Pseudo-Event

As the impeachment circus takes a time out while congress recesses for the holidays, Michael Barone notes that what the Dems have created over the past few months in a "pseudo-event." He writes:

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events is the title of a 1960s book by historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. Pseudo-events, he wrote, are staged solely to generate news media coverage. Real events, in contrast, involve independent actors and have unpredictable outcomes.

It’s not difficult to say which category the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings belongs in. It’s a classic pseudo-event stage-managed to prod sympathetic media into running predictable stories. Inconvenient questions from Republican members are blocked. Even the name of the original “whistleblower” is concealed, though no law requires that, and the stage managers know who he is.

Yet on the front pages and cable news, this pseudo-event is crowding out two genuine events of potentially world-shaking importance and uncertain outcome.

Those two events are wide-spread popular protests against the mad-Mullahs in Iran and the anti-socialist Democracy movement in Hong Kong. Barone comments:

It’s possible that the regimes of post-Mao communist China and the mullahs’ Iran might collapse after 40 years of tyranny. Or, less happily and more likely, these regimes may sweep aside the protests and last for centuries, like so many Chinese dynasties and Persian monarchies. Real events have uncertain and possibly momentous outcomes.

Not so for the impeachment hearings. Witnesses are heard complaining that Trump subverted the “formal interagency policy process” and that he pressured — “bribed” is the focus-group-determined but inapt verb that Democrats are now using — Ukraine’s government for political gain. But Ukraine is not a formal U.S. ally, and Obama refused to provide it even defensive weapons when Russia seized its territory in Donbass and Crimea. Now we’re told that Trump should be ousted from office for a two-month delay in delivering those weapons.

“The executive power,” Article II of the Constitution states, “shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” That president, as the career diplomats testifying have acknowledged, has no obligation to follow “interagency” processes or consensus. It’s hard to avoid concluding that Democrats who detest Trump seized on this weak pretext for impeachment when and because the charges of Russian collusion they brandished for three years turned out to be baseless.

Polls show support for impeachment declining. Americans, it turns out, don’t have to read Boorstin to recognize a pseudo-event when they see one.

But it's far worse than a pseudo-event. The impeachment circus sets a precedent that is dangerous and destructive. Don't believe me—the Democrats told us exactly that in 2016.

It wasn't that long ago that the Democrats got the vapors when prior to the 2016 election, Donald Trump suggested that he'd reserve acceptance of the sure-fire Hillary Clinton win until after all votes were counted.

"Unacceptable!" the Dems cried.

"Dangerous for democracy!" their trained hamsters in the media intoned.

"Destructive to the fabric of our society!" progressive talking heads screeched.

For three years the Democrats have refused to accept the results of a democratic election. Unacceptable ... Dangerous for democracy ... Destructive to the fabric of our society. What breathtaking hypocrisy!