Jim Jordan owns arguably the loudest mouth in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Ohio Republican usually is unafraid to spout whatever lies pops into his vacuous noggin. The lies he spews usually involve Donald J. Trump and the so-called “phony” investigations into the myriad allegations often attached to the former POTUS.
Suddenly, though, the blowhard/liar/alleged traitor has fallen quiet. He won’t admit to sending Trump a message imploring him to call off the 1/6 rioters. But he did! He sent the POTUS a message that sought to get him to put a stop to the riot.
Why won’t Jordan tell us what he did? I think I know. Because it flies directly counter to the defense he has mounted on Trump’s behalf as evidence mounted in the waning days of his administration about the violence he provoked on the day of the Capitol Hill riot.
I have written already about the Republican cowards who populate the GOP caucus in Congress.
I have concluded that Jim Jordan is the king of the cowards.
The hits just keep coming as they regard the Fox News Channel and the lies that continue to flow from a network that used to proclaim itself to be the “fair and balanced” presenter of news.
Wow! We hear now that Fox News personalities implored Donald J. Trump to stop the 1/6 insurrection. They emailed him, asked Don Jr. to tell Dad to make ’em stop rioting at Capitol Hill, urged White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to get Trump to intervene.
Trump did nothing. He didn’t heed the pleas of his own son, his own chief of staff or those of his favorite network talking heads.
A more serious aspect of this, though, are the lies that kept flowing from the pie holes of those same personalities. They told their viewers that the riot was not a big deal. That Trump was being vilified unfairly. That he didn’t incite anyone to “take back the government.”
The credibility — if you want to call it such — of the likes of Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro et al has been shattered into millions of pieces.
All this chatter about Islamic terrorists and the “threat” they supposedly pose to Americans ignores a key point made in 2019 by the director of the FBI.
Christopher Wray, appointed to his post by Donald J. Trump, told Congress that the “biggest threat” to Americans’ security and safety comes not from foreign terrorists, but from the home-grown, corn-fed variety of domestic terrorist.
Wray offered that analysis, of course, prior to the events of 1/6 and the domestic terror attack launched against Capitol Hill, where Vice President Mike Pence was presiding over the Electoral College vote certification from the 2020 presidential election.
All of those yahoos were from right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Yet we hear from nut jobs such as U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., say that one of her colleagues, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is cozy with terrorist groups. Indeed, Boebert implied that Omar might be a terrorist herself, given that she’s a Muslim who emigrated to this country from Somalia.
Let’s keep our eye on the ball, shall we? FBI Director Wray is correct to suggest that the larger threat comes from within.
The liars at Fox News have been given notice by two of their contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, that they ā the contributors ā will not tolerate the lies broadcast by Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson.
Goldberg and Hayes said they cannot stand with the network after it broadcast Carlsonās special on the 1/6 insurrection. Carlson called it āPatriot Purge,ā and according to Goldberg and Hayes ā two leading conservative thinkers and columnists ā the program was full of lies, distortions and unfounded conspiracy rumors. They wonāt be part of a network that allows such lying to go unchallenged.
Good for them.
To be honest, I didnāt watch it. I donāt need to watch what I know it contains. I have heard Carlson spew much of the trash I know he poured into the production of āPatriot Purge.ā
According to The Wrap:Ā Carlsonās āPatriot Purgeā has drawn sharp criticism since its launch, with the Anti-Defamation League calling on Fox News to cancel it. āLetās call this what it is: an abject, indisputable lie, and a blatant attempt to rewrite history,ā ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan A. Greenblatt said in a letter addressed to Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch. Greenblatt expressed alarm that the āfalse narrative and wild conspiracy theoriesā presented in āPatriot Purgeā could āsow further divisionā and possibly āanimate violence.ā
Fox News has given itself ample reason to be ashamed of itself. Carlsonās phony documentary is just one more example of the lies that pour forth from a network that once boasted to be āfair and balanced.ā
If past is prologue as it relates to the 2022 congressional election, then it’s wise to urge the U.S. House select committee to finish its investigation into the 1/6 riot sooner rather than later.
As in … before the 2022 election.
After that, again if history is going to repeat itself, Republicans are going to take control of the House of Representatives; Nancy Pelosi no longer will be speaker and the GOP will likely move rapidly to shove the results of the 1/6 probe into the crapper.
Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has issued subpoenas of several key White House aides who are privy to what occurred the day Donald Trump incited the riotous mob to storm Capitol Hill. I will call the riot what it was: an insurrection. The terrorists sought to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
The panel, chosen by Pelosi, wants answers. So do many millions of Americans. As for who might be speaker if the GOP takes command of the House, he is a 1/6 riot denier. I refer to Kevin McCarthy, also of California.
The reality is that McCarthy has talked out of both sides of his pie hole regarding that terrible event. He scolded the POTUS immediately after the crowd dispersed, but then reverted to form and voted against creation of an independent commission to study the matter.
Thus, it become imperative for the House select panel — which contains two key Republican lawmakers — to finish the job to which it has been tasked.
U.S. House of Representatives Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is only partly right about the mission awaiting the House select committee’s probe into the 1/6 insurrection.
McCarthy today said the panel should concern itself only with why the Capitol security was so lacking and “how to prevent” such a riot from recurring.
Wrong, leader McCarthy!
There’s also this thing about what the 45th president knew at the time of the riot, what he didn’t do to call a halt to it and did he really have that conversation with McCarthy in which he told him that the rioters cared more about the Constitution than McCarthy did.
The terrorists who marched onto Capitol Hill on 1/6 to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election committed an insurrection against the government. House members and senators were doing their constitutional duty in certifying the election.
The House select panel is tasked with finding out all there is to learn about what happened, why it happened and, yes, how to prevent it from recurring.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy needs to stop obstructing the panel from doing its job and adhere to the oath he took to “defend and protect the Constitution,” which the insurrectionists sought on 1/6 to destroy.
Hell will freeze over, Earth will spin off its axis and the sun will rise in the west long before I ever will understand how some congressional leaders can justify their resistance to investigating the events that lead to 1/6.
I want to mention a couple of them specifically: Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader of the U.S. Senate.
Why those two? Because both of them spoke eloquently in the days immediately after 1/6 about the complicity exhibited by the former president of the United States, the nitwit who incited the insurrection that sought to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
McConnell said POTUS “provoked” the riot that stormed Capitol Hill. McCarthy reportedly was on a phone call with the Numbskull in Chief, who told him that the rioters “care more about the election than you do, Kevin.” They both aimed their rhetorical fire straight at POTUS 45.
Then they turned tail and scampered into the tall grass.
They both against the impeachment and against convicting the president of inciting the insurrection. They have resisted calls to form an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the 1/6 riot. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nixed two GOP members of the select committee she formed, McCarthy pulled the rest of the Republicans he selected for the panel and then said Pelosi was playing politics with the investigation.
Neither of them will call the events of 1/6 what the rest of us know to be true: that it was an insurrection.
These two men lead the GOP caucuses in their respective legislative chambers. Sadly, too many of their minions agree with them. But not all of them, I am happy to declare. There really are Republican politicians who are able and willing to stand for the Constitution and for the rule of law. Most of them? They appear to be hopeless.
Thus, we have my lack of understanding of what has happened to a once-great political party.
