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Levin writes: "On Tuesday, more than six months after Donald Trump sent a violent mob to overturn the results of the 2020 election, four police officers delivered searing testimony detailing their experiences defending the Capitol as it was under attack."

Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy. (photo: Getty)
Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy. (photo: Getty)

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McConnell and McCarthy Confirm They're Cowards With No Souls on First Day of 1/6 Hearing

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

29 July 21


They claimed to have better things to do than listen to testimony from the officers who saved their lives.

n Tuesday, more than six months after Donald Trump sent a violent mob to overturn the results of the 2020 election, four police officers delivered searing testimony detailing their experiences defending the Capitol as it was under attack. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone told lawmakers he was beaten unconscious and suffered a heart attack after being shocked with his own Taser multiple times. “I was dragged from the line of officers and into the crowd,” he said. “I was electrocuted again and again and again.”

Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn said rioters told him, “This is our house” and taunted him with racist abuse, yelling “This n-gger voted for Joe Biden!” and “Boo! Fucking n-gger!”

Sergeant Aquilino A. Gonell testified that the mob threatened to kill the police, describing the attack as scarier than anything he‘d seen on duty in Iraq, and adding that he believed he was going to die that day.

Officer Daniel Hodges called the rioters terrorists, said someone tried to gouge his eye out, and testified that he was told by a rioter, “You will die on your knees.”

In short, it was a harrowing way to kick off the House Select Committee’s investigation into the January 6 attack, and anyone who listened to the words the officers had to say would have no doubt been moved, if they weren’t already, to do whatever they could to hold the people responsible for the events that day accountable. Which is why Republicans, save for the two actually willing to tell the truth about Trump and the GOP’s culpability, were nowhere to be seen.

After months of refusing to investigate the insurrection, killing an attempt to form a bipartisan commission to probe the riot, and swearing the attack wasn’t actually that bad, shameless, cowardly Republicans spent the day trying to discredit the proceedings as the officers literally testified about nearly being beaten to death. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who replaced Liz Cheney as the third-ranking House Republican, suggested the failed coup that left five people dead was Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Jim Jordan decried the investigation as a partisan “charade.” And the two highest-ranking Republicans in Congress, who also happen to be the most full of shit, claimed they were simply too busy to spend a moment of their days to hear testimony from the people who saved their lives.

As Cheney, who’s been made a pariah in her party for daring to say out loud that Trump incited the mob that came to the Capitol that day, said in her prepared remarks, “If those responsible are not held accountable, and if Congress does not act responsibly, this will remain a cancer on our Constitutional Republic, undermining the peaceful transfer of power at the heart of our democratic system. We will face the threat of more violence in the months to come, and another January 6th every four years.” Which is apparently just fine with the GOP.

Cheney: Donald Trump can run but he can’t hide

Well, he can hide, probably under the breakfast buffet in the Mar-a-Lago dining room, but the 1/6 committee is still nevertheless going to find out what he did:

Cheney focused her remarks on Tuesday on the former president’s role, urging lawmakers to find out “what happened every minute of that day in the White House.”

“Every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack,” Ms. Cheney said.

In an interview before Tuesday’s hearing, Cheney suggested the committee could subpoena Trump, as well as Kevin McCarthy. (According to CNN, the two men chatted as the attack took place, with the then president refusing to call off the rioters.) “This is absolutely not a game. This is deadly serious,” she said.

Also on Tuesday, Officer Dunn likened Trump to the guy who hires a hit man to kill an enemy, emphasizing that the person paying the hit man doesn’t just get to walk away unscathed. “If a hit man is hired and he kills somebody, the hit man goes to jail,” Dunn said. “But not only does the hit man go to jail, but the person who hired them does. It was an attack carried out on January 6 and a hit man sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

Here’s a story about terrible people harassing individuals who‘ve chosen to continue mask-wearing for very good reasons

It takes place in a city in Missouri that, not surprisingly, loves itself some Trump, and in addition to being comprised of people who view mask-wearing as a personal affront, display their unvaccinated status as a badge of honor. Per Politico:

Depending on your politics, the scene at Backwater Jack’s is either a symbol of reckless abandon or unapologetic living in the face of a pandemic. It is one pole of the divide that has erupted across the country, which increasingly seems cloven into two Americas: vaxxed and unvaxxed. In the Lake of the Ozarks region, where Missourians and out-of-staters pour in to boat, fish, sunbathe and party, to be unvaxxed is a source of identity and—at times—pride, a totem of one’s independence and politics.

Among the few who admitted to getting vaccinated, some described being shamed by friends or family. One woman, Brittany Hanlon, who wears a mask while battling cancer, said she was heckled for doing so while walking through a Wal-Mart. “Take off your mask!” two women shouted at her as she tried shopping. The women told her, “that the mask was making them uncomfortable,” Hanlon recalled, “which I don’t understand. It’s not like I was doing anything mean or inappropriate, I just had a plain black mask on.” An employee at the Ha Ha Tonka State Park Visitors Center, in the Lake of the Ozarks area, Hanlon says she wears a mask while interacting with roughly 600–700 people a week there. She is typically greeted with sneers and requests that she remove it.

Earlier this month, three counties near Lake of the Ozarks were declared COVID-19 hot spots by the Missouri Department of Health & Human Services. In a letter to the community published Sunday, doctors at a local hospital wrote, “The patients in the current wave of COVID admissions are sicker and declining more quickly than those in previous waves. They are also younger. About half of the COVID-positive patients we’ve admitted this month are younger than 59. Seventy-five percent are 69 or younger. This is a virus. There is no cure—only avoidance through vaccination and preventive measures. Treatments are limited and marginally effective. We can address the symptoms and support the patients, but their bodies have to do the hard work of overcoming breathing difficulties, blood pressure drops and eventually failure of the lungs and other organs.“

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