Liar liar pants on fire
If you haven’t heard this one before, I’m about to let you in on what at one time would have been a career-ending lie. But this one will have practically no effect today. I’m referring to a lie that House Republican Steve Scalise repeated — when he knew perfectly well from firsthand experience that it was a lie.
In June, Scalise joined other Republican dirtbags when they questioned if their own House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in delaying National Guard assistance during the January 6 insurrection, the insurrection fomented because of another Republican lie, the Big Lie that the election was stolen.
These Republicans furthered this Pelosi-blaming lie because it was a distraction away from the known fact that Republican insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and they wanted to blame the Democrats for the damage done that day, at least in part if not in full.
That’s right, the “party of personal responsibility” was trying to place some of the blame — all of the blame if they could get away with it — on an 80 year old woman. So they could slip out of having to face the responsibility. So they could shirk responsibility and blame it all in an old woman. Yeah, I’m talking about the macho party of big bad gun-toting men. I’m talking about the party with all that self-righteously proclaimed, self-anointed and self-aggrandising moral authority.
Scalise joined in this lie because the previous lie, that the whole attack on the Capitol was done by Antifa, didn’t really wash with anyone but the strictly brain dead. The lie before that lie, the one that said it wasn’t an insurrection at all, it was really just a bunch of Republican tourists strolling through the Capitol and staying inside the roped corridors didn’t wash either, because of all the footage of vicious violence shown on TV and all.
Now new video footage has emerged from Thursday’s January 6 Committee hearing that showed Nancy Pelosi talking on a speaker phone with the Department of Defense and the governors of Virginia and Maryland pleading desperately for help from the National Guard during the attack. Everybody in the room could hear her making these frantic phone calls and could also hear the responses.
Guess who else was in the room watching her make those phone calls, avidly listening to Nancy Pelosi talk to the DOD and the two governors? Wait for it. Wait for it. Oh all right, you already guessed it, of course. It was none other than Congressman Steve Scalise.
In a just world, Scalise would be hounded forever by every reporter and commentator that comes within thirty yards of him with questions on why he told that vicious lie about Nancy Pelosi when he knew perfectly well it was a lie. He’d become a public pariah. He’d be repudiated by his own party.
But this isn’t a just world. This is a world composed of an ocean of Republican lies. And very soon the callous lie Scalise told about Nancy Pelosi will be forgotten, washed away by another huge tsunami-like wave of more lies from the ocean of lies that is the Republican Party.
There are eight million stories about liars in the naked city of Republican cowardice, perfidy and bad faith. This has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.