Dana Milbank, a fabulous columnist at The Washington Post, reviews Kevin McCarthy’s long record of claiming that he didn’t know, he didn’t see it, he didn’t hear it, he has no opinion.
After McCarthy gave 40,000 hours of security video from January 6, 2021, to Tucker Carlson, he was surprised to hear that Tucker Carlson took clips to “prove” that nothing much happened that day. He was confused. I’m confused too as I thought that Carlson had long advanced the claim that the insurrection and violence that we saw that day was actually a “false flag” operation, manipulated by the FBI, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter. All along, Carlson has pandered to his viewers by insisting that Trump supporters had nothing to do with the turmoil and desecration of the nation’s Capitol.
Just another day at the Capitol is the new line at FOX. If you thought otherwise, your eyes deceived you. The insurrectionists were actually peaceful protestors, now victims and patriots.
This new line was too much for many of the Republicans who were there that day and ran for their lives.
Milbank wrote:
Not since the Know-Nothing Party disappeared in the 1850s has a public figure boasted about his ignorance with as much gusto as Kevin McCarthy does.
It doesn’t seem to matter what you ask the speaker of the House. He hasn’t read it, seen it or heard about it.
The explosive documents from the Dominion case showing Fox News hosts privately said Donald Trump’s election lies were hokum but promoted the lies on air anyway?
“I didn’t read all that. I didn’t see all that,” McCarthy told The Post.
The way Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (predictably) manipulated the Jan. 6, 2021, security footage McCarthy (foolishly) gave the propagandist, giving the false appearance that the bloody insurrection was “mostly peaceful”?
“I didn’t see what was aired,” McCarthy asserted.
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, in an implicit rebuke of McCarthy, blasting the Carlson propaganda while holding up a statement from the Capitol Police chief denouncing Fox News’s “outrageous,” “false” and “offensive” portrayal of the insurrection?
You guessed it. McCarthy “didn’t see” McConnell do that.
The benighted McCarthy has been amassing this impressive body of obtuseness for some time. If ignorance is bliss, the California Republican has been in nirvana for years now.
How about Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, provoking the sacking of the Capitol?
“I didn’t watch it,” McCarthy said.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) calling the insurrectionists’ rampage a “normal tourist visit”?
“I don’t know what Congressman Clyde said,” quoth McCarthy, and “I didn’t see it.”
When his own designated negotiator reached a bipartisan agreement to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack (a commission McCarthy ultimately killed)?
Trump, in a recorded phone call, demanding Georgia’s secretary of state “find” enough votes to overturn the election results?
Trump telling four congresswomen of color (three of them U.S.-born) to “go back” where they came from, prompting chants of “send her back” among his rallygoers?
“I didn’t get to see the rally.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) harassing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with shouts and slander just off the House floor?
“I didn’t see that. I don’t know what happened.”
Trump’s ludicrous allegation that former GOP congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have murdered a staffer?
“I don’t quite know about the subject itself. I don’t know this subject well.”
Trump’s scandalous claim that Democrats inflated the death toll from a hurricane in Puerto Rico to “make me look as bad as possible”?
“I haven’t read it yet,” McCarthy pleaded.
At best, McCarthy’s willful cluelessness is just a dodge. But this week, McCarthy’s see-no-evil approach was just plain evil.
After Carlson aired his phony portrayal of the insurrection, several Republicans finally spoke up about Fox News’s lies: “Inexcusable and bull—-” (Sen. Thom Tillis, N.C.), “whitewashing” (Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C.), “dangerous and disgusting” (Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah).
Then there was McCarthy, questioned by reporters just outside the speaker’s office, which the supposedly “peaceful” insurrectionists had ransacked that terrible day.
“Do you regret giving him this footage so he could whitewash the events of that day?” asked CNN’s Manu Raju.
“No,” McCarthy replied, adding some gibberish about “transparency” (which is the very opposite of Carlson’s fabrication).
“Do you agree with his portrayal of what happened that day?” Raju pressed.
“Look,” McCarthy said. “Each person can come up with their own conclusion.”
Talk about dangerous and disgusting. Given a choice between fact and fiction, between law and anarchy, between democracy and thuggery, the speaker of the House proclaimed his agnosticism. In doing so, he threw the power of the speakership behind the insurrectionists and against the constitutional order he swore to uphold. McCarthy’s leadership team even endorsed Carlson’s fakery, promoting a link to the segment from the House GOP conference’s official Twitter account with four alarm emojis and a “MUST WATCH” recommendation.
