REPUBLICANS DON'T THINK JANUARY 6 WAS A BIG DEAL -- HERE'S WHY

No surprise:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will oppose a bipartisan deal announced last week that would form a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, his office announced Tuesday.

In a statement, he said, among other things:

... given the Speaker’s shortsighted scope that does not examine interrelated forms of political violence in America, I cannot support this legislation.

And we know what that means:

McCarthy, like many Republicans, has sought to broadly equate the violence Jan. 6 with the racial justice protests last summer.... Since the riot at the Capitol, this has been a common refrain.... It’s never been a robust analogy, for a number of reasons, including that there’s an obvious difference between, say, declaring a few blocks of Seattle to be an autonomous jurisdiction and trying to forcefully prevent Congress from finalizing the results of a national election.

Republicans, of course, believe that the violence of the anti-racism protests was relentless, widespread, and massively destructive, because that's how it's described in their media bubble. But there's another reason the whataboutism makes sense on the right.

Republicans downplay the amount of violence that took place on January 6, and many absurdly ascribe it to Antifa and Black Lives Matter provocateurs -- but they also don't care because, as far as their concerned, the target of the violence wasn't very important. It's just the government.

They say they love America, and they believe they have a monopoly on that sentiment, but they don't believe that the government is part of what makes America America. Guns are America. Trump rallies are America. Capitalism and football used to be America, until they became -- say it with me, boys and girls -- "woke."

But the government isn't America. Government is evil. Oh, sure, when there's a Republican president, it's considered unpatriotic to criticize him, but that's because Republican presidents should be allowed to do whatever they want without constraint -- especially by the rest of the government.

So January 6 was no big deal to them. They don't care about the system of government laid out in our laws. They'd have been happy to live in a Trump dictatorship, or a Reagan dictatorship, or a Bush/Cheney dictatorship from 9/11 through the end of Bush's first term. But they have no love for our actual government. What the insurrectionists did on January 6 was not an attack on anything they value.