Less is more when it comes to hearing from lawmakers. Big shout-out to whoever jettisoned the common practice of letting every committee member prattle on at every hearing. That genius deserves a bonus. And a medal. And should be put in charge of future hearings. from an editorial in the New York Times by Michelle Cottle.

I want to write a little about the 8th hearing on January 6, but first I want to talk about Fox News. OK, not Fox News per se, but their website on July 22, the day after the hearing. One of the discussions I’ve had with friends – I’m saying discussions because I don’t think they have ever risen to the level of arguments – is about Fox News lying.

My position is that Fox doesn’t lie, they are like the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, or the LA Times – or anybody, really – in that they just curate the news. But sometimes curating is so heavy-handed that it is the same as lying and Fox News on the day after the last Jan 6 Hearing, is one of those times. Looking at the front page above, the first thing I saw was the headline then the four snippets or pseudo-paragraphs below. In three of the four references, the Seattle police are featured and I erroneously jumped to the conclusion that the whole Seattle police force had resigned, big news indeed. Big news that nobody else seemed to notice.

It turns out that what I overlooked was the police badge in the center of the picture and the start of the first pseudo-paragraph that clearly says FLASHBACK. Those are clues – which I missed – that this headline is not about Jan 6th, July 21st, or Seattle. It is about something that happened in Kenly, a small town in North Carolina, a week or two earlier. It’s hard for me to not think that the day after the damning Jan 6th Committee hearing, the headline and pseudo-paragraphs are misleading on purpose.

Anyway, on to the hearings, where, because Democratic Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson was out with Covid, it was almost an all-Republican show. Not surprisingly, the hearings were better for it. It was two and a half hours of testimony about President Donald Trump trying to work up a crowd to change the results of an election. As an example, after the attempted insurrection had begun and after all of Trump’s advisors were begging him to calm everybody down, Donald Trump tweeted, Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done. It was powerful and damning to have a Republican Congressperson, Liz Chaney, ask questions of a fellow Republican, Matthew Pottinger, a former National Security Council official and a former Trump advisor who, in reference to the Tweet, answered “I read it and was quite disturbed by it. I — I was disturbed and worried to see that the President was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty…that was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign”. It was even more powerful because Pottinger had just said, “I felt then as I do now that it was a privilege to serve in the White House…I’m also very proud of President Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments.”

Usually, these kinds of hearings consist of various committee members trying to play to the crowd; their posturing is almost unbearable to watch. This was different, this hearing was actually choreographed to play to the crowd at the expense of individual committee members and it made for much better TV. To hear Sarah Matthew say, “I am a lifelong Republican and I joined the Trump reelection campaign in June of 2019. I was one of the first communications staffers actually on board for his reelection campaign”…and “It was obvious that the situation at the Capitol was violent and escalating quickly. And so I thought that the tweet about the Vice President was the last thing that was needed in that moment. And I — I remember thinking that this was going to be bad for him to tweet this because it was essentially him giving the green light to these people, telling them that what they were doing at the steps of the Capitol and entering the Capitol was Ok, that they were justified in their anger.”

It is easy to say that “the attempted insurrection is over, and we should just move on” but that ignores the deaths of five Capitol police officers, that ignores the physical damage that was done to our Nation’s Capitol, and, most importantly, it ignores the damage done to our nation’s psyche. As Matthew Pottinger said, “And that is, that it — I — I think it emboldened our — our enemies by helping give them ammunition to feed a narrative that our system of government doesn’t work, that the United States is in decline.” 

No wonder Fox News wanted us to think about something else, like Kenly, North Carolina.

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