Missing the point on purpose — Congressional Democrats' Capitol Riot investigation

14 June 2022

Today is Flag Day . . .

. . . presumably leading us to appreciate the United States' reason for existing.

Metaphorically meaningfully, Congress is continuing its substantively pointless committee investigation of 06 January 2021's Capitol Riot.

Of this spectacle, Chris Hedges says that:

The Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, whose first of six televised hearings began last Thursday, is spectacle replacing politics.

There is nothing substantially new in the accusations. The committee lacks prosecutorial power.

The choreographed hearings . . . will have no effect on Trump voters, other than to make them feel persecuted, especially with more than 860 people already charged (including 306 guilty pleas) for their role in storming the Capitol.

[The hearings are] designed to present inaction as action and substitute role-playing for politics.

The result is . . . politics as reality television, a media diversion that will change nothing in the dismal American landscape.

There was no acknowledgement by committee members that the “will of the people” has been subverted by the three branches of government to serve the dictates of the billionaire class.

No one brought up the armies of lobbyists who are daily permitted to storm the Capitol to fund the legalized bribery of our elections and write the pro-corporate legislation that it passes.

No one spoke about the loss of constitutional rights, including the right to privacy, because of wholesale government surveillance.

No one mentioned the disastrous trade deals that have deindustrialized the country and impoverished the working class.

No one spoke of the military fiascos in the Middle East that cost taxpayers over $8 trillion,

the for-profit health care system that gouges the public and prevents a rational response to the pandemic, already resulting in over a million deaths,

or the privatization of institutions of government, including schools, prisons, water treatment, trash collection, parking meters, utilities and even intelligence gathering, to enrich the billionaire class at our expense.

Watch the following Capitol Riot video clip

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman presented (and occasionally voice-overed) the same congressional committee's video overview of the Riot:

Democracy Now!, "Hang Mike Pence": Watch Dramatic New Footage of Trump Mob Attacking Capitol on Jan. 6, YouTube (10 June 2022)

Given narrator Goodman's doom-toned . . .

. . . Frontline-like manner, we are to conclude (as Democrats wish) that the Committee's spliced video shows a violent coup in progress.

My own evaluation — as a former cop directly familiar with peaceful protests and violent riots — is that this video only shows a sometimes seriously rioting trespass.

Which (admittedly) for fear-filled, pusillanimous Snowflakes — like Amy Goodman and Democrats generally — would indeed amount to an intolerable demonstration of Demon Citizen lawlessness.

Unless (of course) black-yellow-red-or-brown people did the same thing.

Then, for Democrats, such a similar level of Rioting Rambunctiousness would constitute the very definition of saintly endeavor.

On the other hand, I agree with Democrats that President Trump's instigating contribution to the Capitol rioting was criminal in spirit, if not provably in law.

In short, he and Biden are cut from the same fecal cloth.

My own video-observing conclusions

These comments prepare the ground for another quote from Chris Hedges.

First, from my ex-cop's perspective, the committee's spliced together Riot video demonstrates that there were far too few police at the Capitol. That so, despite advance warnings regarding what was probably going to happen.

Second, it is also clear to me — writing as a former police watch commander — that the comparatively few police (who were at the Capitol that day) were not properly directed, integrated and instructed, regarding what to do under what should have been easily foreseeable circumstances.

Thus, the Capitol's disorganized police defense haplessly encouraged the situation to worsen.

Third, it is equally evident (from watching the Committee's prosecutorially styled video) that none of the rioters had the slightest clue— or intent — as to how to mount a real insurrection.

Just watch the purposeless millings, absence of serious weapons, tourist-like observings and naively serious take-us-seriously statements.

With regard to this totality, Democrats descriptive use of 'insurrection' and 'coup' is semantically, historically and substantively ridiculous.

Re-enter Hedges

With regard to what was really going on at the Riot, consider Chris Hedges' insight:

There was a revealing moment in the hearings when Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards . . . related an exchange she had with Joseph Biggs, a leader of The Proud Boys who was indicted, along with four other Proud Boy leaders, for seditious conspiracy in connection with the storming of the Capitol.

“He started asking us questions like, ‘ . . . you didn’t miss a paycheck during the pandemic,’ mentioning stuff about . . . our pay scale . . . and . . . started turning the tables on us.”

The brief exchange highlighted the yawning gap between the haves and the have nots, which, if not addressed, will turn Trump, his supporters, Biggs, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers into martyrs.

The moral? — Ruminate

Would any of all this have happened, if American leadership were not so self-involvedly corrupt?

Hedges again:

Congress is a cesspool. Corrupt politicians whore for the rich and get rich in return.

[T]he game of pillage and corruption in the name of sacred democratic values no longer works.

A new game is taking its place, one where narcissistic buffoons, who stoke the fires of hate and only know how to destroy, entertain us to death.

With American politics, it is always about concocted false narratives.

It is never about truth, objectivity and the good of the people.

The ability to objectively observe and competently reason is being intentionally propagandized out of American culture and personal character.

The next US flag will (metaphorically) have an empty skull at its center.

Probably sitting atop a pile-of-poo emoji.

PeteFree.com

Missing the point on purpose — Congressional Democrats' Capitol Riot investigation