Biden’s Parting J6 Shot
In remarks and a newspaper op-ed, the departing president is still trying to control the narrative about January 6.
December 7. September 11. January 6.
Democrats want us to revere all three dates with equal solemnity, but every time they bring it up, I remember that old song from Sesame Street: “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others).”
Nevertheless, Joe Biden made public remarks yesterday about J6 and published a follow-up Washington Post op-ed that he definitely wrote all by himself. The op-ed is titled “What Americans should remember about Jan. 6,” and it rehashes the same tired laments Biden has made famous for four years now.
First, he notes that later today, Vice President Kamala Harris will be “faithful to her duty under our Constitution” to “preside over the certification of her opponent’s victory in the November election.” Her ritual humiliation will recall Al Gore’s experience in 2000 and Richard Nixon’s in 1960, except this time, there was no real doubt on either side about the outcome. Donald Trump clearly won.
Biden’s op-ed was all downhill from there.
For much of our history, this proceeding was treated as pro forma, a routine act. But after what we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, we know we can never again take it for granted.
Violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of elected officials and assaulted brave law enforcement officers.
We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault. And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.
But we should not forget. We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.
An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.
This is not what happened.
Speaking of what didn’t happen, Biden once again trotted out one of the gross distortions of that day’s events: “Some police officers ultimately died as a result.” The Left initially and falsely claimed that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died in the riot and they routinely cite multiple deaths in the “insurrection.” The truth is that Sicknick died the following day of natural causes and that four officers died by suicide over the next seven months. Biden now couches his reference to those tragic deaths with more careful semantics, but the implication is certainly still clear enough.
Of course, Biden almost always neglects to mention the one person who was actually killed during the riot — Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd. Her unjustified death doesn’t fit his narrative.
For the record, the violent rioters who clashed with police should be locked up. Their behavior was criminal and disgraceful.
Trump has promised to pardon or commute sentences for J6 offenders, saying, “A vast majority should not be in jail.” I hope he limits that to the majority of J6 convicts who were jailed for peacefully wandering through the Capitol, not the violent thugs who battled police. Hundreds of peaceful people were persecuted and added to a grossly inflated indictment and conviction total by Biden’s “Justice” Department solely for the purpose of making the “threat to democracy” seem more dire and existential than it actually was.
What Biden, the Democrats, and their Leftmedia propagandists never acknowledge — and what is obscured by J6 violence — are the unprecedented actions that precipitated the riot. In fact, at the same hour when the justifiable protest turned into unjustifiable violence, our Mark Alexander was in the process of publishing his essay on the real injustice of the 2020 election: “The Democrats’ Massive Bulk-Mail Ballot Fraud Strategy Worked.” Over the last four years, he has greatly expanded that analysis of how Democrats rigged the 2020 election to beat Trump.
That Trump came back from defeat and ignominy to win again in 2024 is a testament to the fact that millions of Americans understood that though the rioters were inexcusable and Trump himself could be characterized as a sore loser, the grievances that yielded that undesirable behavior were all too real and, ultimately, the more critical problem.
“We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago,” Biden wrote. Indeed, we cannot, but not only in the way he means.
Biden mentioned the Constitution in his op-ed, and Harris, in video remarks today, likewise said she would display her “loyalty to our Constitution.” The truth is that neither of these two socialists upheld their oaths to “support and defend” the Constitution. They violate it at every turn with diktats outside their authority and no legislative backing, as well as with their abject refusal to enforce our nation’s duly passed laws.
Rather than mend their own ways, of course, Democrats spent most of the last four years hyperventilating over their own distortions and revisions of January 6 — complete with a rushed second impeachment and a follow-up charade of a congressional inquisition.
They, not Trump or his supporters, represent the clear and present threat to our “democracy” — by which I mean our Republic. Fortunately, their clear overreach was rebuked by voters last November, and most Americans are ready to turn the page.
