RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/january-6th-versus-the-durham-revelations-part-one/

There are now two concurrent Washington, D.C.-area dramas.

One is the last gasp of the politically motivated January 6th Committee hearings.

The proceedings have been restarted to coincide with the final stretch of the midterms and to give Rep. Lynn Cheney a last appearance of political legitimacy, before in defeat she loses public attention.

She will be soon orphaned from her current leftwing aficionados who (only) temporarily appreciate her useful idiocy. And her former conservative loyalists see her apostasy as self-obsessed narcissism and teeth-gnashing for naively betting on the complete and lasting disgrace of Donald Trump, the supposedly successful, bipartisan “healing” administration of Joe Biden, and the “return of sanity” of the Republican Party to presentable and nobly losing Washington-centric Romneyism and McCainism. She lost in a landslide in Wyoming, but had she been running for a national office, she would have lost any such effort by a comparable margin.

For all its pathetic virtue signaling, the committee could never get around the fact that Speaker Pelosi, by vetoing Republican appointees, had turned the proceedings into a Soviet-style show trial.

Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson was himself an “election denier” and had voted in early 2005 not to honor Ohio’s state electors in the 2004 election—for absurd reasons. So many of his pontifications were just that, given his own prior record of voting to overturn an election by throwing out the deciding votes in a swing state without cause.

The only two Republicans on the committee, Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, were apparently allowed on only because 1) they had voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and 2) they were seen as likely to have soon no political future and would thus be free to attack Republicans since their careers in the party were doomed.

The committee was birthed in the unreal atmosphere of a militarized Washington of barbed wire and 30,000 federal troops, supposedly to guard against nonexistent “insurrectionists.” And this spectacle was juxtaposed to the then current giddy idea that Covid was over, the vaxes had worked, we were headed for a new America, Joe Biden would “repair” the Trump damage by centrist government, and Cheney and Kinzinger would be heralded as prescient avatars of a new/old Republican Party.

The committee’s worst liability was its abject asymmetry. No one on the committee worried that the media and the government had spread the lie that Officer Sicknick was killed by Trump supporters, when it was known he died a day after the protests from natural causes. No one worried over why congressional overseers had not ordered stepped-up Capitol police presence and oversight, given their many warnings that a large group of protestors would assemble that day outside the Capitol.

While the committee hounded some witnesses for illegal parading, it completely ignored the four-months of continuous rioting, arson, killing, looting, and violent protests during the summer and fall of 2020 that had led not to a few hours of buffoonish discretion of the nation’s congressional chambers (and the unjustified shooting by an initially unnamed Capitol policeman of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt for the misdemeanor of entering the Capitol illegally), but to 30-40 deaths, $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 police injuries, 14,000 arrests, and attacks on iconic churches, federal courthouses, and police precincts.

How can a committee formed to investigate “insurrection” not investigate mass violence often directed against federal property and state law enforcement, and organized by Antifa and BLM in conspiratorial fashion on social media?

As the committee wound down, it had almost zero television audience. The leftwing news had increasingly become bored and found it of little political use or intrinsic value. And the John Durham investigations simultaneously released “bombshell revelations” of how the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 (and beyond) and the FBI had in cahoots attempted to destroy a political opponent and hijack election…