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Where Were You on June 9, 2022?
On the ninth day of the sixth month, in the year of our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Two, the American House of Representatives convened a television show about a political protest some years earlier. The clips from this show will be used as “facts” for elections in 2022 and 2024. These clips will be used by Democrat campaigns, of course, but more to the point, they will be used by the state-run media to condition voters and vote managers. The more people in on the next steal, the less work each plotter involved must do.
I cannot rate the show very highly. It has terrible pacing and features weak performances from the usual crew of identical new faces who for some reason keep showing up on our screens. It wasn’t like this in the old days. It used to be that a show needed some strong performances and tight writing to get popular. There was a kind of platinum age of television heralded by the beloved but now-unwatchable “Babylon 5,” which was a watershed in long-arc, multi-season plotting of a broadcast series. Shows followed in different genres: “The Sopranos,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Dexter,” “Game of Thrones,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul.” This current offering from the House is poorly done. It’s amazing it got greenlit.
I never watched the Sopranos until these days. I’m midway through the fourth Season.
Published in General
I think he would be right in there with them
What authority did he have over those people? We have him on video saying that people would march to the capitol and “peacefully” demonstrate. Some didn’t listen to that, so why would those people listen to any other words he might use?
Tell Cheney to exercise caution, not me. You also need to exercise caution.
He had informal and formal authority. The informal is that he should have immediately condemned the actions and did whatever he could on social media, etc. to urge the mob to cease. This would have been the decent, moral thing to do, even if it didn’t work.
The formal is that he should have immediately coordinated with the Capitol police and mobilized the national guard. Instead he essentially cheered the rioters on–which was disgraceful.
I had be reasonably told by his detractors that President Trump was a moron.
I am then to believe that this idiotic reality TV star, created a intricate 7 point plan with lots of moving parts and was well on his way to over throwing the government.
Is Trump a dunce or an evil genius? He can not be both.
Like her dad. She is evil. He was evil. The deal with evil is that weak people are taken in by its allure.
This is patently false. He did tell the “mob” to go home. He did not cheer on “rioters.”
The Star Chamber deliberately left off those parts, which is why we dissent.
The Commentary podcast discusses this. Some there are skeptical that the committee can point to a discreet 7 point plan, as opposed to, in hindsight, Trump’s actions able to be dumped into 7 separate categories. Trump just doesn’t work in a systematic fashion like that. The committee is probably overpromising in this department.
Just that construction — that they were thisclose to overthrowing the government — is so over the top hysterical that the only response should be laughter.
How were they going to do that, being unarmed and milling about aimlessly?
But that’s the Narrative that shall not be questioned.
Meanwhile, fully armed officers fatally shot one unarmed protester and fatally beat another. And we’re supposed to just go “okay, that’s reasonable use of force.”
This is not patently false. He waited a long time before issuing a tepid request for the mob to stop. I think the testimony will show he privately approved of the mob and that he dithered for a long time before doing anything.
The Capitol police are a different branch of government. It was Pelosi that changed the coordination procedures beforehand that made it more difficult to initiate a National Guard response. It is unlikely that with the old procedure that the National Guard could have responded before things ended.
What is disgraceful is that Nancy Pelosi refused to allow the National Guard to be deployed beforehand and that Chuck Schumer failed to pass on specific threat intelligence he was given on the 5th. The GOP, when they take over will do a serious investigation about the what and why of the security failures.
Mobilizing the National Guard actually takes some time. These are people with regular (non-military) lives. Trump offered 10,000 National Guard troops days before the riot. The police turned them down. Trump had the Guard on stand by. That is the only reason they were able to react as quickly as they did.
We don’t normally have National Guard troops sent to places that the police do not ask for them to be. The Capitol Police were in charge of the situation, they needed to react. The Capital Police are housed in the legislative not executive branch, Trump had no authority over them, nor possibly any ability to send them troops until they asked for them.
https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/trump-admin-was-ready-to-deploy-national-guard-on-jan-6-capitol-police-timeline-shows-january-donald
Thanks for this, Hoyacon.
