Better the 6th Than the 5th
I didn’t get to see the entire opening day hearing held by Nancy Pelosi’s carefully selected House committee, which is a good thing.
Because I was born on January 5th, I am grateful that the overblown brouhaha took place on the 6th. I would really hate to hear that the day I was born was the worst, the bleakest, day in American history.
I grant my birth is not up there with the 4th of July and Christmas, but it would be hard not to take it personally even if it’s only left-wing politicians and cable news pundits who are saying it.
I didn’t get to see the entire opening day hearing held by Nancy Pelosi’s carefully selected House committee, which is a good thing. As I age, I find my tolerance for bulls—t has all but vanished.
My overall impression was that I was watching the worst performances since “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” It was obvious that at the auditions, members of Congress and the four officers from the Capitol Police Force had to prove they could either cry on cue or voice moral outrage.
The most convincing of the crybabies was Adam Kinzinger, which explains how the Illinois Republican passed muster with Nancy Pelosi. Adam Schiff tried to squeeze out a few tears, but he had to settle for speaking haltingly, as if even six months after the event, he could hardly bear referring to it.
The most shameful were the Capitol police officers. Sgt. Aquilino Gonell complained that the folks who turned out to hear President Trump were not only violent, but racist. Just thinking about them had him sobbing and wiping his eyes.
Officer Harry Dunn, a black man, felt it necessary to announce he had voted for Joe Biden. Since he referred to Trump as “a hit man” and was on record as having defended the riots by the BLM, he hardly needed to tell the world who got his vote.
Officer Michael Fanone combined sorrow and moral outrage, and just might have a career emoting in front of the cameras.
None of what took place surprised me. Not the fact that it was a kangaroo court that had been convened to blame Trump for an “insurrection” in which the only person killed was an unarmed woman, who would have been described as a peaceful demonstrator or perhaps a martyr, if she’d been a Democrat.
And I certainly wasn’t surprised that the four officers were reading from prepared texts, written, no doubt, by the same hacks who write scripts for Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Jen Psaki. What’s more, a couple of the cops had almost as much trouble reading the bigger words as Biden.
What did surprise me were the chestful of medals worn by Fanone and Dunn. Audie Murphy didn’t have that many medals, for goodness sake.
It made me wonder what a security guard gets medals for, anyway. Making sure the lights are all turned off at night? Making sure none of Washington’s homeless are sleeping in the bathroom? Guarding the vending machines? Neatness, perhaps?
Perhaps the most shocking piece of news is that the Capitol Police has an annual budget of $480 million to protect the 535 members of Congress. That’s twice the budget of Atlanta, Georgia, a city of 500,000.
The puzzlement, though, is how it is that, as Victor Hanson pointed out, Washington, D.C. has more cops than Keystone Comedies and the “Law & Order” franchise put together, including the Park Police, the City Police, the Capitol Police, the Aqueduct Police, the U.S. Mint Police, the Uniform Division of the Secret Service and the FBI, and yet it is one of the most crime-riddled cities in the nation.
Maybe it’s time to start defunding this particular city’s police. After all, we’re the suckers having to pay all those salaries and humongous pensions.
Just when I thought there couldn’t possibly be a general as woke and as weak as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, I hear that he’s getting a run for his money from Gen. Patrick Donahoe, the commanding officer at Fort Benning.
Ever since Bill Clinton based promotion on politics instead of performance, left-wingers have been finding themselves benefitting from the Peter Principle, which states that in bureaucracies, people will be promoted beyond their level of competence.
So it figures that if the guy at the top subscribes to Critical Race Theory, believes in compulsive vaccinations and is convinced that any member of the military who voted for Donald Trump is a traitor and should be court-martialed, the path to advancement is to snap to attention, salute and say “Ditto.”
It’s tragic that people who grew up respecting the U.S. military and admiring those who put on the uniform have had to come to the realization that at least so far as the Pentagon is concerned, it’s filled with social workers, ass-kissers and be-medaled mannequins.
You could take the lot of them, set them down at a cocktail party in Manhattan or Marin County and they’d be right at home, drinking wine spritzers, noshing on brie and slandering Donald Trump.
Isn’t it odd that the more that black Americans whine about how badly this nation treats its minorities, the more that people from South and Central America, Haiti, the Middle East and Africa, want to come here?
I’ve been thinking that perhaps we should revise the Constitution and hold a national election for one senator and a single member of the House. What purpose is served by all those others? They’re just a bunch of freeloaders.
I mean, aside from the occasional outlier like Liz Cheney and Joe Manchin, the rest of them vote exactly as they’re told by Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. All the rest of them are just taking up space and costing us a bloody fortune.
It would also simplify life for the hardest working people in the nation’s capital, the lobbyists. They’d only have two people to pressure, cajole and bribe, and not 535.
Charlie Schmitz passed along a few funnies to brighten my day, so now I’ll try to brighten yours.
“I went for a job interview and the manager said, ‘We’re looking for someone who’s responsible.’ "Well,” I replied, “I’m your man. At my last job, whenever something went wrong, they said I was responsible.”
“A free marriage tip: "Never ask your wife when dinner will be ready when she’s mowing the lawn.”
“My wife sent me a text that said. ‘Your great.’ So, naturally, I wrote back, ‘No, you’re great.’
Ever since, she’s been walking around happy and smiling. Should I tell her I was just correcting her spelling?”
Personally, I’d advise against it, especially if she’s mowing the lawn or, worse yet, using garden shears to prune the rose bush.
You can email Burt directly at [email protected].
