Kevin McCarthy
Kevin McCarthy

It’s breathtaking to watch Donald Trump and the Republican “Sedition Caucus” scale new heights of hypocrisy each day in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 coup attempt.

Though complicit in that insurrection, the 139 Republicans in the House who supported the bid to squash votes for Joe Biden, put the onus on the president-elect and Democrats to unite the country and heal its wounds. That’s rich.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy piously said: “We must work together to lower the temperature and unite the country.”

Right, Kev. But it wasn’t Democrats who swarmed DC armed with explosives and baseball bats and dressed in riot gear. They're not the ones who heeded Trump’s defiant message to fight like hell for the country and march to the Capitol to block the certification of the vote for Joe Biden.

McCarthy and his ilk vandalized the People's House, and now they want the people to make it right again.

The shameless GOP is now moving on in its alternate reality world to the fight against COVID-19, which arrived in the US a year ago.

Republicans want to restore the virus, which has fallen off the front pages since their rampage at the Capitol, to its rightful place in the news cycle. It’s a cynical ploy to divert attention from impeachment and their culpability for the Jan. 6 riot

“Voters are opposed to impeachment and Big Tech censorship, and they want an orderly transition,” wrote Trump pollster John McLaughlin. “Voters strongly prefer that Congress deal with fighting coronavirus and not impeachment.

McLaughlin is just spinning another lie. The majority of Americans (55 percent) want Trump impeached, according to a CBS/YouGov poll conducted Jan. 11-12.

Impeachment supporters give “send a signal that his behavior was wrong” (93 percent) as the top reason for getting rid of the president.

That’s followed by preventing Trump from running again (87 percent) and showing that democracy will defend itself (82 percent).

Nearly six-in-ten (59 percent) of respondents blame Trump for the violence at the Capitol.

As for the pandemic, Trump botched the handling of the virus and then downplayed the risks, which has killed more than 380K Americans.

The desperate White House now wants to champion the fight against the virus.

That’s just the latest entry in its record book of deceit.

The Trump White House’s assault on the First Amendment is going down to the wire as the Voice of America reassigns reporter Patsy Widakuswara for doing her job and asking a “tough question” to thin-skinned secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

In a Jan. 11 speech, Pompeo attacked VOA as the “Vice of America,” a news outlet hellbent on criticizing the US. “It’s not fake news for you to broadcast that this is the greatest nation of the world.”

As Pompeo was leaving the podium at VOA headquarters, Wikakuswara asked him, “What are you doing to repair the US’ reputation around the world.”

In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, an assault that shattered America’s global image of being a citadel of democracy, that was an obvious question.

Pompeo dodged the question and new VOA director Bob Reilly threw his reporter under the bus, declaring she was “out of order” for daring to ask the almighty one a question.

Widakuswara was reassigned and banned from president Trump’s Jan. 12 plane to Texas, where she was supposed to be the pool radio reporter.

Pompeo is the one who was out of order. Despite the efforts of Team Trump, the VOA is not supposed to serve as the propaganda arm of the US.

The VOA charter of 1976 protects its independence and programming integrity. The service’s news is supposed to be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” and not represent any single segment of American society.

The White House Correspondents’ Assn. ripped the reassignment of Widakuswara for “doing her job, asking questions,” which is an affront to the very ideals that phony Pompeo blabbered about in his speech on promoting “democracy, freedom and American values.”

WHCA president Zeke Miller said punishing Widakuswara “harms the interests of all Americans who depend on the free press to learn about the actions of their government and gives comfort to efforts to restrict press freedom around the world.”

Jan. 20 can't come soon enough for the press.

Blaming the sun for global warming… The White House Office of Science and Technology posted a debunked report blaming the sun, not human activity for global warming on its website. It was the latest move in the administration’s crusade against science.

David Legates, who was head of the US Global Change Research Program and a leading climate denialist, and staffer Ryan Maue posted the report without the knowledge of Kelvin Droegemeier, who heads the science office.

“The gambit appeared to be a rogue effort to put the imprimatur of the federal governments on research that aims to undermine the established science of climate change,” reported the New York Times.

Peter Gleick, climate scientist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, called the fiasco a “ham-handed effort to grant a veneer of government respectability to junk science” before Biden takes office.

It will be up to Biden and his EPA pick Michael Regan to junk much of the agency’s work of the last four years, efforts that largely focused on trashing regulations that promoted a cleaner environment.