Politico rushed in to declare the Capitol Hill riot was a race issue, hammering on the liberal line that white Trumpy rioters get easy treatment next to BLM rioters. Early on Thursday morning, Politico Playbook came with a guest editor, James Bennet, proclaiming the Capitol rioting was a perfect end for this president's term in office:
LIKE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, the U.S. Capitol revealed itself on Wednesday to be far more vulnerable to attack than lawmakers, journalists or maybe even the Capitol Police imagined. Yet how could the Trump presidency possibly end any other way, with any less agonizing convulsion or any more fitting simile?
After all, the president on Wednesday just did what he does, telling his followers, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.” His collaborators in Congress did what they do, spreading his infecting, aggrieved falsehoods. And the police didn’t do what they don’t do — they didn’t repel white protesters with anything like the degree of violence they used last year against Black protesters.
Julio Rosas at Townhall, who has filmed many protests and riots in recent years, rebutted this line on Twitter on Thursday afternoon:
As someone who has covered many of the riots last year, I can say this narrative is simply false. Tear gas, pepper balls, pepper spray, and flashbangs were all used yesterday, just as they were used on rioters in 2020. https://t.co/WdjJXyfa6X
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) January 7, 2021
But wait -- this hot take on an inadequate response to rioting is coming from the same James Bennet that was forced out as opinion editor of The New York Times over....being too tough on rioting. Specifically, he posted a Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed that the Left abhorred, so the paper confessed there was a "significant breakdown in our editing processes." Bennet actually mentioned this in his guest report:
You may have last seen me getting bounced out of The New York Times for running an opinion piece by Sen. TOM COTTON (R-Ark.) arguing for the use of military troops to prevent the rioting that accompanied some of the peaceful protests over the summer. As our editorials made clear, I disagreed with Cotton then (that’s one reason I supported running the piece). And so I hope it doesn’t make me a hypocrite now to say that I wish the military had been out in force Wednesday to stop the rioting and protect what Biden called the “citadel of liberty.”
Obviously, a more robust police force was necessary to prevent the disgraceful riot at the Capitol. Just as obviously, Bennet is a hypocrite. Since he was disclosing his biases, he added:
Further full disclosure: My brother, [Democrat] Sen. MICHAEL BENNET of Colorado, was among the hundreds of public servants on Capitol Hill who came under threat from the mob Wednesday.
That is a good reason, among many, to be disgusted with this attack on the Capitol.
In case you missed it, Politico decided to fill the gap from the departure of its latest Playbookers Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer with a rotating cast of guest writers up until the Biden inauguration, including prominent TV liberals like Chuck Todd and Yamiche Alcindor.
