The One Crook Who Didn't Go To Jail

At least in Brazil they know what to do with corrupt ex-presidents who stage insurrections to stop elections (via Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips with Guardian US): 

A Brazilian supreme court judge has ordered the house arrest of former president Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly breaching “preventative measures” which were imposed amid concerns the far-right leader might abscond to avoid punishment over an alleged coup attempt.

According to the ruling on Monday by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, Bolsonaro breached a ban on using social media which was imposed last month, when he was also ordered to wear an electronic ankle tag.

Moraes wrote that as demonstrators took to the streets in several cities across the country on Sunday in support of the former president, Bolsonaro used the social media accounts of allies to share messages containing “clear encouragement and incitement to attack the Supreme Federal Court, and overt support for foreign intervention in Brazil’s judiciary”.

“There is no doubt the precautionary measure was breached,” Moraes wrote...

The arrest order is part of an ongoing supreme court case in which Bolsonaro is accused of leading a plot to overturn the results of the last election, in which current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the former army captain.

The trial is expected to conclude later this year, with Bolsonaro facing a potential sentence of more than 40 years in prison.

Many of those protesters urged the US president Donald Trump – who recently hit Brazil with 50% tariffs in retribution for the alleged “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro – to take further action to help save their embattled leader...

Of course trump would attempt to bully the Brazilian people in order to get a fellow corrupt bastard out of legal hot water. trump admires the dictators across the globe as the only humans he'll ever respect. That he's disrupting any foreign relations not just with Brazil but with the rest of South (and Central) America doesn't matter to him and his America First cronies.

trump should have answered for what he did - stirring up rioters to storm Congress and disrupt the electoral count on January 6th - in a court of law, but Biden and his attorney general didn't understand the urgency and took their time, allowing trump's lawyers to delay delay delay until the 2024 election, during which he and his allies in the mainstream media lied and bluffed their way back into the White House and negating any chance of justice.

It remains frustrating to me and millions of others who knew trump was a monster and did everything we could to keep him out of power and yet too many other Americans didn't care - or worse didn't care to know - and made the monster president (again).

What the hell, America. And now the whole world is paying for the crook we wouldn't put in jail.

The International Far Right Denial of Democracy

So there I am trying to edit the non-fiction book of blog articles when news comes down the pipe that Brazil - which had just rejected Jair Bolsonaro, a bullying trump-lite President in last year's election - suffered their own insurrection riot of that SOB's supporters. Government buildings - especially the Presidential Palace and the nation's Supreme Court - raided and destroyed. I jumped to the Guardian's coverage for more details (via Tom Phillips and Andrew Downie):

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ordered the federal government to take control of policing in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, after hundreds of hardcore supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court.

The massed attack was a stunning security breach that was immediately compared to the 6 January invasion of the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump in 2021.

“What we are witnessing is a terrorist attack,” the news anchor Erick Bang announced on the GloboNews television network as word of the upheaval spread. “The three buildings have been invaded by coup-mongering terrorists.”

Shocking video footage showed the pro-Bolsonaro militants sprinting up the ramp into the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices, roaming the building’s corridors and vandalizing the nearby supreme court, whose windows had been smashed.

Lula, a veteran leftist, was sworn in as Brazil’s new president last Sunday in celebrations attended by hundreds of thousands of Brazilians.

But thousands of pro-Bolsonaro extremists have refused to accept Lula’s narrow victory in October’s election, spending recent weeks camping outside army bases across the country and calling for a military coup.

Lula was not in Brasília on Sunday but he gave an angry speech blaming Bolsonaro for the chaos and promising that “anyone involved will be punished”.

It's interesting the rioters waited for Lula to be outside of the capitol - he was in Sao Paulo - to pull off this coup attempt. Also interesting that the organizers did not get any military support in this, relying instead on the state police to guide the protestors instead of stopping them. There's been calls to arrest a security official who may have aided in the staging, who has ties to Bolsonaro and was reportedly seen in Orlando where the ex-President fled to exile (via Adriano Machado with Reuters):

By 6:30 p.m. local time (2130 GMT), some three hours after initial reports of the invasion, security forces had managed to retake the capital's most iconic three buildings.

Brasilia Governor Ibaneis Rocha, a longtime Bolsonaro ally facing tough questions after Sunday's security lapses, said on Twitter more than 400 people had been arrested and authorities were working to identify more...

Rocha, the Brasilia governor, said he had fired his top security official, Anderson Torres, previously Bolsonaro's justice minister. The solicitor general's office said it had filed a request for the arrest of Torres.

Torres told website UOL he was with his family on holiday in the United States and had not met with Bolsonaro. UOL reported he was in Orlando, where Bolsonaro is now staying...

It's too much of a coincidence for Torres and Bolsonaro to be in the same city when all of this went down.

Bolsonaro may be denouncing the violence in public, but he's spent the last months since losing the election acting out the trumpian playbook of refusing to accept electoral defeat, claiming rigged elections, and stomping off in a snit before the changing of the guard to discredit the traditional display of peaceful transfers of power.

Much like how it played out here in the US with trump's MAGA believers, Bolsonaro's supporters - overwhelmed by years of pro-authoritarian Far Right bleating - bought into the lies and reacted with violence.

We now have a January 8th Insurrection to bookend with the January 6th Insurrection.

We shouldn't have been surprised by this. The links between these acts of violence - separated between two nations - made this inevitable. As mentioned before, Bolsonaro and trump consider each other allies, trump in particular happy that a fellow dictator wanna-be won Brazil's election back in 2018. Of course, trump made an open pitch for his buddy in this election cycle. Of course, trumpian handlers like Jason Miller and Steve Bannon were claiming the winning results for Lula were false, and worked with Bolsonaro behind the scenes for whatever purpose. 

This riot in Brazil is part of the overall attempt by the Far Right forces interlinked across the globe - from Russia to Hungary to Iran to Syria to trump in the United States and now Bolsonaro with Brazil - to discredit democratic institutions - installed as liberal methods of forming governments answerable to the people and the law - as weak, broken, and deserving of overthrow.

It's to those wingnuts' discredit that the democratic institutions are pushing back now, defending the system of fair elections against these rioters who are protesting out of fear - that they've been told to fear and hate by their instigators - instead of justice.

Justice should come soon for those (trump and his allies) who stirred up violence here in Washington DC, and justice should come soon for those (Bolsonaro and his allies) who stirred up violence in Brasilia.