Commentary

IF ONLY – If only our lawmakers had the same concern for residents of cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha and others as they do for the nation’s Capitol building.

While residents witnessed federal and city buildings breached, major portions of these cities burned, businesses looted and destroyed, their Democrat city fathers and elected representatives in Washington seemingly couldn’t have cared less.  In Minneapolis alone, early estimates placed property damage to some 1,300 buildings, with 100 totally destroyed, at about $2 billion.

Our law enforcement president, Donald Trump, pleaded with mayors and governors to request federal help, promising to bring order to those cities in short order.  The handful of those arrested were back on the street in 24 hours.

Night after night, rioters – not peaceful protesters – were allowed to do what they do for what? … To “honor” George Floyd.

Now consider the breaching of the nation’s Capitol building on January 6, 2021, where the damage has been questionably estimated at $30 million.

The lawmakers didn’t hesitate to refer to it as an insurrection, a violent uprising against the government.  And Minnesota’s Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar was one of the first to accuse President Trump of inciting a riot leading to insurrection.

Clearly, the protesters, mostly supporters of Trump, got carried away, tossing aside barriers and breaking windows, but once inside they did very little damage. “Many of those who entered the Capitol that day behaved like tourists,” noted Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA).  They were posing for selfies among the statues, while the leftist radicals in our various cities were defacing or pulling statues down.

Perhaps Roger L. Simon said it best in his Epoch Times commentary, when he asked, “If you were to stage an insurrection on the United State government, would you (a.) simultaneously attack the power grid at multiple points, turning out the lights across the country, or (b.) dress up like a horned Star Wars character at a comic book convention and enter the Capitol building, unarmed, as if it were Halloween?

“Were those people stupid?  Sure.  Were they juvenile? Rather.  But were they insurrectionists?  You gotta be kidding.  In fact, these people were the true patriots, trying, in their clumsy way, to get their country back, or what they thought was their country.

“The real insurrectionists are the people accusing them of insurrection.  They, the accusers, the ones now demanding a commission to study this non-existent insurrection, are the ones taking over our country and imposing their will on the people.”

With some 400 people facing charges for their actions on January 6, 2021, Democrats want to investigate events leading to the “attack” on the Capitol, and the House just passed a bill requesting $1.9 billion (yes, billion) to bolster security at the Capitol.

Embarrassingly, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, in their haste to further damage the president, staged a grand televised memorial in the rotunda on February 2, 2021, honoring Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick as a hero, who was allegedly killed when stricken by a fire extinguisher wielded by a protester.  Later, that was determined to be untrue, and that he died of a heart attack hours after assuring a family member that he was feeling fine.

Still, the identification of the Capitol police officer who shot and killed an unarmed woman, Ashli Babbitt, 35, is mysteriously being kept from us.  The video of the shooting revealed that she wasn’t a real threat to the officer or any member of Congress, yet the officer will not be charged for unreasonable use of his hand gun.  Hmmmmmm. 

There’s more in the aftermath of the Capitol protest, in a pilot program to crack down on domestic extremism, Biden instructed Lloyd Austin, the first black secretary of defense to purge perceived rampant extremism in the military.  Reportedly, the obvious target would be MAGA, the supposed dog whistle identifying Trump supporters, white extremists.

Austin’s black senior advisor, Bishop Garrison, a believer in the 1619 Project, is in charge of the purge.  “(We are) mindful that extremism in our ranks is real, and thought we may not have a full grasp of the problem … we know it can have an outsized effect on our force.  It doesn’t take many to impair our morale, health and readiness,” he wrote in a USA Today op-ed. 

What about the effect of his investigation on the morale of the troops?

You may recall that 317 retired generals and admirals recently signed an open letter in opposition to this activity among a list of other threats facing our country that are being ignored by the Biden administration.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.