Just to make sure I receive full appreciation for the arduous work involved in writing it, I refer you to this. It explains terza rima, the convoluted rhyme scheme involved:
Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet…There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameters are generally preferred.
So, without further ado, I bring you:
ACQUAINTED WITH THE WHITE
I have been one acquainted with the white.
I have walked out in snow–and back in snow.
I have watched drifts climb to impressive height.
I have felt blizzard winds that rage and blow.
I have shuffled my muklukked, booted feet
And sniffled wanly, crying, “Woe, oh woe!”
I’ve slipped on ice and skidded down the street
And heard those dying voices with my fall*
Then gone inside to fix myself a treat.
“Snow is design of whiteness to appall,”**
My favorite poet would say, with keen insight.
(Just note his name; he’s called “Frost,” after all.)
I’ve heard friends call me wrong, and far, far Right.
I have been one acquainted with the white.
Today they’re hearing arguments on its constitutionality, and they’re pretending to consider them soberly. But I can virtually guarantee that the mind of every senator was already made up before today, and that the answers fall pretty much as they did before: every single Democrat voting “yes, this is constitutional” along with maybe five RINOs, and the rest of the Republicans voting “no.”
The correct answer is undoubtedly “no.” And I would say that no matter who they were trying to convict from whatever party, if that person was no longer in office.
The point of the 1960s, again we were taught, was to tear down the rules, the traditions and customs, the hierarchies of the old guys. The targets were supposedly the uptight, short-hair, square-tie, adult generation who grew up in the Depression, won World War II, and were fighting to defeat Cold War Soviet Union.
The good guys, the students, and the activists, if they only had power, were going to break up corporations, shame (or “eat”) the rich, and bring in young, hip politicians. Reformers like the younger Kennedy brothers, the John Kerry war hero-resisters, the Bay Area Dianne Feinsteins, and the hip Nancy Pelosis would disrupt the “status quo” of politics.
They would all push hard for assimilation and integration of the races, and the equality of the sexes in pursuit of universal equality of opportunity…
Fast forward a half-century. What did these now-late septuagenarians give America?
Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm.
But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.
We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.
Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis.
I have a few quibbles with Hanson, although I generally agree with the way he is describing the trends. My first qualifier is that the Boomers (which is the generation I believe he is describing, which is my generation and his) were just part of a long continuum that began way before they were born and continued into more recent generations. The 1960s were an important transition time, but they did not stand alone and other hands have taken over since then and greatly extended what for want of a better term we’ll call the Gramscian march.
My second qualifier is that Nancy Pelosi is of an earlier generation. She was born in 1940 and graduated from college in 1962. Although that’s nominally the 60s, it really isn’t in cultural terms; it’s more akin to the 50s. She stayed in local politics (the family business) until the late 1980s, and only came onto the national radar screen after 2000. Not a creature of the 60s or even the 70s at all, although she certainly rode the changes it wreaked.
The same goes for Dianne Feinstein, only more so. Born in 1933, she graduated from college in 1955. Then she went into local San Francisco politics and only began to hold national office in the 1990s. I just don’t see either Pelosi or Feinstein as having any prominence during radicals’ 60s dreams.
I also see the major movers in this entire transformation as multi-generational and mainly cultural, with the political following the changes in education, entertainment, and the press. As Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.”
[NOTE: In an old post of mine I discuss a formative experience that allowed me to understand the 1960s in a way that was much more ominous than optimistic, even as the 60s were unfolding. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Much of school and even college felt like the memorization of dry and irrelevant facts. Many novels seemed obscure and and hardly applicable to my life, and one would have thought that would have been even more true of these startling and intense Russian works from a time that seemed so distant then (although it seems much closer now; odd how that happens, isn’t it?).
