https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/09/republican-antics-congress-self-sabotage/

Already, it is safe to say that the brand-new House Republican majority
is off to an awful, abysmal, amateurish and appalling start. And those
are just the applicable adjectives that begin with the letter A.

Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
Their embarrassing performance at Tuesday night’s State of the Union
address — where President Biden handled their boorish heckling with
ease, making them look both obnoxious and ineffectual — put them in a
hole. And then, for some unfathomable reason, they kept digging.

Eugene Robinson: Biden's State of the Union speech shows he is no
punching bag

On Wednesday, Republicans’ first made-for-television, MAGA-themed
public hearing fizzled and then backfired. The House Oversight
Committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), set out to prove the
conspiracy theory that Big Tech social media companies have colluded
with Democrats and the “deep state” to censor conservative views. But
the former Twitter executives they hauled in to testify told a
different story.

Advertisement
As the company acknowledged at the time, Twitter was wrong to briefly
squelch an October 2020 story from the New York Post involving a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. But the suppression lasted only
one day, witnesses said, and was both imposed — and lifted — in an
internal attempt to follow company policy. There were no orders from
the FBI, as Republicans have claimed.

Image without a caption
Follow Eugene Robinson's opinions
Follow
But one of the former Twitter executives, Anika Collier Navaroli, said
she knew of a government attempt to censor content: In 2019, she
testified, a White House official leaned on the company —
unsuccessfully — to take down a tweet by model Chrissy Teigen that
insulted then-President Donald Trump in vulgar terms. Navaroli also
testified that when Trump posted a tweet that clearly violated a policy
against demonizing immigrants, Twitter relaxed the rule to avoid having
to paste a warning label on the offending missive.


Twitter changed policy to accommodate Trump
2:03
A former Twitter employee testified on Feb. 8 to the House Oversight
committee that the company changed its policy to allow President
Trump’s offensive tweets. (Video: The Washington Post) Meanwhile, MAGA loudmouths on the committee made sure that no one could confuse the
hearing with an actual search for truth. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.)
threatened the former Twitter execs with arrest. Reps. Lauren Boebert
(R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) complained endlessly about
their own accounts being “shadow-banned.”

Advertisement
I try to keep track of polls that show what issues U.S. voters care
most about. The alleged shadow-banning of Boebert and Greene doesn’t
show up on any of those lists, I’m afraid.

Oh, I forgot to mention that there was a brief power outage in the
committee room during the hearing, and that Twitter had some system
issues later in the day. “Coincidence?” tweeted Rep. Troy E. Nehls
(R-Tex.) Uh, yes. Except maybe in the MAGA twilight zone.

You might think that all of this amounts to enough Republican
self-sabotage for one week. But you would be wrong.

//--continues

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)