Posted on 02/07/2020 4:48:20 AM PST by Kaslin
It's comforting, no doubt, to believe that Donald Trump has survived the impeachment trial because he possesses a tighter hold on his party than did Barack Obama or George W. Bush or any other contemporary president. In truth, Trump, often because of his own actions, has engendered less loyalty than the average president.
It's difficult to recall, after all, a single Democratic senator throwing anything but hosannas Obama's way, which allowed the former president to ride his high horse from one scandalous attack on the Constitution to the next. In 1998, no Democrat voted to convict Bill Clinton, who had engaged in wrongdoing for wholly self-serving reasons, despite the GOP's case being far more methodical and incriminating.
The chances of any party removing its sitting president without overwhelming evidence that fuels massive voter pressure are negligible. It's never happened in American history -- unless you count the preemptive removal of Richard Nixon -- and probably never will. Democrats are demanding the GOP adopt standards that no party has ever lived by.
Perhaps if the public hadn't been subjected to four years of interminable hysteria over the United States' imaginary descent into fascism, it might have been less apathetic toward the fate of "vital" Ukrainian aid that most Democrats had voted against when Obama was president.
And perhaps if institutional media hadn't spent three years pushing a hyperbolically paranoid narrative of Russian collusion -- a debunked conspiracy theory incessantly repeated by Democrats during the impeachment trial -- the public wouldn't be anesthetized to another alleged national emergency.
You simply can't expect a well-adjusted voter to maintain CNN-levels of indignation for years on end.
Beyond the public's mood, the Democrats' strategy was a mess. House Dems and their 17 witnesses set impossible-to-meet expectations, declaring that Trump had engaged in the worst wrongdoing ever committed by any president in history. (I'm not exaggerating.) When it comes to Trump criticism, everything is always "the worst thing ever!"
Even if Trump's actions had risen to the level of removal, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler were terrible messengers to make the case. These are not the politicians you tap to persuade jurors; they're the politicians you pick to rile up your base.
Despite all the fabricated praise directed at Schiff over the past couple of weeks, the man reeks of partisanship. Not only because he's been caught lying about the presence of damning evidence against Trump on more than one occasion, but because he played a sketchy role in helping the whistleblower responsible for sparking the impeachment come forward.
Even then, instead of spending the appropriate time building a solid case, subpoenaing all the "vital" witnesses, and laying out a timeline, House Democrats, by their own admission, rushed forward. They justified taking shortcuts by warning that the country was in a race to stop Trump from stealing the 2020 election just as he had allegedly stolen the 2016 election.
That wouldn't have been a big deal if Nancy Pelosi hadn't exposed the supposed need for urgency as a ruse, by withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate for weeks. She did so despite having zero standing to dictate the terms of the trial, no constitutional right to attempt to dictate them and no political leverage. In the end, she got nothing from Mitch McConnell for her trouble.
Meanwhile, Democrats had spent most of the House hearings focusing on difficult-to-prove specific criminal offenses of "bribery" and "extortion" -- poll-tested words that were taken up after the House realized "quid pro quo" didn't play as well with the public.
Then, they didn't even bother including the "crimes" -- no, you don't need a violation of criminal law to impeach, but the word was incessantly used by House Dems anyway -- in their open-ended articles of impeachment, written expressly to compel Senate Republicans to investigate for them.
The House had no right to demand that, and the Senate had no reason to comply. So as soon as the upper chamber took up impeachment, Democrats began dropping one "bombshell" leak after the next -- the same strategy they deployed during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings -- to drag out the spectacle and maximize the political damage.
Some of us would certainly have preferred that more Republicans concede Trump's call was unbecoming and, in parts, inappropriate, even if it didn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense. But Democrats keep demanding that Republicans play under a different set of rules.
The Constitution, a document under attack by the very people claiming to save it from the president, worked exactly as it should. The House is free to subpoena all the "vital" witnesses Republicans have supposedly ignored, and then send a new batch of impeachment articles. Impeachment isn't tantamount to a "coup" any more than Senate acquittal is unconstitutional or corrupt.