But something in them rang a bell, especially as the political upheaval of the 60s progressed. That bell had a sound not only of strange and inexplicable familiarity, it was also an ominous toll of warning. The books seemed to speak to the troubled times in which I was living, and made me realize that there is hardly any new thought under the sun. Those headstrong revolutionaries of the far-off Russian past were not stilted figures in an old and faded photo; they too closely and uncomfortably resembled the rebels of my own generation, who thought they had invented protest and cast off the shackles of the past.
But it was Dostoevsky—as well as other 19th-century Russian writers I was assigned in a college course entitled “Russian Intellectual History,” the single most memorable course of my college career—who informed me across the span of time that my generation was at least as stupid and short-sighted, and even more lacking in knowledge of history, as those Russian firebrands of long ago who thought they were building a better world (some of them thought that, anyway) and ended up constructing a police state and the Gulag in which quite a few of them met their own ends, as well.
After that, I could never see the self-righteous zealot revolutionaries of the 1960s as taking us anywhere but down.]
More Americans have died from COVID-19 in the first three weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency than during the entire Vietnam War, a grim milestone for a leader who vowed to make ending the pandemic “the first priority, the second priority, and the third priority” of his administration.
The COVID-19 death count since Biden took office on Jan. 20 surpassed 60,000 over the weekend. That is more than the 58,220 American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1975.
But surprise, surprise. It’s not big news – unlike a similar milestone under Trump:
Numerous media outlets marked the occasion when COVID-19 deaths surpassed Vietnam War deaths under former president Donald Trump…
…[T]he Washington Free Beacon appears to be one of the only media outlets whose dedication to the truth compels us to diligently track COVID-19 deaths under Biden, the milestone has received far less coverage this time around.
To equate war deaths with deaths from a disease that is taking a worldwide toll in ways that are as yet poorly understood but that don’t follow a strict adherence to the policies or lack thereof laid down by the leaders of each country is to be logically inconsistent. So Trump – whose policies seemed quite reasonable to me – and Biden (whose policies on COVID so far don’t seem much different, except for some jawing about federal mask mandates on public transportation) shouldn’t be blamed for those deaths. Nor can they rescue us, except economically by lifting most of the restrictions, and physically by helping make the vaccine readily available.
So, why am I writing this post? To point out the absurdity of Biden’s suggestion that he had some master plan to combat COVID. Anyone who believed that was deep into wishful thinking and gullibility. And yet I would wager there were a lot of people who did believe him. They were the same people who believed the rhetoric that Trump had murdered everyone who died of COVID (or with COVID, as the case may be).
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
There’s certainly something to that, but I’m not sure it’s a whole lot. Sometimes history repeats itself again as tragedy once again, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say farcical tragedy.
Is there such a thing? If so, we may be living it right now.
For example, there’s journalist Virgina Heffernan (credits: LA Times, NY Times, etc.), who ponders one of the deepest and most pressing moral and ethical questions of our age: what to do when a Trump-loving neighbor does you a favor.
Dilemma for writer Virginia Heffernan. When it snows at her ‘pandemic getaway,’ helpful neighbors plow her driveway unbidden. Do a ‘great job.’ What a nice thing! They don’t do this in the city! Only problem: Neighbors support Trump. 1/10
Heffernan frets. Realizes ‘I owe them thanks.’ But Trump! Heffernan becomes suspicious: This could be, like, a terrorist thing: ‘Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free.’ OMG! They’re Trumpite terrorists! 2/10
Or they’re Trumpite Nazis! After all, French collaborators said the Nazis were very polis, French for ‘polite.’ ‘So when I accept generosity…acknowledging the legitimate kindness…am I also sealing us in as fellow travelers who are very polis to each other?’ 3/10
This is terrifying! And what if the neighbors commit some other kindness in the future? What then? Heffernan: ‘What do we do about the Trumpites around us?’ 4/10
‘My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans,’ says Heffernan. ‘They kept him in business with support.’ And I’m supposed to accept generosity from THEM? 5/10
Still, they plowed the driveway so nicely. What to do? Heffernan thinks and thinks, comes up with answer: I’ll acknowledge their kindness with ‘a wave and a thanks.’ But no ‘absolution.’ No way. ‘Free driveway work…is just not the same currency as justice and truth.’ 6/10
But wait! Heffernan *can* give her neighbors something. She’ll give them the opportunity to apologize for supporting Trump! 7/10
More importantly, Heffernan will offer her neighbors the opportunity to put aside what they believe and take up what she believes. What could be more generous and neighborly? 8/10
Heffernan: ‘I can offer them a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed.’
