The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Thursday, May 09, 2019

Depressing

Just when you think the Democrats have hit peak Trump Derangement Syndrome, they prove you wrong yet again. This week, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the Dems rolled out their latest crazy political stunt, finding AG William Barr in contempt of congress for following the law. Jerry Nadler and his band of intrepid hamsters decided that they needed an unredacted version of the Mueller report, knowing full well that it could not be given to them without a court order. Rather than getting that court order, they decided to demand the report, using it as an excuse for generating headlines by finding Barr in contempt. It's great political theater and nothing more.

Victor Davis Hansen notes the hypocrisy in all of this:
... Democrats are calling for Barr to resign or be impeached for not regurgitating the unproven allegations against Trump. In other words, Barr acted too much like a federal prosecutor rather than a tabloid reporter trafficking in allegations that did not amount to criminal conduct.

The besmirching of Barr's conduct is surreal. He certainly has not done anything even remotely approximating the conduct of former President Obama's two attorneys general.

Has Barr dubbed himself the president's "wingman" or called America a "nation of cowards," as did former Attorney General Eric Holder?

Has Barr's Department of Justice monitored reporters' communications or ordered surveillance of a television journalist? Has Barr used a government jet to take his family to the Belmont Stakes horse race, as did Holder?

Has Barr met secretly on an airport tarmac with the spouse of a person his Justice Department was investigating, as did former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who had such a meeting with Bill Clinton?

The Mueller report ignored the likely illegal origins of the Christopher Steele dossier, the insertion of an FBI informant into the Trump campaign, the unlawful leaking of documents, and the conflicted testimonies of former high-level intelligence officials.

All of those things were potential felonies. All in some way yielded information that Mueller drew on in his investigation. Yet Mueller never recommended a single indictment of any of the Obama-era officials who likely broke laws.

Mueller was instead fixated on possible collusion with Russia. But it is a crime to knowingly hire a foreign national to work on a presidential campaign -- in other words, to "collude." That is exactly what the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee did when they paid British subject Christopher Steele to smear Trump.

Did Mueller argue that the possible crimes of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and other former government officials -- lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, deceiving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, planting an informant into a political campaign, unmasking and leaking the identities of individuals under surveillance -- were only peripheral to his investigation?

Not really. After all, Mueller indicted Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone and others for crimes that had nothing to do with collusion and were far less serious than the improper behavior of top Obama administration bureaucrats.
Hansen concludes, as I have over the past month, that the Dems frenzy is a feint to 'controversialize' Barr before he completes an thorough and professional criminal investigation of the deep state soft coup that attempted to unseat an elected president.

Should Donald Trump win in 2020—and the Dems unhinged behavior makes that more and more likely by the month—this 3-ring circus of political dishonesty, viciousness, and unhinged behavior will continue for another four years. That's depressing.