Jun 20, 2022 4 min read

OK! I’ll admit I was afraid of the boogeyman when I was a kid.

I’d see a scary movie. Then I’d live in bedtime-panic for weeks.

Because I had little defense against the “undead,” I could only do one thing to escape it. When my parents turned off my bedroom lights, I’d cover my head, and stay as quiet as I possibly could.

It worked, I thought, because if I couldn’t see or hear IT, then IT couldn’t see or hear me.

I realized that was silly after I grew up.

That looking away from anything never allows you to escape it.

Take those ongoing Jan. 6 House Select Committee hearings.

There are lots of Donald Trump-supporting Republicans who loudly proclaim they aren’t going to watch any of them.

If they hide from the proceedings, then the proceedings can’t inflict them with what most people call “the facts.”

Some of them are saying we’ve already seen all of this stuff, which is really only the handiwork of overexuberant Democrats, hellbent on taking down Trump.

That’s why, they tell us, nobody is watching.

Well, 20 million people did watch the first, nighttime hearing on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN.

Fox News declined to show that first hearing live.

Instead, Fox’s superstars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity openly mocked the hearings during their respective 8 and 9 p.m. time slots.

Mockery meant Carlson could call the insurrection, “forgettably minor,” even though, at the same time, the committee was showing the extremely violent events of Jan. 6.

Those people who did bother to remove their convenient political blinders were given ample proof that Trump not only knew he lost the 2020 presidential election – fair and square – but that he appears to have lied repeatedly to the public about it.

“If he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact … He’s become detached from reality,” testified Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, about the days following the election, in which Trump was trying to cobble together some scenario in which he was the winner.

Barr appeared on camera using the words “rubbish,” “idiotic,” and “bull—-” to describe his response to Trump’s repeated claims he’d been cheated.

What the folks who refused to watch the hearings missed were a little Trump-on-Trump dramatics.

Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, was seen testifying that when Barr balked at revealing schemes that would overturn the election, she agreed with him – because she trusted his judgment.

Even Mick Mulvaney, who’d been Trump’s chief of staff, watched the hearings, and he bristled at the team of attorneys that were used to try to turn a Trump loss into a Trump win. “Trump’s inner circle at the end was … (Rudy) Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Peter Navarro … Garbage in. Garbage out,” Mulvaney tweeted.

Those who did watch got a chance to see Giuliani and Powell use their special brand of twisted logic that seemed to conclude that everybody, everywhere had schemed to cheat Trump out of votes.

Of course, there were other attorneys in Trump’s orbit who didn’t quite feel that way.

His White House attorney, Eric Herschmann, was also seen saying, “What they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”

Nuts!

The public sessions are just beginning.

There promises to be much more.

Meanwhile, Trump is taking cover by calling the proceedings a “kangaroo court.”

That’s one of his classic moves.

The closer the committee gets to what did lead up to the insurrection, the more Trump will surely launch attacks.

In the meantime, it was revealed that even though he was told repeatedly there was nothing to the claims of voter fraud, he still managed to raise $250 million through emails for his “Official election defense fund,” which the Select Committee has discovered doesn’t even exist.

All of this has alerted Attorney General Merrick Garland about the possibility of criminal referrals.

“I can assure you that the Jan. 6 prosecutors are watching,” he’s said.

Even though Trump’s supporters are not. Because they’re still foolishly clinging to “The Big Lie.”

Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 40-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.