Thus Virginia Heffernan comes up with a way to repay the spontaneous kindness of neighbors: A wave, a thanks, and an invitation to become like Virginia Heffernan. What more could a neighbor want? 10/10 End.
This woman is one of the many voices who are presently instrumental in shaping public perceptions of historic events. Therefore a glimpse into her mind is instructive.
I have noticed a somewhat related phenomenon in my own life since January 6 and the intensification of the labeling of everyone on the right as evil conspiratorial insurrectionists. Several people I know – who don’t usually discuss politics with me at all – have asked me abrupt questions that amount to requiring me to take a kind of loyalty oath or pass some sort of test. It’s not “are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” It’s “do you think the election was stolen and that Biden isn’t our president,” and “do you believe in QAnon’s theories?”
These questions are rather easy for me to answer if I choose to, and whether I choose to do so depends on my relationship to the asker. The first answer is: “So far we don’t know how much fraud occurred, because the evidence has never been given a fair hearing, something I wanted to happen. But Biden has been inaugurated nevertheless and therefore is president.” The second answer is, “No.”
These questions from these particular people – who, as I said, are not ordinarily given to political interrogations and already know my basic politics, which differ from theirs – are a sign to me that the left’s narrative that everyone on the right is a potential insurrectionist has taken hold in the general population. That’s why Heffernan can write a column like that and not get laughed out of the business.
The Bee Gees came briefly onto my radar screen in the late 70s through the extraordinary popularity of their “Saturday Night Fever” score. Then for me they faded out of sight and hearing, and I never thought of them again until YouTube suddenly decided to recommend a Bee Gees video to me about a month ago. I idly clicked on it and was immediately fascinated. I plan to tell that story in another post, but for now I’ll concentrate on their harmonies.
As I said in Part I, singing siblings have a special ability to perform close harmony, probably a combination of nature and nurture. But as I listened to the Bee Gees again, I found that their particular harmonies had a special resonance and an almost otherwordly uniqueness, even among sibling groups. Over and over I would read comments or articles in which people would say that when they listened to the Bee Gees they felt calmed or soothed or happy or all three, and that they found their music and in particular certain songs to be addictive – a word that came up a great deal. Some even suggested that their harmonies induced some sort of change in brain waves in the listener, or a form of hypnosis. Some people said they had been listening to the Bee Gees every day for fifty years or more.
I have no idea how many people have this reaction to the Bee Gees, but the number seems sizeable. There are also some people who hate them – who find their falsetto period particularly annoying. I’m not sure that any other major rock/pop group causes such stark polarization, such love and such hate. Most of the haters hate the Bee Gees’ disco music in particular, and often are unaware of their vast (and I mean vast, a total of over 1,000 songs they have written) catalogue of other types of music. “Cheesy” and/or “Alvin and the Chipmunks” are two of the criticisms frequently aired.
But those who love them really really love them – and in the last month I have to say I’ve entered their ranks, which has been a big surprise to me.
So, what’s going on here? Darned if I know for sure. But I have some ideas. First, a little relevant background.
The Bee Gees were three brothers starting out at roughly the same time as the Beach Boys. Barry Gibb was three years older than fraternal twins Robin and Maurice, but the brothers always insisted they were more like triplets and no one was the leader, and that they wrote the vast majority of their songs together. Their musical output as a group spanned close to forty-five years, until brother Maurice Gibb died at the age of 53 in 2003. If you do the math, you’ll realize that means they started as children, and indeed they were child performers in Manchester, England and then as the Bee Gees in Australia.
Like the Beach Boys’ three Wilson brothers, the three Gibb brothers shared a bedroom as young kids. But because the Gibb family (drummer and bandleader father, band vocalist mother) was so poor, the three Gibb brothers had to share a bed as well. When Maurice and Robin were five and Barry eight, they discovered that they could harmonize effortlessly and instinctively (with that ESP quality again, like the Boswell sisters I discussed in Part I), all three having perfect pitch, a wide vocal range, and a fascination with music. When their parents overheard them singing, they thought it was the radio, and discovered to their surprise it was the three little boys.
They made a pact at a very early age that they would write their own songs, sing as a trio, and become famous. Unlike most childhood pacts, this one was fulfilled. Even as children they became the family breadwinners, and can be seen performing on Australian TV in the 1950s and early 1960s in many YouTube videos. There are a ton of adult Bee Gee interview videos on YouTube as well; here’s one from 2001 I’ve cued up to show a short segment of them talking about the first time they discovered they could harmonize, and how it made them feel:
Here’s a short video (about four minutes) where they tell their early story, which I find fascinating (it can’t be embedded, so you’ll need to click on this link).
After returning to England the Bee Gees became very famous in the 1960s when the twins were around seventeen and Barry twenty, then broke up for a while and reunited, and then were much less famous for a few years. The falsettos didn’t come into play until 1975 in the song “Nights On Broadway,” only a couple of years before they reached the ultra-mega-fame of their first comeback (they had several more comebacks), with “Saturday Night Fever.”
I think that one of the keys to the addictive nature of their sound was the fact that, although as brothers their voices shared some difficult-to-describe quality of tone, their voices were also highly distinct from each other. Two of the brothers – Barry and Robin – were bona fide lead singers with extraordinary and unusual vocal timbre and range. Actually, they all had phenomenal vocal range, they all could sing in chest or head voice or falsetto, and so one feature of their songs is that when they’re doing three-part harmony the listener can’t always distinguish who’s doing the high or low parts and sometimes they switch off. In the following video, the structure of the song “Run to Me” is a good example of their separate voices and then the effect of the three all together (circa 1974). Here Barry sings the verse (including some use of his deep chest voice), Robin dominates the first two lines of the chorus, then all three finish the chorus:
Another live version, I think around the same time:
And here is an example of the Bee Gees’ staying power. This is a live performance in 2002 when they were in their fifties, about a year before Mo died and the group was finished. I believe it is from their last concert together. In addition, it’s an example of what Mo was talking about in his interview about the first time they sang together and how he still gets a thrill when they perform, especially their acoustic medleys with one mic. That’s what they’re doing here, and it’s a short excerpt from the same song “Run to Me” over thirty years later:
One of the hallmarks of the Bee Gees is how much they seem to enjoy performing together. That joy can spread to the audience. It certainly spreads to me when I watch them.
This rather curious article in Time (yes, Time still exists) is getting a lot of attention. You might think that the title of this post is fanciful or facetious, but it’s pretty much a summary of the self-congratulatory title of the piece (by Molly Ball): “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”
Our rescuers:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
Left-wing activists and business titans: always looking out for us. As they have been for quite some time. Such a relief to know.
More from Ball:
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
The Voter Protection Program – again, just working for our own good, looking out for us. How touching. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to listen to some of these recruiting sessions, and/or the way they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation.”
Looking at the people on the board of the Voter Protection Program, it is immediately apparent that it is, as expected, a combination of Democrats and of RINOs extraordinaire. The bulk of the latter consist of old Bush and McCain aides, many of whom backed John Kasich in the Republican race in 2016. There is an emphasis on lawfare to make sure that the innovations in voting rules that reduced voting security were defended in court, and on working with attorneys general of the various states. The Republicans on the board are people who have made themselves available to give a bipartisan face to the war against President Trump, and no doubt they were extremely eager to disassociate from him and work to destroy him in 2020.
Some people writing about the article indicate that it’s an admission that the participants gamed the election in various ways to enable Biden’s win. But the article does not admit that. It does something far more devious – it claims that everything this group did was non-partisan, had absolutely nothing to do with wanting Biden elected, and was merely for the noble purpose of guaranteeing a fair election and making sure people didn’t believe Trump’s conspiracy claims which they of course knew would be false even before the election occurred. And to do this, they paradoxically helped to relax the election rules so much that actual fraud and/or claims of fraud would be far more likely, and they did that only for the very noble purpose of stopping the nefarious “voter suppression” the GOP was trying to accomplish. You see, all efforts at voter security can be re-defined as voter suppression, and many courts will buy it.
This is the sort of thing the left and the current Democratic Party (as well as the self-righteous NeverTrumpers) specialize in. They define Trump as evil and any effort to stop him as noble rather than biased, because they are stopping evil and lies.
Still, since the article reads like a confirmation of what the right has been saying all along about the Democrats’ and their allies’ efforts to undermine Trump, why publish it? Ball has this answer [emphasis mine]:
“Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
My guess is that this story was going to get out anyway – or already has, in the right’s “paranoid fever dream” that turned out to have been correct – and the group wanted to make sure it is defined and described in the way they would like the public to think of it: as a “for your own good” protective device that fortifies democracy.
And they have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Cheap. Oh, and Russian collusion elected Trump in 2016.
I want to doubly highlight the last sentence of that quote from Ball’s article: “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.” In other words, they have to continue to manipulate and massage the way information gets to you, as well as to use the legal system, in order to “protect” you from yourselves and the ugly populist democracy you’d like to vote for. So get ready for more of the same, and even an intensification of the control they will wield now that they are in power.
The article is very long, but well worth reading. I haven’t finished the whole thing, although I plan to do so. Here’s a particularly interesting part in light of the events of January 6:
The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.
As I said, just read it.
[NOTE: By the way, we had a few small hints of this prior to the election. For example, remember the downfall of Jeffrey Toobin during a Zoom call? Remember that it occurred during an election simulation? This was another pre-election story about these “gaming” preparations.]
I wonder how many people in LA County who recently voted to elect George Gascon as their DA were aware that they were voting for a man who believes in the minimum sentences for everyone. It’s hard to believe a majority of Angelenos are for this:
Bruce Davis, a member of the Charles Manson cult, brutally murdered two men and was found guilty. Now, Gascon’s new policy is such that no matter the sentence nor the crime, parole will not be opposed by the DA’s office. Period.
““This Office’s default policy is that we will not attend parole hearings and will support in writing the grant of parole for a person who has already served their mandatory minimum period of incarceration, defined as their MEPD, YEPD or EPD. However, if the CDCR has determined in their Comprehensive Risk Assessment that a person represents a “high” risk for recidivism, the DDA may, in their letter, take a neutral position on the grant of parole.”
Let that sink in.
I think a great many Democratic candidates for office these days are stealth candidates, hiding the extent of their leftism at least to some extent. Obama was the first. I’m not saying that Gascon was hiding the fact that he was a leftist and that he would institute leftist polices if he was elected. But I do think the extremity of what he was planning was hidden. I did a search to discover what Gascon said about parole when he was running for office, and all I’ve found – at least so far – is this from an October 20, 2020 list in a document entitled “GEORGE GASCÓN’S PLAN TO EXPAND DIVERSION, REDUCE INCARCERATION, AND PREVENT RECIDIVISM IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY.” The heading above this paragraph is “Support Parole”:
When a defendant is sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, the law presumes that they will be paroled, after serving the minimum sentence imposed, unless they continue to pose a risk to public safety. Thousands of people serving life sentences have been paroled in recent years and are leading positive, productive lives with an extremely low rate of recidivism. However, under Jackie Lacey, the LA DA has reflexively opposed parole in nearly all cases, even when the person in front of them has clearly demonstrated true change and rehabilitation. As DA, I will fulfill my ethical obligation to follow the law and support second chances for people who have worked hard to improve themselves and no longer pose a risk to public safety.
