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Has there ever been a more hyped event than the anniversary of the January 6 riot?

Leftist TV commentators banged the Democrat Party drums all day to remind viewers of Trump’s culpability in directing an “insurrection” that claimed exactly one life, that of an unarmed protester at the hands of a trigger-happy policeman.

Two days earlier these same propagandists had virtually ignored the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in which many hundreds of student protesters were mowed down by tanks and machine guns.

For over four years, Trump haters have been unrestrained in their hyperbolic condemnation of the former president. Now we have Kamala Harris setting a high bar for hyperbole by putting January 6 on the same level as Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers.

Critics have been quick to qualify her remarks as repugnant and an insult to the memory of all those who died in those two tragedies.

Then we had the wild and false assertions uttered by Justice Sotomayor in defense of President Biden’s vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court’s most strident liberal stated that the Omicron variant is “just as deadly as the Delta variant,” a claim refuted by Dr. Fauci himself. She also said that

“We have over 100,000 children, which we never had before, in serious conditions and many on ventilators,” hyperbole so patently false that it led critics to question Sotomayor’s competence for serving on the Court.

As for examples of hypocrisy, we turn to Congress where the disease is endemic. There is no shortage of practitioners on either side of the aisle, but there is no greater hypocrite under the Capitol dome than Senator Chuck Schumer. The Number One priority for Schumer is the passage of the

“Freedom to Vote Act.” This legislation would replace every state law with a uniform federal law regarding voting rules. Among its most nefarious provisions, the act would throw out every state voter ID law, legalize ballot harvesting, mandate universal mail-in ballots, on-line and same-day voter registration, and acceptance of ballots arriving as much as six days late. The act would in effect redefine voting rights in such a way as to keep the Democrats in power forever.

The problem for Democrats is that the “Freedom to Vote Act” could never survive a Republican filibuster. The solution, therefore, is to get rid of the filibuster, a change in the rules thus far opposed by senators Manchin and Sinema. Enter Senator Schumer.

In 2005, the Republicans were in the majority, and some were looking at the possibility of changing the rules governing the legislative filibuster. No one was more vocal in opposition than Senator Schumer. He said, “The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding Fathers called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubber stamp of dictatorship…They want to make this country into a banana republic where if you don’t get your way, you can change the rules. It’ll be doomsday for democracy if we do.”

Now the cynical hypocrite says that “Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past.” This from the man who led a Democrat filibuster 314 times during Trump’s presidency. That’s when the nation faced doomsday for democracy, after all.

Read what you said in 2005, Senator.

A longtime publishing executive and columnist, Claude Milot can be reached at cmilot@embarqmail.com