The House select committee investigating the events of January 6 consists of nine members, ALL OF WHOM, Democrats and Republicans, were appointed by Pelosi.

Professional politicians, including Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell, and McCarthy, cannot be counted on, as a class, to ferret out the truth if there’s any possibility that the truth will make them and their party look bad and cost them votes in the next election.

They are not – first and foremost – truth-seekers. What they seek is political advantage. 2022 is an election year. The political stakes for the Democratic and the Republican parties’ leadership could not be higher. And the events that took place on January 6, 2021 in our nation’s capital are only now – almost a year and a half later – finally about to be publicly scrutinized by a congressional committee. Did it really take that long to organize these hearings, or was the schedule constructed so as to maximize the impact on the general election in November?

A FULL ACCOUNTING regarding who did what, who refrained from doing what, and who failed to do what on January 6 ought to address the words and deeds of President Trump, Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, WDC Mayor Bowser, and all the other civilian and uniformed local government and national government leaders who could have acted to prevent the mob’s attack on the Capitol but did not. I still remember watching video of the DC police removing the metal barriers protecting the Capitol and allowing the mob to enter the Capitol grounds. That seemed to me at the time, and still today, to have been a big mistake – a HUGE mistake! A true dereliction of duty. The mob’s entrance into the congressional buildings could have been prevented, but it wasn’t.

I wonder, in my more cynical moments, if Pelosi and other Democratic leaders really wanted to prevent the attack and did everything in their power to prevent it, to stop it, or, rather, if they were willing to allow the attack to occur and then use it against Trump and the Republicans – as they are doing today. I hope that no elected American official would ever act that cynically. But these days, there are Democratic and Republican politicians in positions of power who I do not trust at all to act decently and honorably. Rather, I believe that some of them, and perhaps many of them, believe so strongly in the moral uprightness of their own partisan political views and in the moral bankruptcy of the other party, that they are willing to justify saying and doing JUST ABOUT ANYTHING to keep their political opponents from maintaining or gaining and exercising political power.