America’s second-dumbest senator says 1/6 was no big deal

I will never be fully able to accept that this guy beat Russ Feingold twice:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who joined 42 other Republicans on Saturday in voting to acquit Trump at his impeachment trial, spent a fair amount of the rest of the holiday weekend downplaying the events of Jan. 6.

“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson said on WISN. “When you hear the word ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask: How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?”

He added in another interview: “To call that an armed insurrection, it was the most pitiful armed insurrection anyone could possibly imagine.” He said he was “literally never afraid” during the riot and suggested that the danger to Vice President Mike Pence — about whom rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” — was overblown.

[…]

Except clearly not everyone agrees. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has been downplaying the severity of the riot since shortly after it occurred. A piece on Townhall.com has declared it wasn’t even a riot — just a “a few dudes dressed like Conan the Fauxbarian acting like fools and occasionally fighting with the cops.” Carlson and others have ridiculed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for talking about how scared she was, with many of them butchering the details. Still others have compared the melee to racial justice protests this summer.

There are myriad problems with all of these claims, the biggest being that five people died, including a police officer, and that two more officers have taken their own lives since then. Other police officers were so traumatized that they have reportedly contemplated self-harm, with one turning in her gun. Guns, bombs and stun guns were seized from members of the mob, while other rioters used wrenches, clubs and flagpoles as weapons. An officer has said that police “had been seizing guns all day.”

I strongly recommend this ProPublica piece about what it was like to be a police officer during this “pitiful” attack on the Capitol:

In front of the cops, a mob was mounting a frontal assault. Its members hit officers with fists and baseball bats. They grabbed at weapons slung from the officers’ waists. They unleashed a barrage of M-80 firecrackers. Soaked in never-ending streams of bright orange bear spray, the officers choked on plumes of acrid smoke that singed their nostrils and obscured their vision.

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

The combat veteran was hit with bear spray eight times. His experience overseas “was nothing like this,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

I’ll tell you what, if Johnson agrees to have bear spray sprayed into his eyes and then hit repeatedly with a police shield for 15 minutes, I’ll listen to what he has to say about the riot incited by his daddy being an overblown trifle.