The leftist bias, indeed dissembling, concerning the January 6, 2021 mêlée at the Capitol is evident in a front-page article in The New York Times, May 30.  The headline proclaimed:

With No Panel,
Riot Questions
Sure to Linger

Anyone familiar with New York Times–ese knows that raising questions is a favorite way at the paper to keep the anti-Republican pot boiling.  The Times will raise Jan. 6 questions as long as a Republican is left standing.

This front-page piece of anti-Republican propaganda began dissembling in the first paragraph, calling the situation at the Capitol, Jan. 6, "one of the most serious assaults on American democracy in history."

Two paragraphs down, the Times termed the events of Jan. 6 at the Capitol "a shocking act of domestic extremism against the United States government."  (More extreme than the Antifa-caused mayhem throughout the country the latter half of 2021?  More on this below.)

The Times pointed its finger of blame at President Trump by the fourth paragraph:

"The public may never know precisely what Mr. Trump and members of his administration did or said as a throng of his supporters stormed the Capitol while Congress met to formalize President Biden's victory, threatening the lives of lawmakers and the vice president."  ("Threatening the lives"?  As Biden would say, "Come on, man.")  And before that paragraph was completed, the Times managed to insinuate that Mr. Trump received help from Republicans in Congress.  "The extent of the role of Republican lawmakers closely allied with Mr. Trump in planning the Jan. 6 'Stop the Steal' rally that spiraled into a brutal onslaught may never be known."  (Will we ever know the identity of the Capitol Hill officer who killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, and why he shot her?)

The sixth paragraph really went off the deep end, conjuring up Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, and 9/11 as fitting analogs to what a timeline at Wikipedia indicates was a tumult that lasted some four hours, the length of many baseball games nowadays.  To appreciate just how despicable are references to Jan. 6 in a 9-11 context, please go to this link, a column by Debra Burlingame on the travesty of such comparison.

It is no less a "travesty" to struggle to analogize Jan. 6 with "Pearl Harbor" or "JFK assassination."  Those who, maliciously or ignorantly, would do so betray an utter lack of good sense, of taste.  An example of bad taste from Wikipedia is its timeline mention of the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by an as yet unidentified Capitol Hill police officer.  Wikipedia, to its everlasting shame, termed the late Ms. Babbitt an "insurrectionist."  For heaven's sake, she was unarmed.  What kind of "insurrectionist" is unarmed?

Where are the descriptions of the radicals and thugs and mayhem-makers who, throughout the second half of 2020, committed innumerable acts of arson and looting, even murder, across the land?  Aren't the real "insurrectionists" those who burned down police stationhouses, who tried to burn down courthouses, who set themselves up as challenging secessionist entities in major cities?

This leads to a collateral question that, more likely than not, occurred to many patriotic citizens but that pollsters have not touched with a ten-foot poll: how many voters cast their ballots for Joseph Biden, fearing a true nationwide insurrection by the likes of Antifa if President Trump were re-elected?  After all, throughout the country, in the days before Election Day, storefronts were boarded up, not against hurricane winds, but against the fury of leftist post–Election Day mob violence.

The Times' May 29 article mentions Nancy Pelosi only for naming Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré "to lead a security review of the Capitol in the aftermath of the riot."  Among other comments, the general was quoted as saying, "Our government did not work that day."  But what role does Pelosi play if not as senior official in our government?  Not unexpectedly, the Times article, while raising some questions, did not inquire: what did Nancy Pelosi know, when did she know it, and what measures should she have taken before the trouble to prevent the assemblage from getting out of hand?

Didn't President Trump try to get National Guard troops to the Capitol to keep the protesters in check, notwithstanding that security at the Capitol was the responsibility of House Speaker Pelosi?

(For an incisive and early analysis of Jan. 6, see the February 19 American Thinker column on the subject by AT deputy editor Andrea Widburg.  As Ms. Widburg suggests, what if Pelosi manipulated Jan. 6 into a trap for President Trump and his followers, the better to smear him, as the left succeeded in doing, for some two years, with the Russia hoax?)

The Times article, four paragraphs from the end, printed what must be termed a blatant lie by insinuation.  Here is the full text of this offending paragraph (emphasis added):

About 140 officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol.  [The Times identified none, nor described their alleged injuries.]  Many were smashed in the head with baseball bats, flag poles and pipes [again, no specificity of injuries].  Officer Brian Sicknick, who was allegedly sprayed with bear spray, collapsed and died afterward, and two others who clashed with the mob later took their own lives.

Originally, on Jan. 8, if memory serves (and this writer affirms that it does), the Times reported that Officer Sicknick died from a blow to the head with a fire extinguisher.  The account was either based on hearsay or rushed to propagandize against President Trump.  The account did not mention the hospital to which Officer Sicknick was taken, nor the physician who signed the death certificate.  Weeks later, the medical examiner reported that Officer Sicknick's death was caused by two strokes, not by blunt force trauma.  Andrew C. McCarthy, at National Review, wrote how the Times offered a grudging correction for its initial report on Officer Sicknick's death. 

But see how the Times strives to insinuate, nearly five months after the incident, that Officer Sicknick — and two suicides — were killed by "clash[es] with the mob."

On August 20, 2016, The New York Times published an editorial, anticipating that Hillary Clinton would be the next president.  The editorial was titled, "How Can America Recover From Donald Trump?"

How?  By addressing the "toxic effects" of Trumpism.  The performance of The New York Times, in covering Mr. Trump since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2016, and certainly made manifest by its sly, manipulative, and dissembling May 29 front-page article on the GOP's rejection of a Jan. 6 commission, shows that the Times' way of addressing the faux toxic effects of Trumpism is to reduce journalism to the level of a media outlet subservient to a totalitarian government.  

The slogan of the Times should be not "All the News That's Fit to Print," but "All the Fake News That's Intended to Deceive."  But if the Times made such a change, it would be taking a giant step toward honesty, and honesty is no longer a byword at this "noxious" paper (borrowing a term used by Theodore Roosevelt in his " Man in the Arena" speech at the Sorbonne, April 23, 1910).

Image: Adam Jones via Flickr (cropped).

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