By Jim McCraw
The committee investigating the January 6th riot at the Capitol has now presented an amazing mountain of evidence, direct testimony, live witnesses, tweets, phone calls, emails, messages and comments from a small army of witnesses, almost all of whom are not only registered Republicans but also were members of government at some level.
The latest hearing, broadcast in prime time and carried by at least four networks, concentrated this time on the possible dereliction of duty by a sitting president of the United States in that he started a riot and refused to stop it even after blood was shed in the Capitol and the vice president’s life was threatened. Even after members of his own family implored him to make it stop.
Instead, the former president chose to sit on his prodigious ass in front of a TV tuned to Fox News for three hours, sending out more inflammatory tweets through the afternoon.
The former president has known since the morning after the 2020 election that he lost. He lost by a lot in the popular vote, and he lost by a lot in the Electoral College.
After 60 allegations of voter fraud were shut down by judges all over the country because there was zero proof, the Big Lie just got louder and wider and Stop The Steal was born.
For two months, aided and abetted by Republican officeholders and politicians from coast-to-coast, the Big Lie prospered while the democratically elected President-elect was trying to build his team while being attacked daily from the right-side media for having stolen the election from their boy.
There was no proof. The guy who lost never, ever offered any proof of fraud while The Lie Machine invented stories and videos about voting machines controlled from space, truckloads of ballots being removed, and secrets being passed in voting places, all of which was nonsense. The Attorney General of the United States, a devout Republican, said so.
The guy who lost stirred up so much anger, so much frustration, so much hostility that thousands of his deluded followers went to D.C. to show support. All the rest is on video for everyone to see.
The former president has committed crimes, including dereliction of duty. But there was dereliction of duty all over D.C. the night before, the day of, and the day after by so many, many more.
•••
From Our Twitter Poll
So there are a lot of anti-Americans out there. BFD. The leader of the cult should not be in the position of authority. He failed spectacularly when he was.
--GG
_____________________________________
He never should have been in the first place.
--Virginia Lynne Stevenson
____________________________________
How can there possibly be 27% of Americans who have seen what we have seen think he could serve in authority anywhere?
--Elizabeth Beans
____________________________________
Democracy was used to come to the conclusion that Trump should not be trusted with any authority position.
--Tokyoo