For those who haven’t already been bored to tears by it, the 1/6 Commission will be having more hearings in September because, as they say, more evidence is coming out. The fact it’s so close to midterms is a complete coincidence, I’m sure! And with each passing day, Leftists are salivating at the findings and testimony so far. Of course, a lot of both have been utter bullshit to date, but hey…
It’s time we had a serious conversation about government-run investigations because I’m not sure we’re getting our money’s worth, and I do mean our money. Even though it helps overall because it keeps some Beltway busybodies occupied for a time and, thus, prevents them from doing real harm, it’s getting to the point where the price tag no longer justifies the results.
Now, before you Leftists get your collectivist panties in a bunch, this isn’t something I’ve just discovered because of the 1/6 Clownshow…I mean Commission. In my lifetime alone, there have been untold number of investigations into just about every conceivable political scandal from Iran/Contra to 1/6, and not one of them has resulted in any tangible benefit to us. So far, the 1/6 Clownshow…I mean Commission is following the same playbook.
The heart of the problem is these investigations aren’t honest from the jump. Oh, you’ll hear supporters say they want to “uncover the truth,” but they don’t want to uncover all of it; just the parts that will help their political allies in the near future. These investigations are designed to uncover their truth, not the truth. And there is a big difference between the two. For one, the former has two more letters.
When you start off an investigation with a bias for or against one of the involved parties, the results are going to be tainted. It’s like the old computer term GIGO, or Garbage In, Garbage Out. You can’t expect a good outcome from bad faith. And with all of the blue ribbon commissions and Congressional investigations I’ve seen, bad faith is the coin of the realm.
Take the Benghazi hearings, for example. As much time and money as we spent on trying to get to the bottom of the deaths of four Americans due to the Obama Administration’s foreign policy leaders being dumber than a bag of hammers, nobody was held accountable. Nobody got fired, arrested, or thrown in Gitmo. One of the major players, Hillary Clinton, walked away without a scratch and managed to convince enough people she would be a great President in spite of the fact she already lost once before to Barack Obama, who was George Washington compared to the Hilldog. And no matter what happened, it is still considered to be a partisan witch hunt by the Left.
Therein lies the next problem with these types of investigations and commissions: it’s near-impossible to remove the ideological bent from the process. There could be a Congressional investigation into the best flavor of snow cone and someone could turn it into a political issue. (Of course, those people are secretly working for Big Cherry or Big Grape, but you didn’t hear that from me.) A big reason for this is that in Washington, everything is political, from the shoes you wear to where you get a tuna melt on rye. When everything can be turned into a political football, truth becomes a casualty.
The funniest part of these investigations to me is how the people behind them go out of their way to try to appear bipartisan by getting people allegedly from both sides of the aisle to participate. Think of it like Affirmative Action, but for less qualified people. It doesn’t matter if the participants hang with the Donkeys or ride with the Elephants if they all have a vested interest in achieving a common goal, which usually is to deflect blame from institutional fuck-ups and find acceptable scapegoats. This results in findings that are more watered down than mixed drinks in Amish strip clubs.
Anyone remember the 9/11 Commission? If you don’t, it’s no big deal. Their findings so laughable and obvious, they were akin to “Don’t stick your fork in the toaster.” And it was done precisely to avoid dealing with the real problems, such as the FBI and CIA not talking to each other on important matters like, oh I don’t know, international terrorists plotting to take over airplanes and crash them into government buildings. In fact, I think one of the 9/11 Commission’s findings was “Don’t let terrorists take over planes and crash them into buildings.”
Yet, with all of their sage advice, are we any safer flying? Sure, the TSA can still give us complementary rectal exams with each flight, but aside from finding the occasional polyp, the answer is a resounding no. So, this begs the question of why we spent all this money and time on what was a waste of both. And the answer is simple: because Congress wanted to give some political buddies the cushiest temp job ever. No results expected, no quality checks provided. Just show up, rustle around some papers, hold a hearing or two, and collect a fat paycheck in between media appearances to talk about how important the work of the commission is and how hard the members are working.
This does a disservice to all Americans. We trust our leaders to represent our best interests, and that trust gets abused more than Ike abused Tina. Yet, whenever there’s a new scandal that gains enough momentum to inspire politicians to do something, we play the same game over and over again and get the same results.
I know Leftists really want the 1/6 Commission to be different, but it won’t be. They’re already a laughingstock in a country that helped make Rebecca Black a music star, and it’s safe to say their results are going to be vastly disappointing to the hardcore “Arrest Trump” crowd. Nothing of significance will come of it because it’s not supposed to happen. All it does is give people with more axes to grind than a lumber camp a chance to get time in the spotlight, collect a paycheck, and look good to people who are already on their side in the first place.
Then, when the inevitable happens, people who put so much faith in the outcome will be pissed off and rant about how the guilty are going unpunished because [insert partisan squawking point here]. That makes for great Twitter engagement, but it’s piss-poor when it comes to actually accomplishing something.
Going forward, I would love to see Congressional investigations outsourced to independent investigators. Maybe someone like Columbo or Sam Spade with no real agenda aside from figuring out the guilty parties and bringing them to justice. Sure, they’re both fictional characters, but after seeing how real Congresscritters do things, we could do a hell of a lot worse than letting fictional characters run things.
Tag: 9/11 commission
Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week
Since the events of January 6th, the Left has demanded there be a commission set up to review what happened, not unlike the 9/11 Commission. Let me save you a few million bucks: some stupid people did stupid and illegal things, and the Left hyperventilated over it. Yet, that hasn’t stopped House Democrats from passing a bill that would set up the January 6th Commission. Instead, the Senate stopped it.
