by Travis Mateer

While today’s earlier post wasn’t an intentional fabrication, I got the core fact the entire post hinges on embarrassingly wrong, so I had to update it admitting I was wrong.

You see, sometimes it’s possible to jump to false conclusions. When this happens, and it’s pointed out to you, you have a choice: admit you’re wrong, or double down on the false conclusion.

Incorrectly implying a possible conflict of interest due to an assumed relationship that doesn’t exist is one thing. Incorrectly calling what happened in Washington DC on 1/6/21 an attempted coup or insurrection warranting MORE state power, ANOTHER impeachment and the RESIGNATION of Montana’s Senator? That is an entirely different thing.

I’m bringing up my error in dot-connecting, along with the developing reaction to 1/6/21 (which Chuck Schumer compared to Pearl Harbor), because tomorrow’s episode of Zoom Town deals with both.

On the dot-connecting front my guest, Tim, helps me connect the Poverello’s change in policy from a sobriety model to a behavior-based model, and what that policy change meant for first responders. Tim has worked at 911 dispatch, both in Bozeman and in Missoula, so his perspective is very valuable.

Since the release of the Stevensons’ interview last Tuesday, I have also had two, off-the-record conversations with Missoula first responders that have helped me understand the dynamics involved. I hope more people will come forward to share their perspectives on what is happening.

Since Tim identifies as a conservative, which is on the other end of the political divide currently in control of our local municipality, the current political insanity felt like it HAD to be a part of the conversation, especially as Montana political hacks like Don Pogreba try to ride the wave of outrage to oust Republican Senator Steve Daines from office.

From the link:

Daines has not learned anything from the horrific events of Wednesday when American democracy was under siege from rioters who were hunting the Vice President of the United States to execute him, when seditionists set up a gallows outside the Capitol building, and when self-styled patriots attacked it with what appears to have been some level of military planning.

Despite those attacks, and even though the impetus for them was the lie spread by Donald Trump and his Congressional enablers that the election had been stolen, Daines is still spreading the fiction that there were problems with the elections in Georgia and Arizona, consequences be damned.

Who has time or the bandwidth to deal with local matters of corruption and injustice when there’s seditionists to find and punish, and more surveillance legislation to pass, and alternative tech platforms to shutdown, and book deals to cancel, and…and where does this all end?

I don’t think it ends with a correction at the top of blog post, that’s for damn sure.

I would LIKE to be wrong about that.