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.
