LONDON—According to Mr. Google, I am 3,430 miles from home.
It’s nice to be back in London, though I’m sorry to report that my visit was occasioned by the funeral of an old and dear friend. (By “old friend” incidentally, I mean that we had been friends a long time, not that he was old.)
Such things—long-distance travel, mortality rendered up close and personal—tend to impart a sense of broader horizons and more meditative perspectives to our appreciation of events.
This is how I see A.E.’s beautiful, late poem. Housman. These lines are found towards the end.
The flesh will grieve for bones other than ours
Soon, the soul is going to be in mourning in other bodies.
Our proud and angry dust is causing us trouble
Are from eternity, and will never fail.
We must bear them.
Housman is full melancholy observations that are more sad because they are true. Such meditations can have the effect of making many pressing, everyday problems seem distant and faintly comical.
Over the past several weeks, my inbox has been full of news about the preposterous “Jan. 6” show trial in Washington, D.C. It was my first time writing about it here a couple of weeks ago.
This exhibition of untrammeled power is ostensibly for the purpose of determining who and what caused the jamboree at Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The real purpose is to destroy Donald Trump…or at the very least, make him unelectable in 2024.
Regular readers are aware that I believe that the events that occurred on that day were at most partially organized by or with the consent of government agents.
I also believe that the response to the events of that day were wholly framed by a virulent, anti-Trump media bent on seducing the public into believing the incredible story that the unarmed protest at the Capitol was an “insurrection,” an assault on “our democracy” worse than 9/11, Pearl Harbor, even the Civil War.
You don’t have to travel 3,000 miles to understand that the Jan. 6 committee’s show trial, with soon-to-be-former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., presiding, is a flop everywhere except Washington and in the imaginations of the anti-Trump media.
Most people across the country care about out-of-control inflation, soaring energy prices, and an economy that’s spiraling into recession or worse.
The anti-Trump obsessions that the deep-state apparatchiks have with their media megaphones are barely registered. Which is why the Jan. 6 committee has resorted to increasingly desperate measures to exorcise its bête noir.
With dubious legal authority, the committee has enlisted the coercive power of the state—especially our newly energized Stasi, sometimes known as the FBI—to harass and intimidate anyone connected with Donald Trump.
These goons have raided Trump associates and supporters at dawn and made sudden arrests. They clapped them in handcuffs and leg braces, confiscated their personal property and generally acted like the secret police of an authoritarian state.
What have we seen in the past weeks? such as Peter Navarro, Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman should give us all pause.
Liz Cheney somehow managed to use the Stasi against her political enemies. Who gave her the authority? sic the FBI on John Eastman?
Fox’s Tucker Carlson just aired a long list of victims of the regime.
It’s been a sobering show the committee members have put on, but somehow their investigation still lacked traction.
Then, just a few days ago, they resorted to desperate measures, just as the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee did when their initial efforts to torpedo Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was foundering.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s pathetic efforts to parse Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook were not doing the trick, so they unleashed witness Christine Blasey Ford.
Cassidy Hutchinson is Liz Cheney’s Christine Blasey Ford.
Hutchinson, an ex-aide to Trump chief staff Mark Meadows was wheeled onto the stage to paint a grim picture of the president.
Liz loved it so much that she gave Hutchinson her a copy nice hug.
Hutchinson, among other things, reported that she heard Trump assaulting members of his security team.
She also said that she had heard that he lunged for his limo’s steering wheel, apparently in an effort to commandeer the car.
The spittle wasn’t dry on Hutchinson’s microphone before her story was refuted by diverse sources, including the Secret Service itself.
Outside the frenetic precincts of the anti-Trump brotherhood, Hutchinson’s story was instantly transformed into fodder for comedy.
The Babylon Bee had one, as is becoming more common these days.
“Jan. 6 Committee Says,” a headline in the Bee roared, “Cassidy Hutchinson Told Them That She Heard Mark Meadows Say That A Secret Service Agent’s Friend’s Cousin’s Husband Once Heard That One Of Trump’s Other Aides Said She Thinks She Heard Him Say He Wanted To ‘Do An Insurrection.’”
Exactly.
Some anti-Trump commentators claim to have found Hutchinson’s testimony “devastating.”
It was preposterous and probably coached.
We are still making an inventory of her misstatements and circulation of hearsay.
Hutchinson, for example, stated that she had written a note regarding a possible Trump statement to stop the protest at Capitol.
However, it turned out that the note was actually written by Eric Herschmann who is an attorney for Trump.
As John Daniel Davidson reports in a splendid piece for The Federalist: “The handwritten note that Cassidy Hutchinson testified was written by her was in fact written by Eric Herschmann on January 6, 2021.”
This via a spokesman for Herschmann himself: “All sources with direct knowledge and law enforcement have and will confirm that it was written by Mr. Herschmann.”
Oh dear.
It used to be, when it was Donald Trump or one of his surrogates who was being grilled, that the Latin principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus would be strictly enforced. False statements regarding one thing cannot be considered credible. False in one thing is false in all other things.
But Cheney has affirmed her absolute “confidence” in Hutchinson’s testimony.
Different opinions exist about Cheney’s merits. I do not believe she is a fan of Hutchinson’s twisted testimony.
Davidson, in my opinion, got to the heart of the matter.
In “The Jan. 6 Committee Is Causing Never Trumpers To Lose Their Minds,” the Federalist column I cited above, Davidson notes that although Hutchinson, billed as a star witness, “did indeed make a number of explosive claims … The problem is that she didn’t actually witness anything.”
Indeed, as I noted above, Davidson writes: “Her hearsay claims were blown to pieces almost as soon as they appeared, in some cases because people with firsthand knowledge immediately came forward to dispute them, and in other cases because the claims themselves were ridiculous on their face.”
Hutchinson is not like Christine Blasey Ford (or Julie Swetnick)remember her?), is but a dispensable prop in Cheney’s disgusting efforts to subvert the rule of law by prosecuting her vendetta against Trump.
As Davidson concludes:
If anything, Hutchinson unwittingly confirmed that the Jan. 6 committee is a farcical show trial, the purpose of which is to criminalize political opposition to Democrat Party rule and advance the false narrative that President Trump is not just responsible for the Jan. 6 riot, but that he’s guilty of treason.
Touché.
The Jan. 6-committee will be disbanded or transfigured by the midterm elections. Cheney will be cast into outer darkness, a place, as St. Matthew put it, of fletus et stridor dentium (weeping and gnashing of teeth).
This commentary was originally published in The Epoch Times.
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