Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday broke from President Trump by opposing invoking the Insurrection Act as nationwide protests and unrest mount following the death of George Floyd.
Funny how the Ministry of Disinformation hasn’t quashed this type of fake news…
With Trump facing a challenging reelection campaign in five months, Republican voters are far more likely to say the country is headed in the right direction. Nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, say the country is going in the right direction, versus 9 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of independents.
Mark, didn’t your parents tell you as a teenager not to get into your friends’ cars unless you knew where they were going, what you would be doing there, and how you were going to get home afterwards? They didn’t?? We need to have a talk with them.
The next morning, a local journalist regurgitated an anonymous statement from the US Park Police: There was no tear gas. Reporters on the ground and local priests countered that narrative, but the Republicans stuck with it. Some even went so far as to claim that time does not move forward. Washington, DC, like many other cities, had implemented a curfew that was set to begin at 7:00pm. The protesters were tear gassed at 6:35. Nonetheless, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) knew better, insisting that the protesters deliberately stayed out past curfew in order to get tear gassed.
————————
The CDC has defined tear gas as any one of a number of irritant compounds delivered into crowds to disperse them and tear gas is the collective term for these compounds.
The administration is simply using narrow semantic legerdemain and over-punctiliousness to deflect the argument over outcome to an argument over process and some in the Media, notably Peter Alexander, have fallen for it.
This is similar to mass shootings about automatic weapons where the argument concerning the outcome is diverted to one of types of automatic rifles and that lack of knowledge of such disqualifies one from arguing about the loss of life.