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

Thursday, May 02, 2019

Change the Subject

The Democrats appear to be incapable of learning from their mistakes. Part of the reason for that is that many members of the party and most prominent Dem politicians are driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome. But it's also the belief that they—the Democrats—have a monopoly on virtue and "truth," and that any facts, opinions or evidence to the contrary MUST be disregarded. They live in a fevered fantasy world, and they are making fools of themselves. This began with the Kavanaugh hearings, where vicious attempts to destroy a man's character, based on wholly uncorroborated and highly dubious charges of sexual abuse were used in an attempt to defeat the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice. Thankfully, the Dems failed.

But with the backing of their trained hamsters in the media, the Dems pay little or no price for their increasingly crazy behavior, so they not only continue it—they escalate.

The latest example is their collective and vicious attack on Attoney General William Barr. The editors of The Wall Street Journal comment:
Washington pile-ons are never pretty, but this week’s political setup of Attorney General William Barr is disreputable even by Beltway standards. Democrats and the media are turning the AG into a villain for doing his duty and making the hard decisions that special counsel Robert Mueller abdicated.

Mr. Barr’s Wednesday testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was preceded late Tuesday by the leak of a letter Mr. Mueller had sent the AG on March 27. Mr. Mueller griped in the letter that Mr. Barr’s four-page explanation to Congress of the principal conclusions of the Mueller report on March 24 “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Mueller team’s “work and conclusions.” Only in Washington could this exercise in posterior covering be puffed into a mini-outrage.

Mr. Barr’s four-page letter couldn’t possibly have covered all the nuances of a 448-page report. It was an attempt to provide Mr. Mueller’s conclusions to Congress and the public as quickly as possible, while he took the time to work through the entire document to make redactions required by law and Justice Department rules.

This is exactly what he promised to do in his confirmation hearing. Even Mr. Mueller’s complaining letter admits that Mr. Barr’s letter wasn’t inaccurate, a fact Mr. Barr says Mr. Mueller also conceded in a subsequent phone call. The Mueller complaint, rather, was that there was “public confusion about critical aspects” of his investigation.

Translation: Republicans were claiming vindication for Donald Trump, and Mr. Mueller was taking hits in the press for not nailing the worst President in history. Having been hailed for months as a combination of Eliot Ness and St. Thomas More, Mr. Mueller and his team of prosecutors seem to have been unnerved by some bad press clips.
As I've noted in earlier posts, the reason the Democrats have revved up their politics-of-personal-destruction machine, is they desperately need to discredit Barr now. Why? Because it will be Barr who investigates a real scandal, backed by copious evidence (i.e., documents, text messages, testimony of the perpetrators themselves, FISA court orders, a fake but now public dossier, Clinton campaign payments to smear shops)) that implies a soft coup attempt against Donald Trump by members of the FBI, the DoJ and the national intelligence services—all operating under the Obama Administration. The Dems cannot allow that investigation to proceed.

Most of the Dems in Congress are lawyers, so it's not surprising that they are applying the old legal maxim, When your guy is guilty, change the subject. Or maybe it's simply psychological projectionWhen you're guilty of something, blame your adversary of the same crime. The Dems have done those things successfully for the past 2+years and are doing it yet again. We'll see if they succeed.

UPDATE:
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In a combination of unhinged frenzy, hysteria, and "rampant desparation", the TDS crowd is literally promoting a new narrative every day and a new villain on almost a weekly basis. This week's villain, of course, is AG William Barr, and the new narrative, growing in popularity among the Democrats' trained hamsters in the media, is: Barr CORRUPTED the Mueller Report by providing a summary of it.

In a rational world of clear thinking adults, such a contention would be dismissed as ridiculous. After all, the report, all 450 pages, is now available, and the Dems, the Media, and the public can examine it in detail. The problem is that the Dems and the media don't like what's in it. Not one bit.

Barr did not change the words in the Mueller report (although by next week, that might be the Dem's claim). How can a summary "corrupt" the report, even if by definition of a summary, it has to leave out some detail? The Dems, of course, have repeatedly demonstrated that they are neither adults nor clear thinkers, so they don't have to bother with facts like those. Instead, you'll see the ridiculous allegation that Barr corrupted the report more frequently in coming days.