Tag: chuck grassley

Quick follow-up on Tucker Carlson’s lies about how January 6 was just an old white people Sunday school class field trip. It turns out that there are at least some Republicans who weren’t into it!

SOME LIES! Tucker Reveals Ashli Babbitt Just Girl Scout Who Tried To Sell Thin Mints At Wrong House

Obviously, we don’t mean the kinds of Republicans who truly form the ideological mainstream of the party, seditionist, domestic-terrorist-supporting freakshows like Marjorie Taylor Greene. We are not talking about the hordes of Republican feral hogs in the House of Representatives who oink Kevin McCarthy’s daily marching orders at him.

But over there in the Senate, they are not so much into what Tucker and Barely Speaker Kevin are doing. And it’s not just antifa super-soldier woke hippie types like Mitt Romney either, though he was one of ’em, saying that Tucker Carlson’s lying propaganda about January 6 is “dangerous and disgusting.” And also:

In general it sounds like mainstream Republican senators are not cool with Kevin ‘n’ Tucker’s little insurrection-promoting timeshare presentation. CNN’s Manu Raju and other reporters talked to a bunch of them, and actually got them on the record.

Senator Kevin Cramer from North Dakota said, “To somehow put that in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie.” He says give everybody all the footage. “[G]ive it to every source at the same time and let everybody go through it and play it in its entirety.”

Thom Tillis from North Carolina was more succinct: “I think it’s bullshit.” He said maybe there were a handful of tourists in the crowd, but:

“But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … If you were just a tourist you should have probably lined up at the Visitor Center and came in on an orderly basis. I just don’t think it’s helpful.”

Mike Rounds from South Dakota said, “I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today.” He says give all journalists all the footage.

John Thune from South Dakota: “I think it was an attack on the Capitol. … There were a lot of people in the Capitol at the time that were scared for their lives.”

Chuck Grassley from Iowa: “The point is, what happened that day shouldn’t have happened.”

These mainstream Republican senators do not sound very committed to Insurrectionist Sparkle Motion, not very committed at all. NBC News has a bunch more quotes, all from the same senators.

Here’s some more video:

Meanwhile, CNN also has the reaction of the Capitol Police chief, Tom Manger, who sounds pissed. He said Tucker “cherry-picked” his footage, and that was just the beginning:

“Last night an opinion program aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack,” Manger wrote in an internal department memo obtained by CNN, adding that Carlson’s show didn’t reach out to the police department “to provide accurate context.”

“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments,” Manger said.

Manger was specifically pissed that Tucker aired some footage of fallen Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, as part of the insurrectionist propaganda campaign to convince people Sicknick didn’t die because of the events of January 6:

“[T]he most disturbing accusation from last night was that our late friend and colleague Brian Sicknick’s death had nothing to do with his heroic actions on January 6,” Manger wrote. “The Department maintains, as anyone with common sense would, that had Officer Sicknick not fought valiantly for hours on the day he was violently assaulted, Officer Sicknick would not have died the next day.”

When the actual victims of a terrorist attack and their families are calling you a piece of shit, it might be time to rethink your approach. But Tucker’s never one to let a moral compass or human decency get in the way of his propaganda. He’s fighting a war here, and he’s not on the same side as the people who protect the United States Capitol.

We’ve mentioned the statement from Sicknick’s family here today, but we ought to give it a little more airtime:

“Every time the pain of that day seems to have ebbed a bit, organizations like Fox rip our wounds wide open again and we are frankly sick of it,” the Sicknick family said. […]

“FOX has shown time and time again that they are little more than the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and like Pravda, will do whatever they are told to keep the hatred and the lies flowing while suppressing anything resembling the truth,” the family said. “Fox does this not for any sense of morality as they have none, but for the quest for every penny of advertising money they can get from those who buy airtime from them.”

Those are mere excerpts. The whole thing is so much more.

Give all the journalists all the tapes. If you don’t, then the terrorists win. Literally.

[CNN / CBS News]

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