspeople, for example, aren't "seditious" for claiming--in an obvious stunt--that Congress should audit the vote, or at least no more so than the Dem congresspeople who challenged--in an obvious stunt--the certification of Pub presidential victories in 2001, 2005, or 2017. Whataboutism can an effective rhetorical device where, as here, the differences are in degree, and not in kind.
I stand behind that view. Where I was wrong was in failing to see that Trump was priming the pump with his incessant drumbeat of "fraud"--despite being unable to produce any evidence of such--and continually giving his supporters the false hope that the result could be changed, which, ultimately, culminated in the (actually) seditious act of inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol. I will confess to, apparently, having a blind spot for the effect Trump has on his base. Until Wednesday, I thought almost all Trump voters thought "yeah, he's an idiot, and he says offensive things, but I'm voting for him because he's better than Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Socialist Joe." I still think the vast majority of Trump voters think that way, but I never would have thought he'd have so many people who would actually be willing to take the (actually) seditious act of storming the Capitol for him or, if the polls are correct, that there would be so many people in the general population who don't have a problem with the storming of the Capitol. The only potentially saving grace is that populism often dies with the leader, and Congress has an opportunity to kill Trump's political life through impeachment and, failing that, he'll be 78 in 2024.
