Originally published at: Weird Rep. Andrew Clyde doubles down on "normal tourist visit" description of Capitol riot | Boing Boing
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In retrospect the most naive part of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was the assumption that propagandists would need to destroy documentation of past events as part of their ongoing campaign to rewrite history.
In reality you can show unedited video footage of events in full high-def glory alongside sworn testimony of all those who lived through it and the party loyalists will still deny the evidence of their eyes and ears.
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That they have not is why they have not been more successful, and why there are not more brainwashed loyalists.
This reality is scary as fuck; but at least we still have a fighting chance.
In 1984 all hope was long gone.
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I remember when “who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” was the punchline to a joke instead of a standard Republican position.
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Contrasting that blowhard’s statements with video of him holding the barricade would make a dandy campaign advert for his opponent.
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Would Mr. Clyde also characterize a picture of President John F. Kennedy riding in a car at 12:29 PM CST on Friday, November 22, 1963 as a “pleasant little trip”?
Or would he characterize President Abraham Lincoln’s experience before intermission of a performance of Our American Cousin on April 14th 1865 as a “nice night at the theater”?
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Well, obviously he was screaming “How can these fine people get to the gift shop with all these couches in the way!?!?!”
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If it kept him and his cronies in power? Hell yeah, he would.
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In all fairness, that was taken directly out of Stalin’s playbook. There was a legion of photo retouching artists who specialized in erasing people from public photos who were declared enemies of the state. It wasn’t so much conjecture and assumption, but a recollection of events in a SF setting.
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Trump’s Cult Members have lost all contact with objective reality. Rep. Clyde HIMSELF was threatened by the mob, yet he stands by his original statement. I never thought that I’d be living in IDIOCRACY, yet, here we ARE.
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I can sympathize with Clyde. I mean I live in an area where regularly are overrun with tourists. Sometimes I want to barricade the ports of entry.
Orwell walked that back later in the story. Remember, O’Brien holds up 4 fingers and tortures Winston to force him to toe the Party line that there are 5 fingers. That’s not a destruction of evidence at all - it’s straight up denying the truth in front of one’s eyes if the Party tells you to do so.
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Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) has permanent shoe stuck up his nazi ass that will need to be surgically removed, thank you Rep. Raskin.
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Collosal Asshole does not want to revisit his Collosal Assholing.
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To be fair to Clyde, if you only look at the few minutes of the many, many hours of video that look like a normal tourist visit, it does look like a normal tourist visit! Also to be fair, only the most horrible, disingenuous person would try to frame Jan 6th that way.
The scary part is, I think you can pretty much respond to any question of what Republicans would be fine with at this point, and that would be true, no matter how horrific the act, no matter how contrary it was to their stated values.
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I was reading something about fraud research the other day, and it noted that victims of fraud at some point wake up to the con when confronted, and simply switch to noting they were in on it the whole time to save face. Sociologically, it’s easier for us to lie than admit we were duped, even though the status change is no different than getting laid off, divorced, etc. except those are considered pitiable, whereas folks don’t think being vulnerable to slick talk is.
This was in relation to deathbed COVID anti-vaxxers, but the analogy holds (and the Venn diagram of Trumpies is a huge overlap). Not sure if Rep. Clyde falls under the conned or the conman or both in this scenario, but it’s not a surprise he’s going to keep denying.
Orwell and his contemporaries had seen some shit between Hitler and Stalin so it was easy for them to plaster that into fiction without much work.
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There! Are! Four! Lights!Fingers!
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That’s what happens when there are no negative consequences for lying and cheating.
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Compleatly off topic: in the thumbnail image for the video, the man on the left looks like a super creepy caricature of Mr. Bean.
I think. I might be needing a nap. 
