Hyperbole

Admittedly, the storming of the capitol made for a great show and, admittedly, five lives were lost, but…and this is a big but…everybody’s making too much of a big deal about it.
It was not a coup, and if it was an ‘attempted coup’ it was the most poorly planned attempted coup in the history of attempted coups. They did not have the support of the military, they did not take over a single TV station, and they had no end plan. They took over the capitol for a brief time and some guy posed for photos sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and some dude in fancy dress became a viral internet sensation, but that’s not actually a coup.
The left has a long tradition of occupying public spaces and holding sit-ins, sort of like the one AOC staged in front of Pelosi’s office shortly after arriving in D.C., although no windows were broken and no lives lost in that one. That’s all this was, plus a lot more shouting and threats and a lot less Kumbaya.
The media has used one word a whole lot to describe this, and that word is ‘unprecedented.’ Not really. There have been lots of large demonstrations in front of the capitol. There have been lots of political demonstrations in which people have been killed. Kent State comes to mind, and more recently the demonstrations in Minneapolis, in which a right winger murdered two people on the left. And, as the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, pointed out: this happens all the time in other countries, supported by and often instigated by the United States. It’s almost identical to what happened in Bolivia, when they threw Evo Morales out and established a short-lived right wing dictatorship.
Anyway, this incident has passed. There will be another outrage soon. There always is.