Ashli Babbitt

Although the public has other things to worry about — like runaway inflation and a collapsing stock market — there has been a lot of static about the January 6 show trials that opened last Thursday on location in Washington, DC. I’ve contributed to the cacophony myself, though not without misgivings. As rumors swirl about important changes in the cast next year — Liz Cheney, for example, is said to be returning to her real constituency in Georgetown — a friend writes to remind me that the entire show may be eclipsed by a new kid on the block: the June 8 House Select Committee to investigate the plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home in a partially disclosed, insecure location.

Imagine a BLM member's trial in which the prosecution simply played violent videos over and over, which weren't even related to the defendant in question. Sound fair? No? Well, welcome to the Third Trump Impeachment, aka the January 6 televised hearings. Having watched a lot of PBS back in the day, I kept waiting for chairman Bennie Thompson to promise a Democratic Party tote bag if I phoned in my pledge of $50 or more. That was the tone from, as they say, gavel to gavel. But there are so many important things being left out in the Dems' desire to showcase violence. Here are just five of the issues that the hearings have left unquestioned. *** Dems and groupie Liz Cheney constantly use words like coup, insurrection, incitement, sedition, and treason.

Despite the best efforts of the media, the Democrats, and Liz Cheney, the Capitol protests of January 6 refuse to lodge themselves in the public consciousness as a nightmarish enormity. According to The Narrative, it was an “insurrection” that was worse than 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor, the worst attack on “our democracy” since the Civil War. Yet almost no one believes that. Why? Because at the end of the day, the rambunctious events of January 6 were nine tenths theater, one tenth tragedy. Tucker Carlson was right. It was a protest that “got out of hand.” That fact is slowly crystalizing as the official narrative begins to crumble. The other day, I wrote a column lamenting Ted Cruz’s comments at the Senate hearings on the January 6 protest at the Capitol.

At least since the 2016 election, one of my favorites politicians — one of the few I could stomach at all — was Ted Cruz. He is certainly one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress — not, I know, a high bar, but Ted really is someone with deep rhetorical gifts, an illuminating grasp of constitutional principles and a steely eyed appreciation of political realities. After a very brief flirtation with Scott Walker, my favored candidate for president in 2016 was Ted Cruz. I endorsed him publicly and even labored on the outskirts of his campaign for a couple of months. But it was not to be. His announcement that, should he win the Republican nomination, he would pick the egregious Carly Fiorina as a running mate made me raise an eyebrow.

The season is almost upon us of lachrymose memorials to the victims of 9/11. As a nation we choke each year as the anniversary approaches. We can talk about the heroic firefighters and cops, those first-responders who that day sometimes made their last response. We can recount the lists of the dead and the daring of some survivors. A great many Americans remember in vivid detail how the horrors of that day intersected their own lives. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what 9/11 meant and still means to the nation. Even in this age of declining historical literacy, we have a ready sense of the defining importance of more remote occurrences: Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, D-Day. These days, we should add 1619, Wounded Knee and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.

Who shot Ashli Babbitt, the pro-Trump Air Force veteran who was killed by police during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol building? The American people were told that it was a Capitol Police officer who fired the fatal shot. But Cockburn has stumbled across some information that points to a different explanation. Sources close to and within the intelligence community tell Cockburn that Babbitt was actually shot by a member of then-vice president Mike Pence's protective detail. The VP's detail, of course, is provided by US Secret Service, not the Capitol Police. One person asserted to Cockburn over drinks in DC that this is 'basically an open secret' in the intelligence community.

Isn’t normality great? That’s been Joe Biden’s selling point from the beginning, ‘normality’. Back in March 2020, the former conservative Bill Kristol announced that Biden represented the ‘simple’ choice for the ‘normal American’. Biden wasn’t Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders — but especially, just between us, he wasn’t Donald Trump — ergo, etc. Achilles was the ‘swift-footed’. Ronald Reagan was ‘the Great Communicator’. Joe Biden is — what? People talk about ‘gaffes’, but that is unfair. A ‘gaffe’ is a clumsy social error, a faux pas. Emitting gibberish when you can’t remember the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence is not the same thing as committing a gaffe.