It seems like when there’s a major event like 9/11 or 1/6, the Left wants to set up commissions to “get to the bottom of it” with the hopes the findings can be used to prevent future events. Sometimes they’ll jazz it up by calling them “blue ribbon commissions,” but the principle, at least in theory, is the same. Yet, in practice…well, we’ll get to that after the obligatory Lexicon opening.
commission
What the Left thinks it means – a bipartisan group designed to look over the facts of a matter and devise proposals to prevent the matter from happening again
What it really means – an excuse to spend money to get utterly worthless results
My statement in the first paragraph about what happened 1/6 is only partially a joke, which is a higher percentage than my actual jokes, but not as big of a joke as the concept of a 1/6 Commission is. At this point, the events have been analyzed, reanalyzed, put through the various ideological spin cycles, and turned into everything but a Ken Burns documentary series on PBS. There might even be a Broadway musical, t-shirt, or sneaker deal in the process. And all with the same purpose: to squeeze out even more milk from the milked-dry cash cow that was the “insurrection.”
As much as I say more power to ‘em for trying it, the issue comes down to the use of tax dollars towards what is at this point a foregone conclusion. Nothing any commission, bipartisan or otherwise, could come up with would be shocking new information, and the suggestions they could come up with would either be common sense or an appeal for more money and bigger government. You want to know how I know this?
Check out the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. They were about as useless as Auto Tune for Yoko Ono, only much more painful to consider.
This goes back to one of my hard and fast universal truths of life: Government isn’t in the problem-solving business. This opens up a whole slew of follow-up questions, the primary one being why we need a commission to look into anything. It’s really pretty simple: the report becomes a cudgel to use against a particular person or political ideology. With the 9/11 Commission, it was George W. Bush (even though the original warnings he was supposed to act on were more vague than a Michael Bay storyline). And with a 1/6 Commission, the target would be Donald Trump because he helps them raise money indirectly.
There is a secondary reason I’m not even sure the Left recognizes. With both houses of Congress and the White House under Democrat control, Leftists should be able to get pretty much anything they want done. All they have to do is vote along party lines and it’s pretty much a done deal. Yet, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know you have), they can’t even organize a one-car accident, let alone advance an ideological agenda. What better way to avoid having to answer questions about why the Leftist agenda has stalled worse than a Yugo in a flood than to attack a common enemy in Trump? And because Democrats hold the White House and Congress, they can initiate whatever actions they feel are necessary to take the heat off them…I mean to hold Trump accountable.
The strategy in play here works in the long term as well. To put it mildly, the Democrats are skittish about 2022 when Republicans stand to gain seats as conventional political wisdom goes. Then again, conventional political wisdom never predicted we’d be saying President Donald Trump, but that’s neither here nor there. Commissions, like the 9/11 and the proposed 1/6 ones, tend not to move that fast. They make the sloth from “Zootopia” look like the Road Runner on energy drinks. In short, this means it’s a sure bet any commission set up for the January 6th “insurrection” will take a while to start, let alone conclude, which would easily take it into 2022 and beyond where Leftists can run against Trump instead of against their actual opponents. This could easily bleed over into the 2024 Presidential election, given the glacial nature of these commissions.
The problem the Left faces here is one of their own creation. Imagine that! One of their favorite talking points about 1/6 is how everything was caught on video so we could see what happened. Yet, out of that knowledge comes…the need for a commission to look into what happened? As most Leftist ideas do, this runs smackdab in the face of logic. Why would we need to dig deeper into the matter if we all know what happened?
Unless, of course, the commission is a Trojan Horse.
Let me explain as I adjust my tinfoil conspiracy theorist hat. If this commission is to be bipartisan and true to its intent, it will have to look into every aspect of the events of 1/6. Including a certain Speaker of the House who may have made it more difficult to contain the “insurgents.” It might also have to figure out how the protesters who got inside the Capitol were inspired by Donald Trump’s January 6th speech…before he gave it. It’s these little details that always trip up the best attempts of the Left to throw shade. Granted, a 1/6 commission might not have to look too deeply into matters like these, but they would have to explain why or have their work mocked by a certain Midwestern blogger who likes to come up with weekly words the Left love to use.
Here’s where the Trojan Horse aspect comes into play. The Left knows certain parties within their midst have dirty hands and a real commission designed to investigate the Leftist narrative for factual underpinnings might stumble across how those hands got dirty in the first place. To protect those individuals, it might be necessary to appear to support a commission but not follow through on it. Of course, this will enrage the Orange Man Bad crowd, but it’s a good CYA move.
Then, there’s the Left’s recent obsession with eliminating the filibuster in the Senate. After decades of using it whenever possible, the Left has had enough of the filibuster and want to get rid of it because those evil nasty Republicans are threatening to use it to do the same thing the Left did! Who could have seen that coming, amirite? Anyway, the recent failure of the Senate to pass legislation that would create the 1/6 Commission breathed new life into the movement because the Left doesn’t like the fact they would have to get at least 60 votes to get it passed and avoid a filibuster. So, since they lost, they insist the rules need to be changed so they can win. With this defeat, the Left now has more ammunition to renew the call to remove the filibuster as an option. (Which, of course, is a bad idea, but try telling them that.)
Regardless, the idea of a 1/6 Commission may seem good and logical on the surface, but it’s a recipe for disaster, especially for those who have a genuine passion to get to the bottom of what happened. If you want to find out, do your own research. If you want to spend a lot of money and get nowhere, get a high-end treadmill. At least it will be less expensive than a government commission.