This commentary is by Bob Stannard of Manchester, an author, musician and former state legislator and lobbyist.
There is no time to sit around and wait
Don’t you know the world, it is of love and of hate
‘Cause now is the time, we’ve got to be strong
We can’t go wrong
Because the time has come, the time has come
To be free can’t you see — UB-40
By the time you read this, the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol will have held its first prime time public hearing on the orchestrated insurrection and attack on our democracy on Thursday, June 9.
This column is being written a few days before this hearing, thus I’m at a bit of a disadvantage, as I have no idea what the committee will be presenting. OK, I have an opinion as to what might happen, and after all this is an opinion piece, right?
The committee consists of a constitutional law professor, former prosecutors, lawyers and people committed to uncovering the truth about what really happened on Jan. 6, 2020. Were the insurrectionists just a group of people who came together and their rally spiraled out of control, or was this a planned coup attempt to overturn a legitimate election and install the loser president, Donald J. Trump, for a second term; perhaps for life?
For those of you who have a TV and are not wed to watching Fox News regularly, the picture should already be pretty clear, with or without good reception. It’s obvious that the former president was pressuring those around him to change the outcome of the vote, a vote that he lost by 8 million votes and the electoral college vote by a 320 to 262 vote.
More people voted for Joe Biden than any other person in America’s history. However, this decisive victory did nothing to stop the former president and his sycophantic supporters from taking the losing president’s words that the election was stolen and running with them.
The losing candidate initiated over 60 lawsuits challenging the election results, only to have all of them overruled. Losing this many cases did nothing to dissuade the former president and his radical supporters.
We’ve all heard the recording in which the former president was pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,720 votes,” coincidentally one more vote than Joe Biden got. Raffensperger opted to accept the wrath and retaliation of the defeated, authoritarian bully by defying this request. Raffensperger would not break the law for the lawbreaker and this tape may be Trump’s Waterloo.
The committee has worked hard to piece together the events that led up to the insurrection and there’s no doubt that its members will be laying out a very strong case against the former president and those who willingly aided and abetted his misguided, illegal efforts to thwart our democracy. Where it goes is anyone’s guess. The Department of Justice has not been overly impressive in its efforts to hold the insurrectionists responsible. If the evidence is there, will the DOJ actually prosecute a former, twice-impeached corrupt president? One would like to think that in America no one is above the law.
We learned this morning from Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, that the Republican Party is gearing up to push back against everything the House Select Committee puts forth for facts related to the attack. Stefanik announced that they would be fighting back with the real facts.
I do believe that I’m looking forward to the GOP response as much as I am the hearings. The GOP has become the Party of “The Big Lie.” Instead of telling their lying leader that he was wrong, the party took the opposite tack; it bought into his lie and has been promoting it for nearly two years now, and with some success.
Without a shred of evidence to the contrary, the GOP has repeatedly stated that the 2020 elections were stolen. That’s not true, but this party is not about to let the truth stand in the way of a good, albeit inaccurate, narrative.
The party that has gone all-in on a morally bankrupt former authoritarian president’s Big Lie will now try to convince you that it is they who are telling the truth.
We are living in a world that George Orwell, try as hard as he might, couldn’t possibly have dreamed of. People today would rather believe QAnon over truth. They would rather believe Fox News, a channel that has admitted in court that it is not a news station, but an entertainment station. They put their faith and trust into the National Enquirer and fake wrestling.
While all of this will be going on, little will be done to halt the flood of mass murders that are occurring daily. This is the America in which we live today. We fail to change it for the better at our peril.
It’s time to prosecute the crooks and liars and rein in the easy purchase of military-grade assault weapons. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it?
