I don’t have a television, so I will be watching the January 6 hearings on YouTube, most likely not when they originally stream, but I’ll catch them in repeats.
Some readers (assuming there are any) might expect me to have a cynical take on them, but, at least so far, I think things are going well.
I’m no fan of Liz Cheney, as her politics are horrible, and I think she’d be fine with fascism, so long as it’s ushered in as her Dad tried to do. That being said, I think having her do most of the presentation was a good idea, as it helps give the lie to the “partisan witch-hunt” line of argument.
Being a geezer, I can recall the Watergate hearings, which I avidly followed. There really aren’t that many similarities, and that’s a sign of how far we’ve declined. The Watergate hearings, and the impeachment hearings that followed, really were pretty bipartisan. The only person I can recall acting like a Jim Jordan or his ilk was a Republican Congressman from New Jersey named Sandman, and he pretty quickly became the object of almost universal derision. If memory serves, he lost his seat in the next election. Had there been a Fox channel back then, he would have been made into a national hero.
Another difference: during the Senate Watergate hearings we actually learned things we didn’t already know. For the most part, we’ve learned nothing in these hearings that a person paying attention didn’t already know. But that’s fine, because the hearings are aimed at the people who have not been paying attention. One exception: the fact that multiple Congressional criminals asked Trump for pardons after January 6th. I don’t know what the overall game plan might be, but I sure hope they spend at least one hearing exposing those people. One doesn’t ask for a pardon unless one has a consciousness of guilt. Taking a step back, once again we must ask, why are these people so stupid as to think Trump would do anything for them? Were he to have pardoned them when they asked he would have been publicly admitting that the insurrection was a criminal enterprise in which they, and by extension, he, was involved. By that time it had been made clear to Trump that pardoning himself was not likely to work, so why should he have done anything for them while increasing his own exposure?
Pop Quiz question: Has this country really declined so far that these people would have accepted a preemptive pardon and still expected to win reelection, even in a bright red district? Answer: “yes”.
Speaking of quizzes. Here’s one everyone should take.
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