The January 6 Hearings - Part Eight

The public hearings of the U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6 attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election of 2020 are over until the fall, but they went out for the summer with a bang.

The committee, under the stewardship of Vice Chair Liz Cheney (Chairman Bennie Thompson came in remotely due to a COVID infection), illustrate how Donald Trump spent the three hours and change - 187 minutes to be exact - in which the insurrection at the Capitol took place.  He made no effort to contact the military or law enforcement even as is top advisers and even his daughter Ivanka urged him to call off his dogs.  The government officials who were trying to do just that were Senate leaders Charles Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence.  Pence was closer to the insurrectionists seeking to make him the first Vice President to be assassinated than many people originally suspected, and  many agents protecting the Vice President were convinced they weren't going to get out alive.  Trump's two tweets during the insurrection only egged on the insurrectionists to do their worst.

Here's how afraid people are to testify against Trump: The agents protecting Pence testified anonymously.

I know it may be in bad taste to make light of that, but before the hearing, the committee reported that these agents would testify in disguise, which intrigued CNN anchor Jake Tapper.  I was hoping they'd testify in public, possible wearing ski masks, fake beards, or from behind a partition, but in fact they audio-recorded their testimonies in advance and their voices were distorted.  Mascot costumes would have been a neat way to disguise them for public testimony, or maybe painted clown faces, but you can't have everything.

Here's one funny detail: Although Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri expressed solidarity with the insurrectionists-to-be as he entered the Capitol to take part in the certification of the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election . . .

. . . he high-tailed it out of there when they came in with full guns a-blazin' - he was HAWLIN' ASS!

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better . . ..  Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away! 😛

But even this wasn't as much of a hoot as the outtakes of Donald Trump trying to tape a statement the next day condemning the violence he encouraged without selling himself out - and refusing to say he lost the election.  Or the word "yesterday."  Man, that was more entertaining than finding the lost take of Bob Dylan singing "She's Your Lover Now" in its entirety!

Representative Cheney ended the hearing applauding the patriotism of Trump supporters but declaring that they'd been had by Trump, especially those of them who chose to take part in the insurrection.  She probably had as much luck reaching them as Abraham Lincoln had in his first inaugural address when he urged Southerners not to start a civil war.  But Cheney, wearing white in recognition of the women's suffrage movement of over a hundred years ago, also made it a point to thank the many women - may of them loyal to Trump who testified against him and helped set the record straight.

Hint: She wants to run for President.    

I know this is going to upset a lot of Democrats, but the woman who may finally break the mother of all glass ceilings - in addition to saving our democracy - may be a conservative Gen Xer from the West, and not a coastal bourgeois liberal Baby Boomer.  But she will be from a dynasty.

I can't wait to see what the committee has in store for September.

There's still one thing I don't get . . . Jared Kushner was in the shower?   

Who You Callin' a Pedophile Lover?

You wouldn't call you mama that!

Sorry, I got carried away trying to emulate a sista when I'm not even a brutha, and as I am being politically incorrect, I'll stop there.  But black women won't, now that U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has labeled Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson as being too lenient on child pornographers.

"Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker," Hawley said on Twitter. "She's been advocating for it since law school. This goes beyond 'soft on crime.'  I'm concerned that this a record that endangers our children." 

Hawley took out of context some comments that Judge Jackson made when she was on a commission looking at sentencing guidelines a decade ago.  She professed to being "surprised" by the Justice Department's assertion at a hearing that child-sex offenders may not actually be pedophiles but rather people looking for company among people who are interested in child pornography. "

"So I’m wondering whether you could say that there is a — that there could be a — less-serious child pornography offender who is engaging in the type of conduct in the group experience level?" she asked at the hearing. "They're very sophisticated technologically, but they aren't necessarily that interested in the child pornography piece of it?"

As Will Weissert and Calvin Woodward of the Associate Press wrote, "Being surprised by an assertion and wanting to know more are not the same as endorsing it."

Hawley also accused Judge Jackson being a supporter of terrorists because she represented Guantánamo Bay detainees as a public defender and in private practice.  She did so because they were suspected of being terrorists and every suspect is innocent until proven guilty.  At least that was the thinking until then-Attorney General Edwin Meese explained otherwise in 1985 when asked if he thought criminal suspects should have legal protection from being coerced into confessing to a crime they're being accused of: 

"Suspects who are innocent of a crime should. But the thing is, you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect."

Yes, this man was actually the chief law enforcement officer of the nation for three and a half years.

Meese seems like Louis Brandeis compared to Josh Hawley, whose attacks on Judge Jackson only had one effect - he picked a fight with a black woman, something Messe was smart enough never to do.

And Hawley should know that you should never, never, ever do that, especially if you're accusing a black woman of having an amoral mindset or cheapening and coarsening popular culture.  Because an attack on one black woman is an attack on all of them, and they respond like angry birds of prey on the attacker.  Ask white guys who went after Beyoncé on the cultural issue and ended up needing emergency medical care.

Okay, I'm kidding about the ER bit, but I'm sure there are a lot of honkies whose ears are still ringing from the screams they got from black women after bashing Beyoncé - louder than any sexually charged heavy-metal song they've ever listened to.  Hawley has ensured that black women will be shouting him down as he walks toward the Capitol (looks like he won't be pumping his fists in solidarity with them), they'll jam his Senate office's switchboard with angry calls, and they'll flood his Twitter account with so many negative comments that his account will crash, and possibly Twitter as well.   

The Jackson Supreme Court confirmation hearings begin today.  Expect an entertaining show but not something enlightening.  As for Josh Hawley . . . well, man, I feel sorry for you.  No, not really, I really don't.   Remember - you asked for it!