Topic: Newsmax
The sheer amount of slobbering sycophancy Conrad Black feels he must do in an apparent effort to show Donald Trump that pardoning him for his financial crimes was worth it is amazing. In his June 2 Newsmax column, Black once again tries to justify the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and blame it on anyone else but Trump, as part of a rant against fellow conservative George Will because he likened the riot to 9/11:
On Jan. 6 of this year, some members of a crowd of over 200,000, attending an address by President Trump — who detailed the questionable aspects of the apparent result of the presidential election — marched on to the U.S. Capitol and some hundreds of them penetrated the building and caused relatively minor damage to it.
Five people died, but only one, a Trump supporter, died of unnatural causes — shot in the neck by a still unidentified Capitol Police officer.
There were many vivid photographs of the occasion including the spectacle of some of America’s leading legislators hiding under their desks wearing tinfoil protective gear.
In their desperation to represent the episode as an attempt by the outgoing president to incite an insurrection, (which requires taking over the armed forces, police, and media outlets as happens in countries that have coups d’état), the media falsely represented the death of one Capitol policeman as a result of having been beaten over the head by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher, a complete fabrication.
Legislative buildings are attacked fairly often, as in Paris in 1934; smashing into some of the world’s most famous buildings with hijacked airliners has only happened once.
Trump did not incite anything, except a peaceful demonstration after a very questionable election result. None of the 18 lawsuits that directly challenged the constitutional or legal integrity of the vote or the vote-counting system were adjudicated.
Black seems to have forgotten that Trump also said, "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." But Black has some more history to rewrite:
The 2020 election, next to that of 1876 which was resolved by an agreement between the candidates after a partisan vote in a congressional commission, was the most dubious presidential result in American history.
The real issue here is that the Trump-haters, like George Will, want to charge Trump falsely with seeking an insurrection after losing an unexceptionable election, when he was merely expressing the anger of his partisans over a dubious vote-counting process, aggravated by the abdication of the judiciary from its constitutional co-equal role with the legislative and executive branches.
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A man of Will’s influence has an ethical and professional obligation to avoid the willful propagation of defamatory nonsense. He said on the same program that for the first time in American history many members of Congress are afraid of their own voters.
They were elected because those same voters agreed with what they said: they all found Trump the preferable candidate.
Black then ventures into outright lying:
A presidential election result that was highly questionable, despite the frenzied efforts of an air-tight media pretense that all the late drops of unverifiable heavy Biden votes in a few key states were squeaky clean, and which the judicial system at every level refuses to judge for process reasons (a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court said the challenge in that state had to start at the lower courts and work up — impossible given those deadlines), naturally leaves the 75 million voters who supported the ostensibly losing candidate upset. That they would demonstrate is understandable, and when the speaker of the House and mayor of Washington refused the capitol police chief’s request for reinforcements, some hooliganism was predictable.
There were no "late drops of unverifiable heavy Biden votes in a few key states." Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House Black is trying to impugn without using her name, is not in charge of the Capitol police and. therefore, could not have blocked any request for reinforcments during the riot. And it was not DC Mayor Muriel Bowser who delayed deployment of National Guard troops to quell the riot, it was the Defense Department.