Certainly doesn’t sound like “Once the minimum has been served, I will never oppose parole no matter what, and I will ban all my prosecutors from ever opposing parole as well.”
At any rate, Gascon’s policy has at least three effects. The first one – described in that first linked article – is to leave families of victims without support from the DA’s office. The second is that it will likely increase LA’s crime rate. The third is that prosecutors in the office who cannot abide these policies will tend to quit, leaving Gascon and those underneath him free to shape the personnel there into the lean mean non-fighting machine he prefers.
This video by Frei and Barnes is two and a half months old, and I missed it when it came out. But it presents a relatively succinct discussion of the challenges Trump’s legal team faced in trying to fight possible fraud and other suspicious anomalies in the 2020 election, and I think it’s worth taking a look at even now:
“[Trump] absolutely should be charged with premeditated murder because of the lives that were lost for this invasion with his insurrection,” she told MSNBC. “For the president of the United States to sit and watch the invasion and the insurrection and not say a word because he knew he had absolutely initiated it – and as some of them said, ‘he invited us to come. We’re here at the invitation of the President of the United States.'”
Five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died amid the chaos.
As I’ve written in post after post (the most recent being this one), so far the only person we know of who may have actually been murdered, rather than having died accidentally, is Ashli Babbitt – who was killed by a member of the Capitol Police. So perhaps Waters should instead be calling for these as-yet unnamed “House of Representatives and Senate security officials” – who are reported to have nixed more security for that day despite reports that violence was planned (and/or the common sense prediction that attempts at violence would occur) – to be charged with murder. Or any of the people described in this article as having blocked adequate security for the day.
The title of this post is sarcastic, of course. But it is astounding to see all this rhetoric from the Democrats about healing and the simultaneous escalation of charges against Republicans, and to realize that half of America doesn’t notice the extreme hypocrisy or perhaps applauds it in an “ends justify the means” rationale.
On January 26 I wrote a post titled “Deadly riots” that explored the cause of death of the five people whose deaths have been claimed to have been caused by the January 6th riots and/or rioters. One was Capitol Police Officer Sicknick, and I concluded, based on all the information I could find at that time, that we have no idea whether he was actually injured by rioters, whether or how those injuries might have caused his death, or what his actual cause of death might have been. I based that conclusion on information available in the MSM and from official reports as well as statements from his family.
I updated that information on February 1 with this post that added that early reports in the MSM had been that he died of a stroke. These reports seem to have fallen by the wayside but have never been retracted; they merely were replaced with assertions that he’d been hit in the head by a fire extinguisher hurled by a rioter or rioters, and had died of this injury. You can find the details at the link.
Now I see this CNN article appearing on February 2, which is headlined, “Investigators struggle to build murder case in death of US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick.” What is the struggle about, and what is the case for murder so far? Why, it’s about finding no evidence at all that Sicknick sustained any injury at the hands of rioters [emphasis mine]:
Investigators are struggling to build a federal murder case regarding fallen US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove someone caused his death as he defended the Capitol during last month’s insurrection.
Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal injuries, law enforcement officials familiar with the matter said.
Note how cleverly this is written. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that we know for a fact that there were such injuries, we know what they were, and all that’s missing is photographic evidence.
More:
To date, little information has been shared publicly about the circumstances of the death of the 13-year veteran of the police force, including any findings from an autopsy that was conducted by DC’s medical examiner.
That’s exactly one of the things that caught my attention, too. It seems to me that information should have been released. What’s more, it seems to me that so-called reporters should have been clamoring for it. But no.
Furthermore:
In a statement the day after the insurrection, Capitol Police said that Sicknick had been “injured while physically engaging with protesters” and collapsed as a result of his injuries sometime after returning to his office. He died the next day in a local hospital.
