Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com writer Susan Jones lashing out at President Biden's speech on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was the climax of CNS' Jan. 6 coverage, but it was far from the end. An anonymously written article complaining that Vice President Kamala Harris was "likening the Jan. 6, 2021 riot that breached the Capitol building to the Pearl Harbor attack of Dec. 7, 1941 and the al Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Jones followed that up with a Jan. 7 article quoting none other than Liz Cheney dismissing the comparison:
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is as determined as any Democrat to make sure Donald Trump never again becomes president. She is one of two anti-Trump Republicans sitting on the House select committee to investigate the events of January 6, 2021.
And while she "agreed with" some of the remarks made by President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the one-year anniversary of the attack, she wouldn't go as far Harris did in comparing the attack on the U.S. Capitol to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11 attack on the United States.
Jones went on to grouse that "Cheney said the committee's goal is not to prevent Trump from running again, although that's certainly how it appears," adding a further complaint that "Democrats on Thursday used the January 6 anniversary to push their voting legislation, which would set federal election rules that are weaker than those set by some states."
Craig Bannister gave Donald Trump his say in an article:
“The Democrats want to own this day of January 6th so they can stoke fears and divide America,” former President Donald Trump said Thursday, reacting to President Joe Biden’s divisive speech attacking Trump and Republicans on the one-year anniversary of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“I say, let them have it because America sees through theirs lies and polarizations,” Trump added, in a statement released following Biden’s speech.
Bannister failed to mention the highly relevant fact that Trump helped instigate the riot.
CNS served up more Republican spin on Jan. 7 -- namely, that Democrats are focusing on the riot to distract from their purported current failures. Jones did her part:
President Joe Biden, looking backward on a day when he said the country should focus on "the way forward," mentioned "the former president" 16 times in his speech marking the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"They just want to continue talking about Donald Trump and anything else other than the problems that they created," House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) told Fox News on Thursday.
"Look, it was a day that nobody wanted to see happen," Scalise said.
Pat Buchanan's column pushed the same talking point: "Why cannot our liberal media let it go? Why does the distortion and hysteria about Jan. 6 seem to grow with each retelling?" He further whined: "Question: If the left is so terrified of Trump it feels it must prevent him from even running again, by imposing a criminal conviction, what does that say about the left's belief in American democracy? What does that tell us about the left's trust in the people?"
Melanie Arter served up another critic of Harris' 9/11 comparison, and Bannister featured a Republican congesswoman making an odd statement:
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) says her office was prepared for the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 – and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and law enforcement leaders should have been, too.
“January 6th was an avoidable security failure that we can never let happen again,” Rep. Lesko says in a video posted on social media Thursday, the one year anniversary of the riot.
“I was in the Capitol complex that day – I made sure my office was prepared,” Rep. Lesko says, revealing that “We had enough food for the staff, and I told my staff to be prepared to spend the night, in case demonstrators blocked us in and we couldn’t go home after the vote.”
“It was common sense,” Rep. Lesko says.
Lesko went on to blame Nancy Pelosi for the situation at the Capitol, but Bannister failed to tell readers that Pelosi isn't in charge of the Capitol Police. But if Lesko knew there was going to be a riot, why didn't she alert the Capitol Police herself? Bannister didn't seem interested in pursuing that line of questioning.
The coveraged was capped off with a Jan. 10 article by Bannister regurgitating a rant by right-wing radio host Mark Levin that, in Bannister's words, "The same radical leftists who tried to destroy the presidency by promoting conspiracy theories, impeachment and denying the legitimacy of the last president, Donald Trump, are now peddling the lie that the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol was, and is, the greatest threat to America since the Civil War," when "the greatest threat to the country is actually the Democrat [sic] Party, which has supported slavery and segregation in the past, and now wants to rig the system so that it can never lose another election."