Of course, were McCarthy to turn against Fox News, the speaker, weakened by the promises he made to secure the speakership, would be swiftly replaced by the likes of GOP caucus chair Elise Stefanik of New York (who claimed Carlson’s propaganda “demolished” the “Democrats’ dishonest narrative” about Jan. 6), or Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.), who went on Carlson’s show to congratulate him on his deception.
So McCarthy sells out democracy to preserve his title. He gave the security footage to Carlson in the first place because he promised that to the far-right Republicans denying him the speakership during his 15-ballot quinceañera in January.
Even Fox Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has expressed some regret over the network’s role in perpetrating Trump’s “big lie,” saying it should have been “stronger in denouncing it.” The internal documents exposed in the Dominion lawsuit show beyond any doubt that Fox News hosts knew the truth about the 2020 election and yet encouraged viewers night after night to believe Trump’s lies.
Those hosts continue to deceive and manipulate viewers nightly. The same day Carlson aired his Jan. 6 fabrication, Trump said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that he would have been willing to let Vladimir Putin “take over” parts of Ukraine. But when Hannity played excerpts of the interview on Fox News, the network edited out Trump’s proposed surrender.
The latest Fox News lies have proven too much for the Senate GOP leader. Though McConnell has enabled Trump at crucial moments, he said at a news conference this week that it was “a mistake” for Fox News to portray the insurrection “in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here in the Capitol thinks.”
Yet McCarthy continues to put himself before his country. In just two months on the job, McCarthy “already … has done more than any party leader in Congress to enable the spread of Donald Trump’s Big Lie,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, charged on the Senate floor this week. The speaker, he said, “has made our democracy weaker.”
And McCarthy isn’t finished with his depredations. Greene, given a position of influence and respectability by the speaker, is launching a probe, complete with a field trip to a D.C. jail, into the “inhumane treatment” allegedly suffered by the accused insurrectionists awaiting trial. McCarthy has also given the green light to a new probe designed to challenge the conclusions of the Jan. 6 committee.
The man who will lead that panel, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), declared this week that Americans “didn’t see the other side” of the insurrection. “I think the truth is going to be somewhere between the violent videos and the supposedly peaceful actions there,” he said.
No. The only truth is that Jan. 6 was a violent attack on the seat of American democracy. There was nothing peaceful about an armed insurrection attempting to overturn an election — even if some people there that day weren’t themselves violent.
But that truth — and this democracy — are threatened by a dangerously weak speaker of the House, who has concluded that the only way to preserve his own power is to support Fox News in its sabotage of this country.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The American Party/Know-Nothing Party. Used to dress up in robed, KKK-style costumes. And ride horseback with guns & flaming torches. Through immigrant labor coal camps. Terrorizing coal miners and their families.
These thugs knew EXACTLY what they were doing and why.
Kevin McCarthy doesn’t live under a rock. And neither does Greg Becker. CEO at Silicon Valley Bank. Who was a DIRECTOR at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.
Becker & his team allowed the cascading tech industry bank collapse to happen. Selling out democracy globally to preserve & protect titles, power, privilege, profit & plutocracy.
Cold-blooded & calculated sabotage.
In the USA, Israel, UK, China, Canada & Beyond.
The SVC bank was active in fighting to deregulate banks. Trump administration complied. SVC leaders will be accountable (I hope).
As did 17 Democratic Senators who voted to repeal those Obama era Banking Regulations under Trump. There is the problem. Unlike Republicans who almost never compromise on their vile core values, a significant number of Democrats have consistently prevented real change. It has always been about more than Sinema and Manchin. And of course voters put people like Warner in office. Then it leads others to say “both parties are the same” . Whose fault is that other than the voters who elect them in primaries? And if progressives won primaries in many of these states would they stand a prayer in a General Election ?
Now that Fox (sic) News has been given that footage, why are not all of the other news organs clamoring for their copies. A FOIA request cannot be denied since the footage has already been given to one news organ, no? Or can the government paly favorites like that?