The way [the Capitol Police statement is] written you simply cannot tell what happened, except that some injury to the officer seems to have occurred while the riot was ongoing and he was engaging with protestors. It doesn’t say his injury was sustained at anyone’s hands, it does not say what the injury was, it does not say how long it was between the injury and his death, it does not say why his injury did not cause him to go to the hospital and why he just went back to his division office, and it does not mention a fire extinguisher. It also does not say on what basis the Capitol Police concluded he died of that injury or injuries, as opposed to some other cause such as a heart attack…
In its February 2 article, CNN goes on to add some surprising admissions – surprising considering this is CNN, that is, not surprising to anyone following the case closely or reading this blog [emphasis mine]:
In Sicknick’s case, it’s still not known publicly what caused him to collapse the night of the insurrection. Findings from a medical examiner’s review have not yet been released and authorities have not made any announcements about that ongoing process.
According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.
One possibility being considered by investigators is that Sicknick became ill after interacting with a chemical irritant like pepper spray or bear spray that was deployed in the crowd. But investigators reviewing video of the officer’s time around the Capitol haven’t been able to confirm that in tape that has been recovered so far, the official said.
The case could also be complicated if Sicknick had a preexisting medical condition. It could not be learned if he did.
Byron York has also touched on some of the dogs that haven’t barked concerning January 6 in his Washington Examiner piece from yesterday, in which he lists nine question s he has submitted to Capitol Police (complete with follow up calls) that have gone completely unanswered. He points out that these are standard questions with answers that are usually released even at the start of investigations, and so the failure to answer is unusual. Although York’s questions are different from the questions I asked in my post of January 19 entitled “How little we know about what actually happened on January 6,” they are related and the idea behind the article is similar. It turns out that although two and a half weeks have passed since my piece we still know next to nothing.
Here are York’s unanswered questions:
How many Capitol Police officers were injured in the riot?
What were their injuries? What is their condition now?
Did Capitol Police confiscate any firearms from rioters? If so, how many and what types?
What is the status of the investigation into the killing of Officer Sicknick?
Is there an autopsy report for Officer Sicknick? If so, will it be released to the public, or will its key findings be released to the public?
What is the status of the investigation into the shooting of Ashli Babbitt? Has it been ruled a justifiable shooting?
Who was the officer who shot Ms. Babbitt?
Did any other officers discharge firearms during the rioting? If so, under what circumstances?
Did any rioters discharge any firearms during the rioting? If so, under what circumstances?
I think it’s very likely that the present administration, the Democrats, and the press are hoping that the narrative around Officer Sicknick’s death that they’ve already established in the minds of the vast majority of Americans – that right-wing Trump-supporting rioters killed him by bashing him in the head with a fire extinguisher – will continue to serve its purpose. In order to do this, it’s important to keep any information that might tend to undercut that narrative away from the public. If the Capitol Police are told to do that, I am assuming that they follow orders.
I’m not sure why CNN would have even written that article, however, unless some of its readers were clamoring for more information. But how many people will read the article compared to the many millions for whom the narrative has already been firmly set? Probably relatively few. And even that that group will probably find what’s written there to be ambiguous enough that their minds are unlikely to change.
Everything I wrote about the gaps in this case back in January and a few days ago could have been easily noticed by any reader or any reporter willing to do a little online research into Sicknick’s death. All the information was easily available in the public domain. All it took was curiosity and a little time – not even a ton of time. But the left and the MSM and the Democrats are counting on a lack of curiosity and effort. The narrative is serving its purpose, and it’s important to set it early and to repeat it often. Mission accomplished.
[NOTE: As I’ve said in previous pieces on this, of course it’s possible that we’ll find out that Officer Sicknick was in fact killed by rioters wielding a fire extinguisher. I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean I know. I also wonder if they’ll ever release any more information to clarify what caused his death.]
