This Just In – I don’t trust my eyes. I have good reasons.
Back in the Spring, I noticed I was rubbing my eyes and cleaning my glasses a lot and that it didn’t seem to help. One day I took the ingenious step of covering my left eye and looking at the television through only my right eye … with my glasses on. Yep – big hairy new cataract. Double vision. Blurry vision. Migraines. Vertigo. Quite unpleasant.
Last month I had surgery to remove that nasty thing and while there are a few quirks of recovery to figure out yet, my vision is much better, but for much of this year, it’s been a source of great amusement at my house that when I’m looking for a can of beans, I declare “I don’t see them!” and my husband will appear, look in the cabinet right in front of me and pluck them out. He’s a patient man.
I say all this to establish that I’ve grown accustomed to something happening right in front of me that I cannot necessarily see or understand. This week, I had that experience, though I cannot blame my twitchy right eye, still recovering from the surgery.
It was an ordinary enough thing. I was watching the news and saw a clip of the Speaker of the House talking to reporters. He was explaining that he would indeed be releasing the security footage from January 6th to reporters, but that his staff was reviewing the footage first.
“We have to blur some faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” said the Speaker of the House.
Let me rephrase … he said they’re going to release the footage, but first they need to tamper with it.
Minutes after getting up off the floor, I listened to former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) respond to that quote from Speaker Johnson. Where my eye might still be twitching, Cheney’s twinkled. She would advise the Speaker to go ahead and release that footage just as it is, she said. The Justice Department, she pointed out, already has that raw footage. They’ve had it for a long time.
Johnson’s staff issued a statement to “clarify” his remarks, acknowledging that the DOJ had the footage.
This begs the question, then … what did we just see? Surely the person second in line for the presidency was not brazenly promising to tamper with evidence. In what world would that make any sense?
This was, once again and most pathetically, for the audience of one in Mar-a-Lago. It’s performance art – an effort to promote the lie that when the Department of Justice files charges against people who participated in a violent riot at the Capitol, that’s not law enforcement, it’s “retaliation.”
Johnson’s spokesman Raj Shah, who worked as a deputy White House press secretary in the Trump administration tried to walk these comments back. He said that the Speaker was just concerned that those people who were identified “might face retaliation by non-governmental actors.”
This is the kind of doublespeak 180˚ reversal that we need to watch out for. I know I’ve been blurry and seeing things, but even I saw this one.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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