I was lucky enough to have other things to do last night which prohibited me from watching the latest installment in the Democrat obsession with January 6th, and yeah, I’m including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger in that group now.
The January 6th committee held a primetime hearing, garnering complete buy-in for the stunt from all the networks and cable stations except Fox News, and it didn’t take long for the clips to start coming out. What transpired was a political show trial that would make Stalin blush.
Of course, one can have their opinion of January 6th, and that opinion can include it being a terrible event that should be roundly condemned. What happened was profoundly stupid and harmful. It doesn’t matter what a person believes about the 2020 election. Being an idiot isn’t a political strategy and running one’s head into a woodchipper accomplishes nothing, even if it wasn’t a “coup.”
But that has little to do with this sham committee. It is now June 2022, and the condemnations have been done to death. Republicans, especially those that had absolutely nothing to do with January 6th, are not bound by an oath to keep hyperventilating over it for all of eternity. And more to the point, the most obvious takeaway from last night’s hearing was that this committee has nothing to actually offer.
Take Liz Cheney’s opening statement for example. It was widely lauded as an exercise in truth-telling, but what did she actually say? The answer is not much.
Speeches about how terrible and no-good the orange man is are not new. They offer nothing to the conversation and they do nothing to advance the Democrat narrative regarding January 6th. Note the vast generalities used by Cheney. Trump “summoned” and “assembled” the mob, but what exactly does that indicate? Yes, there was a peaceful protest over a mile away, and to be fair to the Wyoming representative, the former president did tell them to go to the Capitol. But did he tell them to go inside? Did he tell them to fight with the police? Did he tell them to commit “insurrection” via some kind of unarmed “coup?”
Cheney never quite gets there, and she doesn’t get there because the answer to all those questions is: “No.” Thus, she’s left with the vague charge that he “lit the flame.” Whether that’s actually true or not is an open question given he pointedly told people to remain peaceful, yet it’s not even that relevant.
Why? Because even if we connect several dots and assume that Trump saying the election was stolen motivated those people to enter the Capitol, that’s still not in any way a direct call to violence. Are we going to criminalize political speech now? Is the legality of such speech now dictated by what other parties choose to do with it? The crime of incitement has real, statutory standards, and none of what Trump said comes close to meeting them.
Then there was this from Cheney, which is just a dead giveaway.
The committee playing that clip of Barr saying what he’s been saying for a year and a half is a good indication on its own. That’s why they led with? We already know that Barr doesn’t believe there was sufficient evidence of fraud to have overturned the election. But I digress, back to Cheney, notice the softening of expectations. The “investigation is still ongoing” she says, which is just another way of saying they don’t have a smoking gun but want to drag this out into perpetuity, or at least through the November election.
Then there was stuff like this from Bennie Thompson.
What a bombshell, right? I mean, it’s so stunning that it shouldn’t be hard at all to provide direct proof that Trump or anyone in his orbit told the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to fight with cops and enter the Capitol. Yet, that evidence never came last night, and it’s not going to come over the next several days. Because again, this committee has nothing. Rather, it exists to vomit out a bunch of unconnected dots in the hopes of pushing a disproven narrative.
There was no organized, pre-planned insurrection on January 6th. There was a protest where several hundred people splintered off and did a bad thing, and they are paying dearly for it. Donald Trump, as much as one may hate him, did not order or even insinuate an order for people to enter the Capitol. In fact, he did the opposite. All the rest of the pomp and circumstance about Trump associates talking about challenging certification is not illegal. How do I know? Because Jamie Raskin and Bennie Thompson, both members of the January 6th committee, have previously challenged the certification of presidential elections.
This committee is a farce. Listen closely and you won’t hear anything at all. It’s a waste of time, rehashing what we already know in dramatic fashion in the vain hope that people will forget they are paying $5 a gallon for gas and $12 for a pack of bacon. It’s not going to work.