According to Mr. Google, I am 3,430 miles from home.
It’s nice to be back in London, though I’m sorry to report that my visit was occasioned by the funeral of an old and dear friend.
(By “old friend” incidentally, I mean that we had been friends a long time, not that he was old.)
Such things—long-distance travel, mortality rendered up close and personal—tend to impart a sense of broader horizons and more meditative perspectives to our appreciation of events.
I think in this context of a beautiful late poem by A.E. Housman.
Toward the end, these lines occur:
“The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours / Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts. / The troubles of our proud and angry dust /Are from eternity, and shall not fail. / Bear them we can, and if we can we must.”
Housman is full of such melancholy observations, which are all the more melancholy for being true.
One effect of such meditations is to render many pressing everyday concerns distant and faintly comical.
Over the last several weeks, my inbox has been full of news about the preposterous “Jan. 6” show trial in Washington, D.C.
The ostensible purpose of this exhibition of untrammeled state power is to get to the bottom of who and what precipitated the jamboree at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Regular readers know that I believe that the events of that day were at least partly organized by, or with the connivance of, government agents.
You don’t have to travel 3,000 miles to understand that the Jan. 6 Committee’s show trial, with soon-to-be-former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) presiding, is a flop everywhere except Washington and in the imaginations of the anti-Trump media.
Most people across the country care about out-of-control inflation, soaring energy prices, and an economy that’s spiraling into recession or worse.
The anti-Trump obsessions of the deep-state apparatchiks and their media megaphones barely register.
Which is why the Jan. 6 Committee has resorted to increasingly desperate measures to exorcise its bête noir.
With dubious legal authority, they have enlisted the coercive power of the state—especially our newly energized Stasi, sometimes known as the FBI—to harass and intimidate anyone connected with Trump.
These goons have conducted dawn raids and sudden public arrests of a wide spectrum of Trump associates or supporters, clapping them in handcuffs and leg irons, confiscating their electronic devices and other personal property, and generally acting like the secret police of a totalitarian state.
Somehow, Cheney has been able to deploy the Stasi against her political opponents.
It’s been a sobering show they have put on, but somehow their investigation still lacked traction.
Then, just a few days ago, they resorted to desperate measures, just as the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee did when their initial efforts to torpedo Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS nomination were foundering.
Sheldon Whitehouse’s pathetic efforts to parse Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook weren’t doing the trick, so they unleashed Christine Blasey Ford.
Cassidy Hutchinson is Liz Cheney’s Christine Blasey Ford.
Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, was wheeled on stage a few days ago to paint a lurid picture of the president.
Among other things, Hutchinson reported that she had heard that Trump had assaulted members of his security detail. She also said that she had heard that he lunged for his limo’s steering wheel, apparently in an effort to commandeer the car.
The spittle wasn’t dry on Hutchinson’s microphone before her story was refuted by diverse sources, including the Secret Service itself.
As is common these days, The Babylon Bee had one of the best takes.
Exactly.
Some anti-Trump commentators claim to have found Hutchinson’s testimony “devastating.”
I thought it was a preposterous, and probably coached, exercise in self-aggrandizing and mendacious melodrama.
We aren’t yet done making an inventory of her misstatements, circulation of hearsay, and utter fabrications.
For example, Hutchinson said that she had written a note about a possible Trump statement intended to stop the protest at the Capitol.
It turns out, however, that the note was reportedly written by Eric Herschmann, an attorney for Trump.
This via a spokesman for Herschmann himself, “All sources with direct knowledge and law enforcement have and will confirm that it was written by Mr. Herschmann.”
Oh dear.
It used to be, when it was Trump or one of his surrogates who was being grilled, that the principle “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” would be strictly enforced.
If someone lies about one thing, nothing else that he says can be regarded as credible. False in one thing, false in all things.
Opinions differ about the merits of Cheney.
I certainly don’t credit her high opinion of the twisted testimony of Hutchinson.
In my view, Davidson got to the nub of the issue.
In “The Jan. 6 Committee Is Causing Never Trumpers To Lose Their Minds,” that Federalist column I cited above, he notes that while Hutchinson, billed as a “star witness,” “did indeed make a number of explosive claims ... The problem is that she didn’t actually witness anything.”
Indeed, as I noted above, “Her hearsay claims were blown to pieces almost as soon as they appeared, in some cases because people with firsthand knowledge immediately came forward to dispute them, and in other cases because the claims themselves were ridiculous on their face.”
As Davidson concludes, “If anything, Hutchinson unwittingly confirmed that the Jan. 6 committee is a farcical show-trial, the purpose of which is to criminalize political opposition to Democrat Party rule and advance the false narrative that President Trump is not just responsible for the Jan. 6 riot, but that he’s guilty of treason.”
Touché.
Come the midterm elections, the Jan. 6 Committee will be gone or transfigured and Cheney will be cast into outer darkness, a place, as St. Matthew put it, of “fletus et stridor dentium.”
