All the President’s Mensches - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
All the President’s Mensches
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When does the January 6 Committee hold hyped hearings showcasing the Secret Service agents contradicting the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson?

“The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the effing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,’” the “witness,” who admittedly did not witness anything of the sort, testified. She claimed, “The president reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel.” She indicated Trump grabbed the man’s neck area.

The 26-year-old, though coming across as a nice young lady showing signs of neither uptalk nor vocal fry, struck as the type of person lurking around watercoolers rather than riding shotgun in the presidential limousine.

“[Tony] Ornato and [Bobby] Engel, who remain active Secret Service agents, have said they are willing to testify under oath to dispute Hutchinson’s narrative, even as they have refused to speak publicly about it,” the Hill reports. “The unnamed driver, the agency has signaled, is also denying her account.”

In other words, the man (Ornato) Hutchinson said told her the story, the secret service agent (Engel) in the car, and the anonymous driver all refute her second-hand account.

The committee suppressing the actual eyewitnesses and highlighting the one peddling hearsay necessarily follows its unprecedented composition, in which Nancy Pelosi rejected Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, other Republicans understandably withdrew, and the remaining body comprises partisan Democrats and two Republicans who despise Donald Trump almost as much as their constituencies despise them.

A balanced committee makes for an adversarial process. It cries foul, like an opposing lawyer in a courtroom, on second-hand accounts. It calls witnesses who might undermine the incoming argument prevailing among the majority. We do not see this on this committee because only people on the record as disliking Donald Trump sit on this committee.

Like the Watergate break-in during a reelection that Richard Nixon won before announcing, stacking the January 6 Committee with haters and partisans undermines in its overkill. One need not twist reality to make Donald Trump look bad on the worst day of his presidency. But the droolers and hyperventilators, in their zeal to vindicate their argument that Trump lied and undermined democracy, lie and undermine democracy.

The politically motivated fabrications about the Capitol riot predate the committee’s summer-replacement-series run.

A protester’s overdose outside of the Capitol became, in the words of the New York Times, a victim likely “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.” Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson used hers and the deaths of others not caused by the tumult at the Capitol as a means of saying that “seven people lost their lives.”

Committee member Adam Schiff infamously altered the message of a forwarded text between Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows that distorted not only the author of the words but the meaning of the message itself.

The articles of impeachment supported unanimously by the committee members blame Trump for inciting his followers, who “killed law enforcement personnel.” The zealots learned this from the zealots at the New York Times, which reported that “pro-Trump supporters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. [Brian] Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.” Furthermore, “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” Officer Sicknick suffered no bloody gash because nobody hit him with a fire extinguisher. He did not get “rushed to the hospital.” Sicknick, in fact, described himself as in “good shape” afterwards. Hours after the riot ended, Sicknick suffered two strokes and died the next day. (READ MORE: The Credibility of the January 6 Committee Implodes)

Thompson and other Democrats now attribute law-enforcement suicides long after the fact to January 6. Blue lives matter (when they serve the narrative).

Enough truths exist to serve the committee’s purpose of disparagement. Donald Trump did not, as he bizarrely claimed to supporters that day, win reelection in “a landslide.” The tweet that Mike Pence, in presiding over the count of electoral votes, “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” betrayed a loyal vice president as it misunderstood the vice president’s role.

Why embellish what needs no embellishment?

We like telling ourselves ideologically comforting lies. January 6 represents, on both sides, the power of politics to induce self-delusion.

Daniel J. Flynn
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.   
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