CT Blue

And some more or less random observations.

First, to the surprise.

I’ve been watching the January 6th hearings on my IPad, and I think they’ve been quite useful, but until yesterday nothing I heard surprised me. Most of it was already known, and what wasn’t already known fit so neatly into the Trumpian pattern that it seemed like old news anyway.

Now, I already knew that Trump had told the January 6 crowd that he’d be walking with them to the Capitol, but I always assumed he was just being Trump. You know, …. lying. But yesterday, Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump actually really wanted to go to the Capitol. Of course, he had no intention of walking. This is the guy, after all, who rode a golf cart during his meetings with European leaders. But he did want to go, which I found surprising because I always figured there was no way he would do anything that posed the slightest risk to himself, particularly when he could dupe others into doing his dirty work for him.

I have no reason to doubt Hutchinson on this point, so I can only conclude that Trump must have believed that the Secret Service was sort of his own Praetorian Guard, not only providing protection but ready to take on anyone he perceived as his enemy. Still, I have no doubt that had he gone, he would certainly have led from behind.

Now, to some random observations.

It has come to my attention that the right is running true to pattern, and attempting to distract from the meat of Hutchinson’s testimony, to which it can not take issue, by challenging her on an almost irrelevant point: whether Trump grabbed the arm of his secret service driver to force him to drive to the Capitol. As the author (Jason Miciak) of the linked article points out, the committee has already gotten testimony from the agent involved. If he had denied that such a thing happened, the committee would simply have cautioned her not to repeat what was, in any event, simply hearsay evidence coming from her. She never claimed to have first hand knowledge of the event, she only claimed that someone told her that it had happened. She also testified that the plan of Meadows, et. al to deal with the January 6th fallout, if I recall her terminology correctly, was to “distract and deflect” by blaming Antifa, etc. So this is part of that pattern, for which the media always falls. An unnamed source, usually, as here, with only asserted second hand knowledge, makes a claim and the media swallows it whole. They beat an irrelevant point to death while ignoring the larger story.

Finally, and this is a bit off the subject, but I said these were random observations, I was a bit taken aback by a paragraph from today’s New York Times article about Rudolf Giuliani’s risible claim that he was assaulted by a guy who patted him on the back and called him a scumbag, which admittedly is very unfair to scumbags. Anyway, here’s the paragraph in question:

The strange political afterlife of Rudy Giuliani is one of the most told stories in American politics: The man who was once “America’s mayor,” leading the nation’s biggest city through its worst terrorist attack, has since tried to overturn the results of a presidential election, gotten caught splayed on a bed and adjusting his pants in a satirical documentary, and on Sunday, gotten a supermarket worker jailed after claiming that he had been assaulted and almost knocked down.

Excuse me, but I’ve seen the clip from that satirical documentary. I believe the Times is being overly generous in stating that Rudy was merely “adjusting his pants”. I think you can get a better idea of what he was adjusting here.