The hearings of the House Jan. 6 committee that began on Thursday night presented plenty of evidence of plain old-fashioned wrongdoing, infantile fantasizing by people old enough to know better, and hundreds of instances of people committing overt criminally indictable offenses at the behest of a president of the United States. But the evidence showed something else, too: an entire political party that has lost the capacity to be embarrassed.
There is so much evidence of behavior and attitudes that are embarrassing that you hardly know where to begin: with the whiny look on Jared Kushner's face and his whiny tone of voice as he described the White House counsel's threats to resign as "whiny"? The aw-shucks shrug of the shoulders given by former Attorney General William Barr, who was the highest law enforcement official in the land, as he explained — if that is even the word — resigning his office because he had finally had enough of what he called "bullshit"? Committee vice-chair Liz Cheney's lengthy recitation of all the phone calls Donald Trump didn't make and orders he refused to issue while a violent attempt was made to overthrow the government of which he was in charge?
