Let Ahab Beware Ahab
liz cheney really wants that orange whale
And here we go again.
After the January 6 Committee held its final-for-now public hearing, the news media rushed to explain how damning the spectacle was. Here’s the account from The Hill. As I said yesterday, the people tribally chanting this stuff don’t notice what they’re saying, and casually undermine themselves without seeing what they’ve done.
So. The Hill:
Former President Trump was caught on candid camera — and the results were damning.
The panel obtained raw footage of two crucial Trump addresses to the nation.
One was on Jan. 6 itself, when, after hours of violence at the Capitol, he recorded a video in the White House Rose Garden saying the rioters should go home; the other was an address delivered the following day.
The latter was the more startling because it showed Trump repeatedly objecting to the script that had been loaded into his teleprompter.
So Donald Trump recorded a videotaped message on January 6 telling the “rioters” to go home, and that message was released to the public that day. What Trump said on January 6 was go home. But behind the scenes on the next day, January 7, unheard by the public until July of 2022, he privately complained about the script of another message he delivered on that second day; therefore, he fomented an insurrection on January 6. If you’re having trouble tracking all of that, try smoking some drain cleaner.
This appears to be the actual claim: Trump’s private comments on January 7 caused the actions of rioters on January 6. He secret-back-fomented!
This construction of facts, this attempt to assign later private thoughts to change the color of a public statement and render it its own opposite, is tortured to the point of madness, or of silliness. He said X, but he later thought Y, and that proves that he said Y instead of X.
The Hill then claims that Liz Cheney is “the star” of the January 6 Committee, and “the most effective Trump critic among Republicans on Capitol Hill” — immediately before saying this:
Her opposition to Trump has been disastrous for Cheney’s political fortunes, however. She was long ago ousted as a member of the Republican House leadership. Now, she looks likely to lose a House primary to a pro-Trump candidate, Harriet Hageman.
A poll for Cheney’s home state Casper Star-Tribune last week put her down by 22 points. The primary is set for Aug. 16.
By the time the hearings resume in September, Cheney might be officially on her way to becoming an ex-congresswoman.
She’s the highly effective star of a major political event; for example, she’s about to be thrown out of Congress.
At the risk of going out on a limb, here, monomania may cloud judgment.
On the one hand, a younger me would have loved to watch this farce with popcorn (and probably make it a drinking game). On the other, I don’t need it to know how completely unhinged they are. Trump broke them, no doubt. The sad part is the reach and power they still have even after 6 years of being wrong about literally everything. LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Unbelievable
The people who accuse Trump, who offered to deploy National Guard troops to protect the Capitol on Jan. 6, of fomenting a riot after it occurred are largely the same people who excused and encouraged far more destructive riots in real time throughout the summer of 2020. The real difference is that the riot at the Capitol, which featured middle-aged Republicans taking selfies and very little actual damage, inconvenienced and frightened important people as opposed to the far larger numbers of inconsequential people who were the victims of the Democrat-sponsored riots. In fact, to some extent the victims of the summer of 2020 overlap with the targets of the Jan. 6 committee, the people who are supposed to shut up and take it.