Above: Sometimes the positioning of an ad accidentally adds to a story. This sidebar ad showing Popeye fueling up with spinach gave me a hook for this story and a title for this diary.
Watching House Minority Leader Keven McCarthy’s press conference where he railed against Speaker Nancy Pelosi for making the House January 6th Special Committee Jan. 6th investigation a partisan political exercise one of the phases that came to mind which didn’t include profanity was “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
The gist of the The Washington Post OpEd by Greg Sergeant and Paul Waldman is summarized in the first two paragraphs:
We should be thankful that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) just pulled Republicans out of any involvement in the select committee to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection. In so doing, he ensured that the committee’s investigation will both have more integrity and be more likely to undertake a valuable accounting.
Which goes to a larger truth about this moment: Efforts at a real examination of arguably the worst outbreak of political violence in modern times — and efforts to protect our democracy more broadly — will not be bipartisan. These things will be done by Democrats alone.
The authors’ bottom line (prefaced by those very words) is offered in the last first paragraph in their conclusion below:
Here’s the bottom line: By nixing Banks and Jordan, Pelosi actually protected the integrity of the committee’s investigation, from their openly advertised intention to misdirect, disrupt and sabotage it. By appointing publicly committed saboteurs, McCarthy openly advertised the same intention.
The conventions of political reporting are such that this basic and obvious truth will not be faithfully rendered in press accounts. But it follows from a straightforward interpretation of the statements and conduct of those Republicans themselves.
I don’t know why they decided to add what seems to me to be an unnecessary opinion about the press in their concluding paragraph. I think that it would have been more accurately phrased as “press accounts in the right wing press” but it still doesn’t fit with the entire essay. Correction: Thanks to commenter EvilMatt for finding this article demonstrating that this view isn't just in the right-wing press: “Nancy Pelosi just doomed the already tiny chances of the 1/6 committee actually mattering” by CNN’s Chris Cillizza. It is obviously relevant. Andrea Marcotte devoted her column to the story today: “Media's "both sides" obsession has gone too far: Jan. 6 commission fight is fault of the GOP only” which is the lead story on Salon. She sums it up in her last three paragraphs (in my comment reply below)
I would add that as a general rule anything that Nancy Pelosi does that gets the man who desperately wants her job to feign outrage over what he damn well knows is her deftly throwing a political knockout punch to his jutting jaw is good news for our side.
