We need to define three words. They are protest, riot and insurrection. Then we need to consider whether asserting hypocrisy in other people excuses one's own.
Protest is a noble exercise in free expression conducted in a purposely public display to advance an argument against a policy or a condition. It's always been big in France but not so much in the United States, though it seems to be rallying here, for excellent reason. The nation took a turn toward the protest-worthy over the last four years.
Protest gets accomplished by marching and placard-carrying and chanting. It hurts nothing except maybe traffic flow and a few establishmentarian's feelings. You get a permit for it, or ought to.
A riot is a criminal act in which persons rampage destructively from anger or resentment or pure meanness, looting property and doing physical harm to others.
A protest can be occurring and elements of it can break into a riot. You can have protesters declaring from microphones that activities must be peaceful while people on the periphery--because they're not noble but pre-disposed to criminal opportunity--break windows and deface storefronts and slug a newspaper reporter. That happened last summer with the protests of the police killing of George Floyd.
Insurrection is an uprising specifically against government and government authority. It's anti-American, if occurring in America.
That's what happened the other day at the U.S. Capitol. In a less direct way, it had been happening ever since Donald Trump was defeated in the presidential election. He lied to say he'd been cheated and thus riled the mind-misplaced against their government in his ego disorder's behalf.
What those people did inside the Capitol was an insurrection because their protest turned to rioting, and the rioting invaded the seat of American representative governing to try to terrorize elected officials into ignoring their constitutional obligation to democracy.
So, to apply those definitions: You get a pat on the back for exercising your rights if you protest. You should go to jail if you riot and thus cause damage to life and property. And you should be impeached and convicted if you are a president who incites the mind-misplaced to acts of revolt against the U.S. Congress as it attempts to do its clear and simple constitutional duty.
So, when you tell me that the madness inside the Capitol was the same as the protests turned to riots last summer, you are wrong. The rioters committed criminal acts against property and persons. The insurrectionists tried to overthrow the very government of our country.
Both are bad, but they are different.
When you tell me that I waxed indignant about the madness at the Capitol but raised nary a peep about the riots last summer, you are wrong again. I wrote then in praise of the protesting and in condemnation of the violence. I deplored the nonsensical mantra about defunding the police.
But there was no one to impeach from the riots last summer. No politician had incited the action, which did not invade the government. Those riots arose from protests reflecting the people's outrage over the police killing of an innocent Black man as seen clearly on a sickening video.
What happened at the Capitol week before last was aided, comforted and fomented by a defeated president trying to upturn our democratic republic. It therefore was a prima facie treasonous act commanding impeachment and conviction.
The other question remains: Would seeing hypocrisy in others in their discernment among the two events, while wrong, excuse either event--or, more specifically, would it excuse the insurrection, or at least call for tolerance of the insurrection and rejection of impeachment?
In other words: Was it all right for Trump to be a traitor because some people rioted last summer?
Surely, we can agree that "no" is that answer.
Our state's insurrection-forgiving Republican congressional delegation voted en masse against impeaching Trump. The six delegates did so on a consensus argument that the president was a bad boy but that there are practical political considerations at play in rushing to honor constitutional principle, since the offender is going to be leaving in a few days anyway.
It's a position reflecting tragic appeasement. But it's much better than the position advanced by a Republican congressman from Colorado named Ken Buck.
He opposed impeaching Trump because Robert De Niro once said he wanted to punch Trump and Madonna once said Trump so outraged her that sometimes she thought about bombing the White House, though of course she'd never do it.
How Trump could be rendered innocent of what he did in plain sight on the basis of past musings by one great actor and one average pop singer ... perhaps the congressman could insert that explanation later into the record.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.