Democrats Ignore Their Own Role In Capitol Breach

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

The Jan. 6 hearings set to begin tonight will be even more predictable than the prime-time fare they are preempting. Once again, we will be told the story of a narcissistic president who helped whip up the mob in the mad hopes of overturning the 2020 election.

This drumbeat melodrama will spotlight Donald Trump’s infamous recklessness and showcase the damage he and his most fervent supporters did that day to their country, and themselves, when they breached the Capitol in the name of a lie.

It is an important story but also a familiar one, pounded home for a year and a half in repetitive front-page articles and cable news chyrons. We get it. The hearings will not go beyond this storyline. They will not offer penetrating insight into the deeper forces that set the stage for that horrific day because they are not an honest pursuit of the truth but a partisan effort to eliminate a sworn enemy and give Democrats a more positive 2022 political narrative than rising crime rates and even faster rising inflation.

While Democrats and their “Never Trump” brethren broadcast yet another episode of “Evil Orange Man,” the story we need to see is “Jan. 6: An American Tragedy.” The Capitol riot was not the singular result of Trump’s frustrated mind. It was a reflection of the aching anger and mistrust that is metastasizing across our body politic. Trump did not create this cancer; he fed off it. It will not be cured by excising him.

Like Robert Mueller’s blindly partisan report – which discovered innumerable innocent contacts between Trump cronies and Russians but ignored the central role Hillary Clinton and her crew played in fabricating the Russiagate conspiracy theory – the Jan. 6 hearings will disregard the central role Democrats played in sowing the seeds of this tragedy.

Democrats and their media allies gave Trump supporters plenty of reasons to believe their man would never get a fair shake by mercilessly maligning the president as a Russian agent and the second coming of Adolf Hitler. These same forces may have swung the election in its final days by falsely claiming that the laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which suggested the candidate’s involvement in Hunter’s shady business dealings, was “Russian disinformation.”

Democrats helped sow doubts about the election by exploiting COVID fears to ram through a series of “electoral reforms” that favored their side, including the widespread use of mail-in ballots that were accepted with relaxed standards. Democrats also enjoyed an unfair advantage through the unprecedented use of private money to finance a public election, especially the $322 million Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave to a progressive group which appears to have funneled much of the money to Democratic strongholds in swing states. Perhaps all this one-sided activity was above board, but it raised reasonable concerns about electoral integrity.

Democrats also laid the groundwork for Trump’s claims of a “rigged election.” Since George W. Bush’s victory in 2000, they have ascribed Republican wins to thievery, fraud, and voter suppression. The chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, voted to overturn the results of the 2004 election and his fellow committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin challenged the certification of the 2016 race. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are just a few of the other party leaders who declared Trump an illegitimate president by falsely claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Democrats and their media allies have made a hero out of Stacey Abrams, despite her refusal to admit she lost the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia.

Democrats also helped normalize the violence that occurred on Jan. 6 by tacitly endorsing the often-violent protests that erupted in their strongholds following George Floyd’s killing. Their muted response to the rioting and looting that filled our television screens and ravaged our downtowns – the scenes of diners and politicians being harassed by left-wing protestors – sent a dangerous message about acceptable behavior.

Democrats on the Jan. 6 committee have only fueled this distrust of government in the 16 months since the attack. While pledging allegiance to “the facts” and “the truth” as they rail against Trump’s “Big Lie,” they have steadfastly failed to challenge the false narratives casting the riot as a deadly assault. Only one person died that day as a direct result of the violence, a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. Committee members have not demanded that the Capitol Police explain why it claimed that Officer Brian Sicknick had died from injuries sustained “while physically engaging with protesters”when a medical examiner determined that he had succumbed to “natural causes.” Nor have they asked why the New York Times reported that a Trump supporter “appears to have been killed in a crush of fellow rioters” when, in fact, she died of a drug overdose (the “paper of record” has still not corrected this error).

Democrats on the committee have also shown little interest in addressing the admitted failures of law enforcement. Nothing seems more central to its mission than determining what might have been done to control the crowd. But the committee has largely ignored the Inspector General report that found that the Capitol Police had failed to act on intelligence suggesting a potential threat, lacked a comprehensive plan in the event of violence, and did not adequately respond to officers who were frantically requesting backup during the melee. It has also shown little interest in videos that appear to show officers allowing Trump demonstrators into the Capitol.

None of this absolves Trump or the rioters, who are facing the full force of the law for their actions. The Democrats are not responsible for the Jan. 6 assault, but they certainly share some of the blame for helping create the climate in which it occurred.

By ignoring these factors, the Jan. 6 committee is just another symptom of our nation’s sick soul. Instead of bringing us together through an honest reckoning of our broken politics, it will only deepen our anger and mistrust.