Now We Know What GOP-Led Congressional Oversight Is Going To Look Like
Here’s video from a House Oversight Committee hearing dealing with the Twitter Files controversy today. We have a couple of clips to show you, and a general observation you’ll probably pick up on yourself without our help.
First, here was chairman Jim Jordan’s opening five minutes, which is a tour de force establishing just how corrupt and malignant the federal government is…
Next, here’s what happened when Matt Taibbi, who was the principal journalist revealing the social media platform’s complicity in assisting the federal government to suppress information pertinent to the 2020 election – namely, the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. That suppression materially affected the outcome of the election, as more than 10 percent of Joe Biden’s voters said in post-election polls that knowing about the Hunter Biden laptop before the election would have changed their vote…
The rather obnoxious woman who started that food fight, Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents the slummy areas of east Houston, not only doesn’t understand that the First Amendment and long-held custom protects journalists from having to reveal their sources but also doesn’t know who Bari Weiss is.
In case that name slips your recollection, Bari Weiss was the New York Times editor who was run out of her job for the sin of allowing Sen. Tom Cotton to present a heterodox view within the pages of that paper – namely, that the military should have been called out to put down the George Floyd riots. She now has a very heavily-trafficked Substack account.
Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, is the ranking minority member on the committee. And here’s how she cranked things up…
She’s a pretty mean one, as you can see. But she isn’t a particularly smart one. Plaskett is trying to file the the FTC’s abuse of its power, in demanding to know which journalists Twitter was communicating with under the consent decree Twitter had agreed to with respect to data security, which is a lunatic argument to make – no reasonable person would assume that intruding into journalistic relationships developed out of a story on federal government suppression of free speech is something done in service to consumer privacy.
Jordan crushes Plaskett over that idiotic argument.
And Plaskett calls Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger “so-called journalists…”
Taibbi got in the last word there and it was pretty ugly for Plaskett…
The point of all this is to show that every single one of these hearings will go just like this. The Republicans trying to expose government lies and corruption which are manifest, obvious and ongoing will find themselves beset by idiots like Stacey Plaskett and Sylvia Garcia, who are either wholly uninformed about the issues being heard in committees on which they serve or are deliberately belching out mendacious, insulting and inflammatory statements with the express purpose of turning these hearings into circuses.
As Jordan said, Taibbi and Schellenberger are both Democrats. They’re not Trump voters. Bari Weiss is also a Democrat. To see them treated this way is amazing, but not really surprising. Because the people in charge of that party now possess none of the values or worldview which upheld the political consensus of the past 80 years which is disappearing before our eyes. They don’t care about objective truth, free speech or reason.
From a different hearing, here is Cori Bush, the malignant ignoramus who represents the slums of St. Louis, attacking Alex Epstein as a “white supremacist” over the fact that he touts Western culture – something that as an American Cori Bush is a participant in and a beneficiary of – as superior to the cultures of less-advanced countries. At a hearing, no less, about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Epstein’s response is also well worth watching…
The Stacey Plasketts and Cori Bushes of the world don’t care that they look like morons in these hearings. They look like morons no matter what. What they care about, what they’re there to do, is to gum up the works and keep the public from gaining a proper understanding of how bad the regime they serve really is.
An honest opposition in these hearings would be making the case for why the federal government attempting to censor the Hunter Biden laptop out of the public eye was a warranted thing. They’re not doing that. They’re just throwing feces at the wall hoping they can muddy the coverage of the hearings.
And that’s nothing new, but it’s disgusting nonetheless. So is the realization that every hearing on every governmental abuse and weaponization will go just like this.