The House Republicans make up the rules as they wish. I just read that they are now considering prosecution of Liz Cheney and other members of the Jan 6 committee. I suppose they can refer them for prosecution but that will go nowhere.
Amazing to me that the GOP defends an attack on the Capitol.
Simply put: traitors. And until they face the law for their actions, they will continue and spread.
Exactly right. 141 Repugnican traitors voted NOT to approve the election results AFTER the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol. In other words, they actively participated in the attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States. And many of them participated in the plot to do this BEFORE the actual Capitol attack.
Traitors.
The traitors continue to be treasonous in their support of the 1/6 insurrectionists, in their insistence that 1/6 was a normal tourist visit, in their hatred for Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger, in their using their new power to continue Big Lies (Trump “won” and 1/6 was peaceable). And let’s not forget the biggest traitor of all: Tucker Carlson, who feeds his audience the lies they want to hear.
McCarthy is the classic flim-flam man along with many others in the GOP. The media are complicit by failing to challenge his feigned ignorance.
Both
What astounds me is the craven behavior for all to see. If he were to leave office today, he would be judged as the most ineffective, spineless, unprincipled Speaker in the history of Congress. His name is likely to become a well-worn adjective for pusillanimous political behavior. McCarthyism has been taken, but the best that could be said of it was that it had a point of view, something Kevin seems incapable of generating himself. Right now, it may be the American synonym for quisling.
I would add least qualified.
Since McCarthyism is taken, how about “Kevinism”?
Kevins do seem to fit well with Karens!
The Repugnicans are almost all like Trump. They stand for nothing except what they can grab for themselves personally. They are completely committed to the war of all against all. Yes, they will indulge in extreme factionalism and go after the Dems, but they will also eat one another and their young if they see an opportunity in it. They haven’t the moral compass of parasitic wasp larvae.
So why doesn’t the press follow these questions up with:”You don’t expect the American people to believe your plea for ignorance do you Mr. Speaker?” I can’t help but think that many in the media are more concerned with getting an interview with DeSantis for ratings than exposing the truth.
Follow the path that led to McCarthy being elected Speaker of the House, two heartbeats or impeachments from being president of the United States.
Who called Greene to help McCarthy win?
If you Google that question, the first page of results are full of Trump making phone calls to get McCarthy elected.
Then McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson, and no other media source, 40,000 hours of video covering the failed January 6th insurrection and coup attempt.
For Traitor Trump, everything is transactional. “I’ll do this for you if you do this for me.”
There is another possibility. Trump has something on McCarthy and the Traitor blackmailed him to do that. Playing dumb is McCarthy’s only defense.
Stretching a bit more, maybe McCarthy is a closet, kiddy fiddler who used to attend Jeffrey Epstein’s molestation parties.
FOX is desperate because of the Dominion lawsuit and court case.
Traitor Trump is desperate because of many lawsuits and court cases closing in and his daughter already threw him and her brothers under a bus.
What happens when you corner a mad dog? Desperate mad dogs will do anything to survive. Tear everyone apart, along with themselves. Hitler was a mad dog near the end of WWII when his generals came to him and said Germany had to surrender or end up being totally destroyed as a country. Hitler’s response was the German people deserved to suffer because they failed him, and the war went on… until he shot himself, after shooting Eva in the back of her head, and had his body burned so nothing existed to be identified. The Soviet army was only a couple of blocks away when that happened and Hitler had children fighting tanks.
FOX has more at stake than we knew in the Dominion lawsuit.
Dominion sued for $1.6 billion. If Doninion wins, they not only get $1.6 billion but can win punitive damages, which are unlimited.
Please refrain from even toying with allegations of pedophilia.
I agree. But convictions and coverups are fair game.
This shows a lot of forethought and I agree completely. Thank you
Recently unearthed footage from McCarthy’s early days:
Haaaaaa! Yes!
REPORTER: Speaker McCarthy, are you a man or an intestinal parasite of the body politic like Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley?
KEVLING: What do you think I am, a biologist?
Are we being ruled by smart people who are putting us on or idiots who really mean it? Mark Twain
Haaaa!!!
Yes
Dumb or duplicitous? Yes, of course. He is both, and utterly spineless.
McCarthy and Fox News could prove to be the downfall of our democracy, if left unchecked. They put personal gain ahead of everything, not caring what the cost, or how many are hurt and die because of it!