I had no interest in watching. I expected it to be a show trial and a farce. From the descriptions that I read, it seems to have been carefully prepared and scripted. When the script includes a blatant lie like this, the entire enterprise loses all credibility for me.
Gary, I think that you should be extremely troubled by this. Do you agree that what this Bennie Thompson fellow said is a blatant lie?
No disagreement re: the Capitol police not being under the control of the executive branch. Do you have a citation that the National Guard was not permitted to deploy beforehand? Admittedly, it has been some time since I read a lot about Jan. 6, but I do not remember reading that the executive branch was hindered in calling out the Guard. Even if there was hindrance beforehand, I can’t imagine that once the mob entered the Capitol, the police would have refused assistance from the Guard.
In any event, can you link to any support for your claims?
Fair point–thank you for the link.
So if this was not a truly thought out concrete plan, then the argument becomes more Trump was flailing around and randomly trying all sorts stuff at the same time, throwing pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The idea that this “flailing about” that had virtually no chance of success was an existential threat to democracy, that we were just that close to the government being over thrown, is just crazy.
I agree with this generally. But it does not make Trump’s behavior on the 6th any more palatable.
What I have read is that before the 6th Trump offered to mobilize the national guard to provide protection to the capitol, but that the final decision was Pelosi’s, and that she declined. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is, how is it Trump’s fault?
I’ve read the article you linked to–thanks. Several thoughts: first, there appears to be lots of blame to share. The Capitol police first rejected the mobilization of the Guard, only to reverse course one day later. For some reason though, the Trump administration never got around to completing the mobilization. I thought this was an interesting quotation:
“As Sund’s requests were denied, the Trump administration continued working on getting then-President Trump to formally authorize the deployment of as many as 20,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 rally, according to Just The News, which conducted interviews with then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel.”
Why did President Trump never authorize the deployment then?
Finally, the mayor of DC bears blame too. She expressed an opinion publicly asking the Guard not be deployed, but she has no authority so to do. DC is under federal oversight, and no one should have listened to her opinion if they thought additional assistance might be needed.
@Jager’s linked article above suggests that this is at least partly true, but that there may well have been a healthy amount of blame to share.
Who disputes this other than the Jan. 6th committee and NTs?
Great discussion, folks!
Bite your tongue. B5 is still one of the best TV shows around. Yeah, yeah, graphics, yeah, yeah, not in High Def, but the stories from that show are still some of the absolute best that have been televised. I have yet to see a season that was better than Season 4 (though the cancellation of Season 5 forced JMS to speed up the conclusion of the Shadow War and push the much less interesting Psi War into the TNT hosted Season 5. But unwatchable…certainly not.
This kind of reminds me of 2015. There were two groups, pro-trump and anti- anti-trump. A lot of people weren’t really sold on Trump but the over the top attacks on him got people first to defend him and then ultimately to support him.
I have no trouble with the idea Trump could have done things differently/ better on Jan 6.
Existential threat to our democracy, nearly over throwing the government, worse then 9/11 or Pearl Habor, all this junk gets me back to defending Trump from over the top and unrealistic attacks. This gets me closer to a increase in support for Trump in the future.
I wonder if there is a real risk that this televised dog and pony show will actually increase rather than decrease Trump support
Doubt it moves the needle at all.
Oh, count on it.
Polls already show dropping support for the Dems’/Nevers’ Jan. 6 Narrative. This will continue.
Meanwhile . . .
Where’s the hearing on this event? Which Democrats encouraged this?
If the repubics had a pair and if they take over the house in November, we’d find out, but I suspect they’ll want to kiss and make up with the Demo-rats.
See:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/01/08/maryland-governor-describes-delayed-permission-to-send-national-guard/
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/01/12/why-the-dc-national-guards-role-was-limited-during-us-capitol-riot/
From NYT: