Ya Gonna Believe Me or Your Lyin’ Eyes????
The newest (but truly old) big lie: They’re gonna come into your house, tie you to a chair and stick a vaccine into your arm and, while they’re invading your private space, they’ll confiscate your bibles and guns.
While we admit that the candidate did not say she could “see Russia from my house,” she did tell a more-than-minor lie when she declared: “[G]overnment health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil…”
Oh, those maniacal, murderous death panels. Eleven years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there’s still no death panels. Guess that fear-mongering was all a lie.
Old lies have 2021 brothers and sisters. One is that the perhaps delusional (we offer that as an excuse for the inexcusable) 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashli Babbit – shot and killed while attempting to climb through a broken glass door in the Speaker’s Lobby of the House of Representatives on January 6 – was an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman.” True, she may have served her country honorably but let’s see what the Office of the U.S. Attorney for D.C. had to say on April 14.
Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP [United States Capitol Police] was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob. Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate. As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor…
The focus of the criminal investigation was to determine whether federal prosecutors could prove that the officer violated any federal laws…, prosecutors must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the officer acted willfully to deprive Ms. Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution or other law, here the Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to an unreasonable seizure. Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully,” which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that the officer acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law…
The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.
Pretty simple: On January 5, a 14-year Air Force and National Guard veteran with a history of deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar posted, “They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours.”
She, who once swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… [to] bear true faith and allegiance to the same…So help me God” was not a “martyr”; she was not “executed” and no Capitol Police officers were “lying in wait” for her. She was not part of a “peaceful protest”; she was attempting to climb through the window of a door leading to the House chambers. She died while violating the Oath she had sworn years earlier.
The public entrance to the U.S. Capitol is through the Visitor Center, which is open for public tours six days a week from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. and closed Sundays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and Inauguration Days. Three million visitors – 15,000 to 20,000 daily - pass through the Center each year.
“Do not lie. Do not deceive one another.”
Leviticus 19:11
Nonetheless, Georgia Representative Andrew S. Clyde would have the world believe the January 6 insurrection was just a “normal tourist visit.”
By the Congressman’s measure, one would think that, on a “normal tourist day,” visitors to the Capitol can pick up zip-ties in the gift shop; and drag police officers down the steps of the building, shock them with stun guns, smash their heads with bats, pipes, and flag poles and cause officers to suffer concussions and at least one heart attack. By the Congressman’s standard a “normal tourist visit” is one that provokes the suicides of two police officers and the deaths of CP Officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood.
But let’s let Congressman Clyde speak for himself: “Let me be clear, there was no insurrection and to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie. Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures….”
The Congressman reminds us of the various versions of the old phrase “Who you gonna believe – me or your lyin’ eyes?”
Representative Clyde, left without mask, caught screaming his greetings/ welcome to insurrectionists during a “normal tourist visit” on January 6.
Representative Clyde, center without mask, caught on camera helping barricade the House chamber door as a “normal tourist visit” rages on the other side of the door.
“You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit,” the representative declared a few days later, which can only mean that he spends a great deal of his time office helping to barricade the House chamber door.
“There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”
Proverbs 6:16-19
Rep. Paul Gosar probably doesn’t get invited to many of his family’s holiday gatherings. After all, six of his nine brothers and sisters publicly endorsed his Democratic opponent for the 2018 midterms. They objected to what they saw as his extremist views on immigration, health care and white supremacists. He called those who broke into the Capitol “peaceful patriots,” which makes it difficult to explain why, five months after the Capitol riot, ten – 10 – Capitol Police were still off duty with injuries and seven – 7 – D.C. Metropolitan Police remained in a “less than full duty status due to the riot. In total, more than 150 officers - 86 CP and 65 MPD reported injuries and even more D.C. police officers sustained injuries they “did not even bother to report,” including scratches bruises and eyes burned by chemical sprays,“ according to Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee.
CP Labor Committee Chairman Gus Papathanasio reported that officers sustained head wounds, cracked rips and smashed spinal discs.
Clearly, Rep. Gosar’s definition of “peaceful patriots” might cause some folks to question either his judgment or his veracity.
Or, perhaps we can believe D.C. police 0fficer Michael Fanone. After all, there’s body-camera footage of him being dragged down the Capitol steps, beaten and Tasered several times with his own weapon. “I got one!” one of the rioters yelled in cowardly triumph as Fanone screamed in pain and pleaded for help – “I got kids!”
But Congressmen Clyde and Gosar and their ilk won’t accept Fanone’s description of “the most brutal, savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life” that caused him to suffer a mild heart attack and a concussion during the “tourist visit.”
At this writing, almost 600 of the Capitol insurgents have been arrested, hundreds more are being pursued by the FBI and other police agencies, and approximately fifteen have entered guilty pleas, with many of them promising to “rat out” their fellow “tourists.” Not even the Statue of Liberty, Yellowstone National Park and Orlando’s Disneyworld combined can rack-up those kinds of numbers in a whole year, let alone a single day.
Congressmen Gosar and Clyde are perpetuating a lie in service of The Great Lie of a stolen election in order to divide the American people. They and the other members of their fabulist cohort will continue to beatify Ashli Babbit and spew their lies through November 2022. They would have the American people deny what their own eyes have seen and their ears have heard, deny the deaths of Officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood and the testimony of Officer Michael Fanone.
Hopefully, in defense against this mendacity, Americans will remember the admonition of a Jewish teacher 2000 years ago: “Blessed and your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.” (Matthew 13:16)