Happy Presidents' Day - or Presidents Day (the style is variable) - to all our American readers. You can find our two-part forty-five-song Presidential Medley here and here. Usually, after the mostly-peaceful peaceful transfer of power, I update our special to take account of the new guy - in this case, the purported forty-sixth. But for some reason, this time round, I just thought, aw, screw it.
~As I've been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies: Covid-19 originated in bats or pangolins. New York did a way better job of handling it than Florida, and Andrew Cuomo's official stats are on the up and up. It's totally racist to refer to the "Chinese Coronavirus" but not to "the UK strain" or the "South African variant". There was no election fraud on November 3rd, but there was an insurrection on January 6th. And there are troops on the streets of the American capital to prevent a QAnon uprising on the old inauguration day of March 4th.
Some of the lies are, however, being quietly withdrawn, having accomplished their objective. In my opening monologue on Thursday's Fox News Primetime, I said the following:
All but one of the five dead from January 6th were Trump supporters, felled by strokes, heart attacks; one poor lady was shot at near point-blank range by a police officer and was promptly memory-holed by the US media. The nearest thing to a Trump kill was Brian Sicknick. Here's how America's alleged newspaper of record, The New York Times, reported that story:
'He dreamed of being a police officer, then was killed by a pro-Trump mob.'
The reporters were Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tracy Tulley:
'On Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters... overpowered Mr Sicknick, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.'
'Falsehood flies,' said Jonathan Swift, 'and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect...'
The falsehood flew on the wings of The New York Times for weeks, and the Tale has had its Effect: there are millions of Americans who will still believe three decades hence that Officer Sicknick had his skull smashed by Trump supporters wielding a fire-extinguisher.
There was no such fire-extinguisher. No 'bloody gash in his head', per the Times.
The Truth, meanwhile, is not limping along after the Times falsehood. The Truth is still walled up in the DC pathology lab, unknown to the world.
If you've ever been at a crime scene, as I was once long ago, you'll know the policeman always wants to know the cause of death immediately and the pathologist always wants to get the body back to the laboratory for a proper examination. Certain things can be ruled out in an hour or two – blunt force trauma, for example.
In other words, the fire extinguisher was known by officialdom to be a crock even as the Times published it.
Certain other things might require a couple of days or weeks – that's because you have to take tissue samples and send them away for analysis, for traces of poisons or cancers. It is rather unusual in a functioning jurisdiction (which I certainly don't regard the District of Columbia as) not to be able to tell you the cause of death after well over a month. The investigators' latest theory is said to be bear spray. Bear spray is basically a weaker version of pepper spray, and it's not known to cause human fatalities. And in any case, if Officer Sicknick had been exposed to bear spray, that should have been known to medical examiners four weeks ago.
That was me on telly last Thursday. On Sunday, the blizzard machine at The New York Times finally semi-corrected its utterly fraudulent reporting:
UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.
The Capitol Police utterly failed on January 6th, and had as compelling a motive as anybody to re-characterize the event. But the Times' blame-shifting shouldn't excuse the culpability of their own "reporters". They're not quite saying their original story was bollocks on stilts, but the rewrite concedes that "the circumstances surrounding Mr Sicknick's death were not immediately clear":
Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.
They're not really "at odds" over this: It's the pathologist who gets to determine the official cause of death, not the constabulary. The point is: By now, the cause of death is assuredly known. It is not being released for political reasons, because it would undermine the Official Lie, and might even make the obsequies at the Rotunda look somewhat opportunist and manipulative.
However, the lie has now served its purpose, and millions of Americans will forever believe that Trumpers killed a copper. So it's now safe (as in Nineteen Eighty-Four) for details such as the fire extinguisher and blunt trauma belatedly to be written out of the "newspaper of record"'s record.
~Meanwhile, new Official Lies are being set in place. Over a year after Chairman Xi shipped the WuFlu out of the International Departures lounge to every corner of the planet, his enforcers at the World Health Organisation are ruling out any theory of its origin that might embarrass their Politburo masters.
Oh, but we all must "follow the science", mustn't we? Well, certain scientists are getting fed up with the WHO's China-shilling. Bruno Canard, structural virologist at France's National Centre for Scientific Research:
The WHO investigation is a masquerade. There are so many conflicts of interest and obfuscation that it is as if you asked Hassan Rouhani [Iran's president] to lead an international check on Iran's nuclear programme. The WHO is committing credibility suicide.
The revised official version is that ChiCom-19 entered the People's Republic on a frozen fish-stick or tagliatelle carbonara from Australia or India or Slovakia or anywhere but China. Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers in New Jersey:
The WHO mission was a charade. It has no credibility. Its members were willing – and, in at least one case, eager – participants in disinformation. The predetermined, preordained purpose of the mission was to raise the false-flag proposal that Sars-CoV-2 originated outside China – possibly in southeast Asia, or possibly in Europe or the US – and arrived in Wuhan through international travel or internationally shipped frozen food. No serious person considers internationally shipped frozen food as a plausible explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 arrived in Wuhan.
But that's now the official version. So, if you question it, the Twitter Weirdbeard will kick you off social media.
~One more lie: The total lack of election fraud in the "free world"'s crappest electoral system. That's the Official Lie, as enforced by, say, the senior executive vice-wanker at Cumulus Media. Meanwhile, back in the real world, many of his stations' listeners beg to differ. From a new Rasmussen poll:
42% say mail-in voting led to unprecedented voter fraud in the 2020 election.
That's up by three per cent from December. Evidently there's even more fire-extinguishing insurrectionists out there than we thought. So look for the Cumulus guy and the Weirdbeard and the Times to enforce the official lies even harder.
~It was a busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with the Friday edition of Fox News Primetime, in which I turned the tables and interviewed Tucker. The weekend episode of The Mark Steyn Show was a combined Chinese New Year/Valentine's/Presidents' Day show. Our Saturday movie date was a reprise of our late friend Kathy Shaidle's take on Rock Hudson's mid-life crisis in Seconds. Valentine's Day brought a brand new entry in my series of Sunday Poems on video - Love's Philosophy by Shelley. And we rounded out the weekend with, of course, "My Funny Valentine".
If you were too busy fighting like hell over who first said fighting like hell, I hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Steyn's Sunday Poem is made with the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a great gift membership.