Pretending that democracy is on the precipice of extinction simply because you didn't get your way, though, is nothing but histrionics.
B.S. In PDJT's words "it was a perfect call".
If?!!! Stopped right there. Trump did nothing wrong. Stop with the hypotheticals please.
There’s nothing inappropriate about:
“We’ve got the former Veep here bragging in public that he strong-armed you guys. Any truth to that?”
Same reason the effort to prosecute the Duke Lacrosse players failed.
I don’t agree with the author. I don’t think Trump did anything wrong, and I read the transcript. In fact, I think he was doing his job. The POTUS is responsible to uphold treaties and US Government employees who violate these treaties should be investigated. Joe Biden had a prosecutor fired because he said he was corrupt. What corruption was he referring to? Is that the event wherein 1.8 billion of US taxpayer money was given to a bank in Ukraine, that enriched local Oligarchs, was kicked back to politicians via their children in the US, and paid for George Soros continued attack on our country by laundering the money via multiple banks and Crowdstrike?
Maybe someone needs to investigate a little before they say Trump was NOT doing his job.
I disagree. It is far more than histrionics.
It threatens the very fabric of our nation.
One party being unwilling to accept the results of an election, threatens the foundations of the country.
And have the dims learned anything from this epic fail?
The answer would be NO!!!!
Trump’s poll numbers have gone up 10 points to 50 so keep it up Nasty and get him to 60 by election day.
Exactly. It seems the author, for all his well written essay, cannot help but concede the Progressive assumptions as truth, even when they are obviously at issue, and most likely, false.
There was NOTHING inappropriate about that call. I am so sick of listening to a bunch of prissy people who probably have a ton of inappropriate behavior in their lives.
The only case was Orange Man Bad. A large fraction of the voting public either can't swallow that hypothesis, or, those of us who can, maintain "good on him - we need an unguided missile to shred the roots of the deep state that have tapped into all the agencies and NGOs in DC.
“Some of us would certainly have preferred that more Republicans concede Trump’s call was unbecoming and, in parts, inappropriate, even if it didn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.”
Concede nothing, especially if it is not true. But even if it “looked bad”, concede nothing to the demonkraps, ever. Any concession is nothing but blood in the water and takes the issue further in their direction. Notice the demonkraps NEVER conceded that, as a minimum, the Bidens acted in a manner that raised questions.
Why don’t we have all the phone calls of Biden and obozo Ukranian released so we can compare what appropriate calls look like.
He was doing so well, and then he decides to revert back to the sniveling, Democrat-approved GOP of yesteryear.
There simply never was a real charge that could be explained in plain words. Some dimwit Harvard pretender-lawyer couldn’t connect the dots and you ended with a one-star Dallas-like drama, with fake actors and a marginalized script.
He did nothing to be impeached for, idiot.
Correct. NEVER apologize to the leftist outrage mob. You don’t get forgiveness anyway, and they simply use it as an admission of guilt to further beat you over the head.
“Some of us would certainly have preferred that more Republicans concede Trump’s call was unbecoming and, in parts, inappropriate, even if it didn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.”
No, some of us would certainly have preferred that more Republicans had vociferously come out and declared that the Democrat case against the President was a media-supported sham with no facts, no substance, no standing and that both groups are very close to being rounded up for treason.
“ Even if Trump’s actions had risen to the level of removal,”
‘If?!!! Stopped right there. Trump did nothing wrong. Stop with the hypotheticals please.’
Same here. This piece is hard to skim on a fri morning just trying to get through what they’re saying about the weeks events this was where I was done.
People should stop by now expecting to find something corrupt about Trump. ‘They all do it’ is a mentality that expects the US to be mediocre thus falling further.
Trump is not corrupt
Hillary did her Clinton bc best to frame him and failed big league.
The media would do well to watch what happens next because it is over.
The
How do we know his?
Easy....Nanzi told us. She stupidly held a gleeful impeachment signing ceremony---handing out pens like she was already in office.
That alone, will go down in history as her biggest blunder.
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