While I (almost) always appreciate Kyle’s sense of humor, it seems to me that a good deal of the talk about supposed media/Democratic overreaction to January 6 is an attempt at changing the subject. I do not think it is time to change the subject yet.
Not that I didn’t like the joke. But it wouldn’t seem to me obviously ridiculous to make, as Kyle humorously imagines, a nine-hour documentary about a six-hour event. There was an eight-second event in 1963 that has produced many hundreds or thousands of hours of documentary and commentary and continues to do so. The people who wanted to string up Mike Pence may not have been as competent as Lee Oswald, but surely it would be a mistake to take that incompetence as exculpatory. In fact, I think we should reject in total the argument that we should take this less seriously because the mob never had any real chance at achieving its goal. For one thing, the mob did, in fact, achieve its goal, which was to introduce the element of physical violence and the threat of murder into what had been, until then, more than two centuries of peaceful democratic succession. And maybe it is those 224 years that we ought to be thinking about, for perspective, rather than the six hours.
But, yes, they are an excitable bunch at MSNBC.