While Empress Nero Fiddles
From Yahoo News, June 9, 2022
Soon after rioters breached the initial police lines at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards blacked out, the back of her head clipping the concrete stairs.
Edwards, testifying Thursday during the Jan. 6 committee's first public hearing, said she regained consciousness in the middle of a "war scene."
“When I fell behind that line and I saw, I can just remember my breath catching in my throat, because what I saw was just a war scene,” she said. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up. I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood.”
From Politico, March 29, 2021:
Capitol Police shared more than 14,000 hours of video with the January 6 Committee.
From New York Times, January 8, 2021
A United States Capitol Police officer died on Thursday night from injuries sustained “while physically engaging” with pro-Trump rioters who descended on the U.S. Capitol the day before, the fifth fatality linked to the chaos that engulfed the nation’s capital on Wednesday, according to the authorities.
From Politifact, April 20, 2021:
On April 19, 2021, the medical examiner, Dr. Francisco J. Diaz, determined that Sicknick died from two strokes at the base of his brain caused by a blood clot in the artery that feeds that part of the body.
Diaz told the Washington Post that there were no signs of any injury, or evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemical irritants. Sicknick died, Diaz said, of natural causes.
All of this leads to several questions.
With that much video, how is it that footage of multiple bloody bodies of Capitol Police Officers, and blood thick enough to cause slipping on the floor, was never shown? The video would be disturbing, but it could be shown in the evening hours accompanied by a warning.
In a city that has abolished cash bail for most crimes including menacing and assault, how is it that multiple “rioters” are being held in jail without bail?
Where are the reports of medical treatment of all these bloody bodies?
As Empress Nero plays her violin, we see the economy in meltdown on the screen. How does she manage to keep up the act?
How is it that being named by a rump congressional committee as under suspicion of insurrection is sufficient evidence to disqualify Republican congressional candidates from being on ballots?
A House of Representatives that is singularly focused on conducting the fifth or sixth impeachment of former President Trump cannot take time to authorize protection of Supreme Court Justices from unlawful threats of violence?
I have no firm answers to those questions.
Speculation is worthless. Pro-life groups are targets of violence across the country, yet no one can condemn those actions? One does not need to hold any particular view on abortion to condemn violence.
I hope the committee is not disbanded before early January, 2023. These questions need answers, and only through continued examination of evidence will that occur.
I continue frustrated that hilarious laughter does not greet every new claim. Ridicule is a wonderful tool highly under-used.
I belong to no party and have no ideology except for a touchingly naive belief that freedom means everything because without it we have nothing, but the absolute feebleness of Republicans is really a marvel of fecklessness.
Elements of J6 are quite odd, particularly the lack of trained security force. There were multiple avenues involved and at least three groups involved in violence. The use of flash bangs into a crowd created a mob, always unpredictable which is why that tool is not used for dispersal. Inconsistencies abound well beyond the fog of war.
The committee is another attempt to destroy Trump but has established many precedents that will haunt future Congresses. Assuming change of control, there will be retribution for the political damage. Only the absolute incompetence of the Biden administration was unanticipated for the committee who thought there was time to use the results to change the midterms. But other factors will dominate. Pelosi knows she is done and doesn't mind the damage. The two stalwart R's on the committee hope to have future but it won't be much.