Blame Pelosi, not top Capitol cop: Devine
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Steven Sund, the popular US Capitol Police chief fired on live television by Nancy Pelosi less than 24 hours after January’s Capitol riot, is sorely missed by his troops in their hour of need.
Morale has plummeted and officers are resigning or contemplating early retirement in the aftermath, scapegoating and despicable politicization of the Capitol riot. Two have committed suicide.
A bad situation took a turn for worse last Friday when Capitol Police Officer Billy Evans was killed and another officer injured by an Islamist Louis Farrakhan follower who rammed a car into a police barricade outside the Capitol.
It was Sund who quietly went to visit the injured officer, Kevin Shaver, in hospital Saturday, and Sund to whom officers turned for advice and consolation after the lone-wolf attack. They keep asking if he can return to his job.
When the remains of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died in unexplained circumstances the day after the Jan. 6 riot, were lying in honor in the Capitol rotunda, it was Sund who slipped in before dawn to pay his respects before House Speaker Pelosi staged her self-serving spectacle.
Sund, a decorated, 25-year career veteran of counterterrorism at the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, where he was commander of the Special Operations Division, had been running the Capitol police for 18 months.
He had tried for two days to get permission for National Guard backup before the riot but was blocked by people doing the bidding of Pelosi.
Pelosi has never owned up to her role in the woeful undermanning of the Capitol police that day. Instead, she blamed Sund and her loyal House sergeant at arms, Paul Irving.
By scapegoating Sund, who had capably led his outnumbered troops that terrible day, and kept every member of Congress safe, she was blaming the very officers who fought valiantly for hours to defend the Capitol.
“I am calling for the resignation of the chief of the Capitol Police, Mr, Sund,” Pelosi declared at a televised press conference on Jan. 7. “He hasn’t even called us since this happened.”
That just wasn’t true, as Sund told Pelosi in an eight-page letter.
He spoke to Pelosi twice on Jan. 6.
At 5:36 p.m., he briefed then-Vice President Mike Pence and Pelosi that the chambers could be safely reoccupied beginning at 7:30 p.m. to complete certification of the Electoral College vote.
He had another conference call with Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell an hour later.
Did the 81-year-old House speaker forget?
Earlier on the day of the riot, at 12:58 p.m., as the Capitol was being breached, Sund urgently called Irving, and again requested National Guard backup.
Irving told him he had to “run it up the chain of command.” In other words, ask Pelosi.
Sund called Irving four more times, all while commanding the battlefield.
But it took 3½ hours for Irving to tell him his request had been approved. By the time the first 150 members of the National Guard were took up positions on Capitol grounds at 5:40 p.m., the crisis was all but over.
“I do not believe that the US Capitol Police failed,” Sund wrote.
“Greatly outnumbered and against tremendous odds, they kept the members safe.”
Now the Capitol Police feel vulnerable and need serious leadership. But Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer have left them hanging.
Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman has no security of tenure and the Capitol Police Board has only just started a nationwide executive search for a permanent chief.
But the board will not find anyone more suited to the job than Sund.
While he knows his officers want him back, and friends say he would do anything to return to the job he loved, Sund would only say yesterday: “I know they’re going through a lot. I stand with them and wish I was there to support them.”
He never should have been forced out. If anyone should have resigned in disgrace, it was Nancy Pelosi.
Names are not to blame
A man whose name in childhood was Kok Wah has complained to The New York Times that years ago, his elementary-school teacher called him Tommy to prevent his classmates making vulgar jokes at his expense.
No doubt this memory was coaxed out of him to fit the narrative of structural racism that underpins the Times’ stories about Anti-Asian hate crime.
Forget that the second wealthiest family in America changed the pronunciation of their Dutch surname, Koch, from “c–k” to “coke” to avoid being the butt of just such humor.
No, the foresight of a schoolyard-wise teacher five decades ago wasn’t racism, and it had nothing to do with the fact that the 63-year-old Chinese-American bus driver who now goes by Tommy Lau, was punched in the face in Brooklyn last month by a mentally ill, homeless black man with 33 arrests under his belt.
That has everything to do with the fact that the city has failed in its duty of care to the mentally ill. Isolating them in hotel rooms only exacerbates their problems, and makes the streets less safe, especially for the elderly and weak.
Hunter has his eye on politics
Hate to break it to you, but Hunter Biden has political ambitions.
In his crackhead memoir and on his abandoned laptop, the president’s 51-year-old son has expressed the desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and whined that his ex-wife, Kathleen, was unsupportive of the aspiration.
After he delivered the eulogy at brother Beau’s funeral, for instance, he confided to her that he was thinking of going into politics.
“Every third person I hugged or shook hands with encouraged me to move back to Delaware and run for office,” he wrote.
Kathleen spoke for the entire nation when she replied: “Are you serious?”
No one wants woke-friendly skies
Nobody wants to fly with an airline that prioritizes identity politics over ability when choosing its pilots.
But United thinks its new woke recruitment philosophy is a winner.
“Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes,” the airline trumpets in a promotional tweet. “That’s why we plan for 50 percent of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”
Passengers honestly don’t care about the sex or skin color of the person in the cockpit. We just want to know that they are competent to fly the plane without killing us. We also want engineers who can build a bridge that won’t collapse and surgeons who know the difference between a gall bladder and a kidney. That’s the basics for a functioning society.
But the cult of woketopia has so embedded itself into the DNA of corporate America that competence now is viewed as a symptom of toxic masculinity and white privilege.
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