I’ll give credit where credit is due. The Democrats are totally engaged in political theatre, but you know what? They are good at it.
Nixon would never have been impeached for Watergate, had he not covered it up. Had Nixon on day one said that he ordered CIA operatives to find illegal leaks within the White House, and that these ‘plumbers’ committed a crime by breaking into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, it would have been a big news story for a few days, but it would also have blown over. Nixon could simply have simply said, “These men were overly zealous, and acting outside their purview,” and that would have been the end of it.
Nixon, instead, covered up the crime, and committed various new crimes in the process. The rest is history.
Nothing Trump has done has been impeachable, and unlike with Nixon, there has been no cover-up. Even CNN says Trump has been doing these things ‘in plain sight.’
The Democrats would like to pretend that Trump is in a situation similar to where Nixon was, but there is a critical difference: With Nixon, it was the cover-up that became impeachable, whereas with Trump there is no cover-up.
Trump used authority he really does have, to investigate possible illegal activities by his political opponents that really did occur, and he did so openly. At the end of the day, that’s what happened.
So far, in the Senate trial, Schiff has made a big deal about Trump asking Russia to find the 30,000 e-mails Hillary Clinton had previously deleted, about a week before Wikileaks published those e-mails. The e-mails, incidentally, were absolutely damning to Hillary Clinton…
Once upon a time, finding deleted things (such as audio tapes of Nixon’s phone calls) was considered ‘investigative journalism,’ and I have a sneaky suspicion that when such things are done to Republicans, that is still the correct term.
When you investigate Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, Democrats call it ‘impeachable,’ and this is true in spite of the fact that Hillary Clinton, with the help of the Obama Administration (of which Joe Biden was a part) did exactly to Trump what Trump was then accused of. Do you remember the Steele Dossier? That too came from Russia…
How about Hunter Biden? It was, after all, a request to investigate Hunter Biden that started the current round of impeachment talks.
Do we have anything similar to Hunter Biden’s Ukraine thing, related to Trump? Yes we do. Donald Trump Junior had meetings about building a Moscow Trump Tower, and those meetings continued into the 2016 Republican Primaries. Those meetings ended once Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee (and when further talks would have been a conflict of interest), but had Trump not won the nomination, he likely would have continued talking with the Russians about building a tower – and doing so would have been well within his rights as a private citizen.
The Democrats investigated Donald Trump Jr’s Trump Tower meetings into the ground in 2016, but of course they considered that to be ‘investigative journalism’.
Let us imagine for just one moment that Donald Trump Jr interviewed with a Ukrainian oligarch, for a board position on a giant natural gas company the oligarch owned. Let us imagine that Donald Trump Jr was paid three million dollars by this Ukrainian oligarch, in funds that later turned out to have been embezzled from the Ukrainian people. In addition to this, let’s say Donald Trump Junior was paid an additional $85,000 per month to have his name listed on the board of directors for this company, without having any role in the company, other than being listed as an ‘honorary member of the Board of Directors’. Let us say, further, that after paying Donald Trump Jr the $3 million in embezzled funds, the oligarch then fled to Russia to avoid prosecution for corruption. Finally, let us say that when Donald Trump Jr flew to Ukraine to interview with this oligarch, he flew with his father onboard Air Force One, and that Donald Trump Sr (the President) also had business dealings with the same oligarch, on the same trip. Does that sound like something today’s Democrats might investigate? Would they call such an investigation ‘investigative journalism,’ or ‘an impeachable offence’?
All of that happened, except that it was not Donald Trump Junior with Donald Trump as President. It was Hunter Biden, with Joe Biden as Vice President.
Let us imagine for just one moment that Donald Trump Junior formed a mutual funds company with the heir of the Heinz fortune, and with the nephew of ‘Whitey’ Bulger (the infamous mobster). Let us say that when negotiating trade deals with China, Donald Trump Sr brought his son Donald Jr with him, and that while Donald Trump Sr, as President, was negotiating trade deals with China, his son sat beside him, selling billions of dollars of mutual funds, to the same Chinese officials Donald Trump Sr was negotiating with, at the exact same time Donald Trump Sr was negotiating with those Chinese officials. Does that sound like something today’s Democrats might investigate? Would they call such an investigation ‘investigative journalism,’ or ‘an impeachable offense’?
All of that happened, except that it was not Donald Trump Jr with Donald Trump as President. It was Hunter Biden, with Joe Biden as Vice President.
Now, before we get too angry at the Democrats, let us remember where they are. In 2016, Hillary Clinton owned the DNC. The DNC was completely bankrupt, and was only able to run a candidate because of funding being trickled into it by the Clinton Foundation. There was no way Hillary Clinton was going to lose the nomination…
Without Joe Biden, what do Democrats have for 2020? Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Really?!? Both of those candidates are too far left to appeal to the moderates in the Democratic Party. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is centrist enough to appeal to centrists, and the extremists in the Democratic Party would vote for a steaming pile of dog poop before they would vote for Donald Trump. As a consequence, Joe Biden is the best and only chance the Democrats have of winning the 2020 election.
In 2016 the DNC had no choice but to excuse whatever Hillary Clinton might have done, and in 2020 the DNC has not choice but to excuse whatever Joe and Hunter Biden may have done.
What better way to cover up the crimes committed by the Democratic front runners than to call investigating those crimes, ‘criminal’? The mainstream media is falling all over itself trying to make the investigation into the Bidens a crime, while ignoring everything the investigation of the Bidens has uncovered. And this is smart. I mean, what else can the Democrats do?!?
I have bad news for the DNC, but this particular piece of political theatre has three acts, and I have already seen the script.
Act One involved the House of Representatives, without any indication of an impeachable offense by Trump, rushing articles of impeachment through the House. The House could have subpoenaed evidence, and could have gone through the courts to get evidence (wherever executive privilege did not actually apply), but the House said that impeaching Trump was such a time-sensitive national security issue that they had to impeach Trump without any of that evidence. Time was so critical to the House that Nancy Pelosi closed out Act One by sitting on the Articles of Impeachment for a month. Rashida Tlaib gave Act One a fitting name: “Impeach the Mother F&#ker!”
Act Two is in the Senate, where the Democrats are claiming that unless the Senate takes the time to dig into all of the things the House had no interest in finding, it’s a cover-up. The Democrats will do this while also trying to deny the Republicans any chance to call witnesses that would show that investigations into the Bidens are justified. If I were to name Act Two, it would be ‘Investigations for Me, but Not for Thee!”
Act Three will be a landslide election victory for Trump, come November. We can call this act “Four More Years.”
The intermission between Acts Two and Three, incidentally, will be about eight months. In true Keystone Cop format, the Democrats blew their October Surprise in January…
By the time the election comes, nobody will care about the impeachment, but the corruption surrounding Joe Biden and his family will still be in the news.
My note to Democrats? Political theatre is not good enough.
