The Wall Street Journal has a very odd piece that we're going to assume started out as a fluff piece about Rep. James Comer, the Republican coordinator of Republican investigations into All The Things. What the final version ended up as is difficult to describe, but I do know one thing: From here on in, every time I start to feel bad about myself for reviewing movies without actually watching them, I'm going to remind myself that reporting on things without watching them is a well-honed tradition in our political press.
Buddy, if you're actually watching how events play out before writing your piece about the politics of how those events are going to play out, you're doing it the chump way. Real political journalism is about pretending the guy wearing an oversized bow tie and a red rubber nose might be a damn statesman, as you turn your head slightly to avoid seeing where the 20th thrown pie lands. This baggy-pants, big-shoed man might be the voice of reason the House needs, so long as you ignore, you know, events.
The Republican leading several investigations related to President Biden and his administration faces the dual challenges of keeping the politically charged probes on track while also managing hard-line conservatives eager to put their own stamp on the proceedings.
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That's our opening, and in fairness we can't rule out the possibility that the reporter who turned this one in actually wrote that bit back before Republicans even announced who that dual-challenged House Republican would be. The Republican selected for the lead role, the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, was hardliner Kentucky Rep. James Comer. If you want to write an eight-minute explainer about the challenges of "keeping the politically charged probes on track while also managing hard-line conservatives," you might at some point want to look in on what Comer himself has been saying about those investigations.
He's not been shy about it. He's been greedily parading himself around as the Republican who will finally get to the bottom of all this something something Hunter Biden something while studiously—and I mean studiously—avoiding any pretense of giving a damn about the grotesque corruption of the Donald Trump family. If you know nothing else about the man, he wants to make sure you know that he's on Hunter Biden's trail, because reasons.
Incidentally, one day after leaving the White House, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner had already formed the corporate shell he'd use to collect $2 billion from murderous Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman after Kushner and Trump used their governmental powers to shield bin Salman from consequences Congress demanded after the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The same bin Salman-chaired investment fund has been paying Donald Trump millions per event to hold Saudi-backed golf tournaments on his properties.
No Republican is investigating a single thread of any of that, and Comer—the man tasked with making Republicans seem at least marginally coordinated as they investigate Hunter Biden, rampant "wokeness," and Twitter policies against publishing stolen nude photos—will tell you every chance he gets that he does not care about Trump's crookedness or Jared's paychecks or, you know, that whole raising an angry mob to attack a joint session of Congress thing.
That feels important to mention, as The Wall Street Journal waxes on the theoretical difficulty of performing "serious oversight" with a team consisting of white supremacist Paul Gosar, conspiracy crank Marjorie Taylor Greene, other conspiracy crank Lauren Boebert, omnipresent sweaty screecher Jim Jordan, and take your pick. It feels important to mention that the whole premise of Comer's new oversight campaign is that it will only take on "oversight" of Republican-pushed conspiracy theories, and is intentionally "unserious" by design.
But no, instead we have go trundle through paragraph after paragraph of folks speculating on how the hearings that have already begun are, in theory, going to go.
“There’s going to be a tightwire act,” said Rep. Nancy Mace (R., S.C.), an oversight member who has clashed with Ms. Greene. Of Mr. Comer, she said: “I knew that he wants our committee to be taken seriously and be substantive. And we’re relying on his leadership to do that.”
I get it. This whole piece was turned in three weeks late, wasn't it. That's why it feels like we're Where's Waldo-ing our way the news cycle looking for the smallest scrap that would show Comer to not be the thing he's advertising himself as in his press releases, Twitter tweets, and television appearances.
It is eventually mentioned, between these neutral and largely substance-less portrayals of the "serious" investigation's chief wallet inspector, that "already there have been flashpoints" in the hearings, like when Rep. Paul Gosar "sparked controversy" with references to a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims immigrants are being intentionally transported to this country to "replace" white "culture." There's all of two sentences devoted to last week's "freewheeling hearing" in which Comer led Republicans through knotted conspiracy theories claiming that Twitter was conspiring against conservatism when by taking down illegal election disinformation, stolen nudes, and references to a New York Post story so sketchy that not even the rest of the Rupert Murdoch empire was willing to touch it.
The hearings were not "freewheeling." "Freewheeling" is when your favorite podcaster takes too much cough medicine and spends the next hour reading out the names of obscure cheeses.
If you want to know what the hearings were like, there's plenty of video. Comer appears prominently throughout!
- Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, speaking as a witness, used his time to claim that actually it was Hillary Clinton who colluded with Russia in 2016 in order to defeat herself, while Sen. Ron Johnson used his own time to question whether the United States government was involved in creating COVID-19.
- The actual evidence brought to light by Twitter witnesses and documents showed that the Trump administration and some Republican lawmakers were themselves very prolific in sending Twitter demands that tweets they didn't like be taken down—an actual insult to First Amendment rights that not a single House Republican gave a damn about.
- Witnesses testified that no, actually, Twitter probably helped fuel the Jan. 6 coup attempt by letting Trump run amok on their site no matter how many times he broke anti-violence, anti-disinformation rules.
- While Comer's committee was threatening ex-Twitter employees with prison time for unidentified supposed crimes, Greene was calling people pedophiles, and Jordan was fuming over conservatives being "shadow banned" over piffling details like being racist or spreading hoaxes, there's probably a better scandal to be had in examining Elon Musk's selective release of Twitter documents purporting to show the company's past political bias while hiding data that contradicts his claims. Or not.
All of this, however, is on the public record. There's video of every hearing. We do not need to speculate on whether Comer, supposed Serious Boy, will rein in his party's cranks and crackpots to produce something marginally less clown shoe because we can see him on the little screen and he is ... demonstrably not doing that! If anything he's been egging Team Clown Shoes on. It's their job to perform for the cameras, and it's his job to attach roller skates to their shoes so that they can slide from conspiracy to conspiracy faster than they could in the days when Democrats ran the show.
There is a seemingly uncontrollable urge, in this nation's free press, to feign gullibility in order to promote fact-averse neutrality. The Wall Street Journal cannot plausibly present a profile of Comer in which he is portrayed as the vaguely-sort of-serious figure holding back the tides of frothing Republican paranoia unless it all but ignores Comer's own advertising of the hearings, his chairmanship of the hearings, and the actual damn hearings.
The urge to portray Comer as a supposedly serious player despite his own repeated insistence that something something Hunter Biden is by far and away the most urgently pressing post-coup oversight matter of the day is so entrenched that after only the briefest of mentions of his "freewheeling" conspiracy hearings, the Journal's reporter closes out the piece by noting that Comer at one point cooperated with a House Democrat on a "postal-service overhaul bill."
Ooookay? We're going to balance the hearings in which Republicans have demanded explanations for why Twitter was removing stolen pictures purporting to show Hunter Biden's penis and in which witnesses wax on about Hillary Clinton colluding against her own campaign with ... a Postal Service bill?
That's the last reed we're going to cling to after we've hunted high and low for anecdotes suggesting that Comer might dial back the Republican conspiracy circus in hearings that have already started and are already known for their trapeze acts?
Is there anybody in the Journal tasked with watching the hearings we're opining on? No? Okay, just wanted to make sure. But look, I know all about the need to retool old unpublished stories. I get that sometimes you've worked on something for a week or two, it's just not coming together, and eventually you just have to toss it to your editor and say, “Good luck with this pile.” I have sympathy here.
If you begin your piece with the premise of "House Republican faces challenge of not looking clownish despite nose honks, thrown pies," though, you should already know that's a take with a short shelf life even in the best of times. That one's pretty much on you.
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