Lazo was lucky to get just 45 days in jail and ordered to pay $500 dollars restitution. He was seen as just a follower and wasn’t part of the first wave of insurrectionists. INQUIRER FILE
Donald Trump is playing America. He just succeeded in getting a judge he had appointed to approve an extraneous special master for the Mar-A-Lago documents investigation.
Is there any question really? Trump readily admits to having more than 11,000 documents he has no right to have, some of which were top secret, and yet the criminal investigation on charges connected with the Espionage Act could be held up for months.
A delay benefits Trump, not our country, our people, or democracy.
It’s just another example of the cult of Trump, this time from a Trump-appointed judge loyal to the man and not to our Constitution or the rule of law.
Examples abound among Republicans in Congress, and even in the Filipino community, of those who insist on riding the coattail of a liar. Like one Kene Brian Lazo, a/k/a the Walis Tambo Man
Lazo knows by now Donald Trump is a loser. Lazo is the Filipino American man from Norfolk, Virginia, who held a Filipino broom up high in the Capitol rotunda Jan. 6, as if to encourage a sweep of the premises. Politically, not janitorially, though Lazo contributed to the disarray.
Lazo posted on Facebook on Jan. 7 about his belief in the false narrative that the Nov. 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. “They still stole it even tho there (sic) cheating,” he wrote.
He was arrested, charged and just last month sentenced to 45 days in jail. Lazo’s defense was that he was manipulated by Trump “to believe the lies.”
His public defender, A.J.Kramer further stated, “Mr. Lazo believed every word,” and that now Lazo regrets “lending his voice to a falsehood about a fraudulent election.
Was it finally the truth? Or was Lazo, as they say, just singing for his supper?
Lazo was lucky to get just 45 days in jail and ordered to pay $500 dollars restitution. He was seen as just a follower and wasn’t part of the first wave of insurrectionists.
And yet some still won’t take Jan. 6 seriously. But they should. I’d like to think Lazo was telling the truth and not lying.
Maybe he should tell his Filipino American pals to heed the truth. Because the ongoing belief that the election was stolen from Trump lingers.
A poll in The Economist/YouGov released in August showed 69 percent of Republicans think don’t believe Biden won the 2020 election. And the only proof that exists is that Trump says so. Trump the liar. He didn’t win.
But Republicans are intent on being as dumb as Brian Kene Lazo was before his sentencing. They need to get smart like Lazo did, after his sentencing.
A test of democracy
A good test of our system is every time a vote is taken in America, like this week when Tuesday primary voting takes place in Massachusetts, one of the 13 original colonies that broke away from a king. Remember, we don’t have one of those in a democracy, and in Massachusetts they will be voting for a governor. But no king.
At the end of the exercise, there will be winners in both parties who will face off in the general midterm election in November. Then, in all the states, there will be more elections with candidates who win, and the others who will lose with grace.
And then the citizenry will carry on throughout the country, 50 states, one nation.
That’s the way it works in a great democracy, where the Constitution and the rule of law prevails.
The campaign ends on election night and makes way for real governance. It happens in most every election, except the last presidential election in 2020. But it’s given us in the media a real litmus test for truth.
Every time someone says Joe Biden isn’t the legitimately elected president of the United States, it must be called out as a lie.
And the person who said it must be called a liar. Does anyone disagree? That’s how the truth works. There can be no wavering. Truth is truth.
Debate is fine, and welcomed. Even if over notions of electoral tampering. But there are no facts to suggest significant voting irregularities that would change the final 2020 results. The facts are the U.S. presidency has been decided, votes were certified, and Biden won.
And yet, two years after, there is still dispute because Donald Trump, the only president ever to be named in a criminal search warrant as FPOTUS for “former President of the United States,” refuses to go along with the truth.
Notice that was “former president,” and not “once and future king,” of which we remind once again, there are none in a democracy. But Trump’s insistence of being somehow “special” or “above the law” only makes him America’s “King Liar,” with a handful of loyal subjects who act as if they are in his cultish grasp.
The Jan. 6 cultists
That would include the more than 870 people charged in the Jan. 6 insurrection, of which more than 385 were convicted; 245 rioters have been sentenced so far with 126 receiving jail or prison. Just last week, Thomas Webster, a former NYPD officer, got 10 years in prison for assaulting an officer with a flagpole. He could have faced more than 17 years.
Still, it’s far more jail time than our Walis Tambo guy Lazo. Lazo wasn’t the worst among the offenders on Jan. 6. But he serves as an example that it’s time to embrace the truth now.
Many people didn’t see Joe Biden’s Soul of America speech last week. The major networks were too chicken to show the president of the free world telling the truth.
But you should watch it.
“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated,” Biden said. “And that’s where MAGA Repbublicans are today. They don’t understand what every patriotic American knows: You can’t love your country only when you win.”
As Biden and all truth-tellers know, American democracy only works if we choose to respect the rule of law and the Constitution.
And so Biden delivered a blunt truth: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Heed that truth. The freedom it’s based on is why so many Filipinos came to America in the first place.
Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He writes a column for the North American Bureau. NOTE: I will talk about this column and other matters on “Emil Amok’s Takeout,” my AAPI micro-talk show. Live @2p Pacific. Livestream on Facebook; my YouTube channel; and Twitter. Catch the recordings on www.amok.com.
