Beyond the Liz Cheney vs The Big Lie clusterf*ck yesterday, there was another GQP-induced fiction-drama played-out at the House Oversight and Reform hearing on the Jan.6 insurrection/riot at the US Capitol building — Republicans lied like laughing assholes, painting the event as nothing more than a walk in the park, apparently exhorting Americans to forget what we all witnessed on live TV that day, and in the following days, even worse video on the tragic, brutal reality of what happened.

GQPers on the committee tried like shit to reverse the reality of the event, like Pat Fallon, who claimed the attack was overblown: ‘“Our friends in the mainstream media are quite fond of labeling January 6 as an insurrection or even a rebellion. But are those descriptions accurate, or are they hyperbolic?” Fallon asked.‘
However: ‘He did acknowledge an “unruly and dangerous mob of about 400 broke the law, trespassed, committed various other crimes and endangered the health, safety, wellbeing and lives of many innocent people.”‘
WTF!

Defining the moment: ‘“This is why it’s so hard to get to the truth,” Democratic Congressman Kweisi Mfume said.‘

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos this morning took a look at the hearing and how actually can’t be approached by Republicans because it would pop The Big Lie balloon, so they turn and run from, or fail in polite telephone etiquette:

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that efforts by a member of the D.C. Metro Police to talk to Republican leader Kevin McCarthy are not going well.
Officer Michael Fanone has been trying to get in touch with McCarthy for weeks. He wants the Republican leader to see what actually happened to him on Jan. 6, to see how the crowd of Trump supporters really acted.
Fanone tried again this week, hoping that since it’s National Police Week, McCarthy might give him a few minutes. Instead McCarthy’s staff hung up on Fanone.
But last night, CNN released Fanone’s body camera footage.

No wonder McCarthy is such a weasel, it ain’t pretty:

Officer Fanone from above the attack

F*ck every member of the @GOP for minimizing both the physical and psychological damage all officers sustained pic.twitter.com/AmU22K2Pk4

— ?aryAnn???????'? (@cinemaven) May 13, 2021

Sumner concludes:

These are the images of what the GOP is now selling as “a normal tourist visit” from “patriotic Americans.”
This is the event where even bothering to investigate is an effort by the “deep state” to repress the rights of “law-abiding Americans.”

Republicans are not just ignoring Jan. 6, they’re endorsing it.
On that day, with insurgents still occupying the Capitol and searching for victims, Donald Trump sent out a tweet.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

At the time, every line of that tweet seemed monstrous.
Now Republicans have embraced it from beginning to end. Expect them to demand a statue — not for Fanone and the others who defended the Capitol, but for the people who dragged him screaming down the stairs.

Another giant Republican asshole on the House Oversight committee is Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who lied like shit in twisting the horror of the insurrection/riot into something similar to a tourist outing.
Clyde’s idiot speech via most-aptly The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also this morning:

“There was no insurrection,” he said.
“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. You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the sixth, you’d actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

Of course, like shitheel McCarthy, Clyde scampered:

A representative for Clyde did not respond to an email asking whether he had any response to accusations that he was spreading falsehoods about Jan. 6.

Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, in response to a video that put Clyde’s comments side-by-side with footage from that day, criticized his fellow Republican.

“Hard to believe any elected official could be this oblivious to reality,” Duncan wrote on Twitter.
“It’s this type of blind ignorance that got our party into this mess to start with.”

And this morning, Clyde took offense with lying arrogance:

This morning @LACaldwellDC @DaniellaMicaela gave Rep Andrew Clyde a chance to explain his comments yesterday that Jan 6 looked like a “normal tourist visit.”

Take a listen—> pic.twitter.com/wf99KjRvzT

— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotnbc) May 13, 2021

This entire strain is just pure bizarre — although the GQP has been building to the right now for decades — and when someone doesn’t give a shit whether anything is true or not, real or not, there’s an enormous problem that won’t soon go away on its own, and will most-likely just get worse.
The unmitigated gall of Republicans is astounding, actually beyond comprehension, and really, really terrifying.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post this morning takes a look at that scenario, and surmises we just might be f*cked:

When it came to the brazenness and sheer volume of his dishonesty, Donald Trump was unique among politicians in American history and perhaps even in world history. So when he left office and found the vital propaganda pipelines of Twitter and Facebook closed to him, one might have hoped that his party would begin to rebuild its relationship to the truth.

But if anything, the Republican Party today is even more committed to myths, falsehoods and a shared hostility to the very idea of an objective reality on which a democratic debate might be built than they were when Trump was still president.

Things are not getting better. They’re getting worse. And it’s almost impossible to see a way out.

Go read the whole post, Waldman lists the shit, and it horribly sounds right-on.
And Pinball, too, is right-on:

As we say in history, shit, shit, shit…

(Image by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).