So a friend of mine emailed me a link to a Washington Post editorial by Karen Tumulty.
The Post is suggesting that in lieu of the Congress undertaking an
impeachment proceeding against President Trump, they should move to
censure him instead, and then move on, and let the voters decide his
fate in 2020.
That's not a bad idea as far as it goes. Perhaps a way to end this mini
civil war that's gone on in our country for the past three years, and
allow for some measure of healing. But the WaPo editorial started off
with a line that was so off putting to me that I could barely bring
myself to read the rest of their opinion. Here's how I responded to my
friend's email:
I agree with its basic sentiment. But it's a
good thing the headline hinted at the subject matter of the oped,
or I would have stopped reading at this:
"
More than two years of admirably accurate investigative reporting on the
part of the media — the same accounts that the president so often
labeled “fake news” — gave the country a basic outline of how this
presidency operates."
What
a disgustingly self serving and deceitful statement. It totally memory
holes the fact that the majority of that reporting centered on
collusion, coordination, and conspiracy. Their reporting promised us
with absolute certainty, that the president was a knowing agent of the
Russians. It smeared the reputations of, and then bankrupted total
innocents like Carter Page, near total innocents like George
Papadopoulos, and national heroes like Mike Flynn.
Only after two years
of effort, as it was becoming clear that the story was false, did the
MSM pivot with an obvious moving of the goal posts from collusion to
obstruction. From the very start, this story was a total fabrication
based on the most successful and nefarious "political dirty trick" ever
perpetrated on the voting public. The Clinton Campaign with the
willing assistance of the MSM,
elements of the FBI,
and the Intelligence Community, both foreign and domestic, took a
fabricated story about pee tapes, legitimate business trips to Moscow,
and clandestine meetings in Prague that never happened, and spun it into
a three year obsession for the Media Industrial Complex in this country
to feed off of. The entire business models of CNN and MSNBC have relied
on this hoax to keep those networks from having to resort to screening
infomercials to pay the bills.
Oh, and the Russians. I forgot the
Russians. They participated in this dirty trick as well. There
actually WAS a political candidate who conspired with the Russians in
2016 to try and influence the course of the election. It was Hillary
Clinton. And that's not a rhetorical statement. I'm serious. Is there
ANY part of the Dossier you're still willing to defend after reading
the Mueller Report? Any part that matters? This three year nightmare
was all based on a lie.
And the only real beneficiaries are the
Russians. And maybe the Democrats. We'll see. If they prevail in
2020, then I guess we'll have to admit that they played the long game
and won. But at what cost? What was/is the Democratic Party willing
to put this country through to get some sort of sick revenge against
Donald Trump because he defeated the anointed one Ms. Hillary Rodham
Clinton? Trump may go down in history as the worst president the nation
has ever had, but he denied the presidency to Hillary. And for that
service to his country, I will be forever grateful!
Now
that the president's poor behavior in response to the lie has
apparently been exposed, as I gather is well documented in Volume II of
the Mueller Report, the left is quite happy to shift gears, dwell on
that response and ignore their complicity in the fabricated story
without which the response would never have happened. It's like you
spent three years kicking Trump in the balls, and then you criticize him
because now he walks funny! Well Trump may be a flawed man and an
imperfect president, and I'll be the first one to admit that. But as it
stands today, you can count me among his defenders.
Thanks to the
Mueller report, we now know what Trump did, and some of it apparently
borders on obstruction of justice. It's time now to lay out the story
of what his opponents did. To me, the fact that Mueller spent over four
hundred pages and never mentioned the name Glenn Simpson, or Perkins
Coie, or Stephan Halper, and never addressed the real conspiracy with
the Russians, is all the evidence I need that the fix was in. Mueller
threw everything he had into proving collusion and utterly failed.
Democrats are salivating over the fact that Mueller gave them a roadmap
to pursue obstruction accusations, but I'd counter with this: Can the
president be held liable for attempting to obstruct an investigation
into a crime that he knew he didn't commit? A crime which a subsequent
investigation has failed to show ever even took place? And this despite
all the time and resources that even a true obsessive could have ever
considered necessary for the task? Democrats think he can be held
liable. I think, good luck selling that one to the American people. I
think this Mark Levin take will sell a lot better.
Having
gotten that out of my system, the idea of a censure in lieu of
impeachment has appeal to me as well. It may well be a way for bitter
Democrats to express their rage at the president without making the rest
of the country suffer any further simply in order to appease their
spitefulness. A consideration they should have afforded the rest of us
over the past 2-1/2 years, but oh well...Better late than never.
Jess