"Impeachment"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Impeachment”

November 7, 2019

“Why not amend the Constitution so that any President

who is impeached and acquitted is permitted to serve a third term?”

                                                                                                William Mattox

                                                                                                “Impeachment Needs a Replay Booth”

                                                                                                Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2019

                                                                                               

Like most clever but sensible suggestions for Congress – the elimination of frivolous impeachment attempts – Mr. Mattox’s proposal will never be adopted. It makes too much sense for a Congress that prefers political theater to judiciously carrying out their responsibilities as legislators.  

The American journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken once wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the people alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And the granddaddy of all hobgoblins is impeachment, at least here in the fourth quarter of 2019, a year from a presidential election that will see the most vilified President we have ever had run against one of the most far-left leaning candidates ever nominated. “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night,” said Bette Davis in the 1951 movie “It’s All About Eve.”  For us Americans, it will be a bumpy year.

Cynicism fills the air. Politicians live by scruples known only to themselves. Their concern is their own welfare and that of their party. Their goal is power. That end justifies whatever means or processes are felt necessary to achieve it. Yet, they wrap themselves in cloaks of righteous indignation. “Every member should support allowing the American people to hear the facts for themselves…this is nothing less than our democracy.” Stirring but hypocritical words spoken by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as she allowed Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to conduct impeachment hearings – hearings held in secret, where Republicans were not allowed to call witnesses and to which Mr. Trump’s lawyers were banned from attending. Schiff and the media have made much of diplomats fired, like the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Do they forget that elections have consequences? Foreign policy is the responsibility of the President and changing ambassadors is expected and common.

The imbroglio of impeachment reminds one of Alice’s adventures in court over the case of the missing tarts. When the King asked the jury to consider their verdict. “No, no said the Queen. Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” What we are witnessing is a farce, but one with sobering consequences that, at best, will rebound to impale she (or he) who wields the sword when party leadership next changes, and at worst will damage our democratic Republic. In a recent op-ed in “The Hill,” Alan Dershowitz wrote that a foresighted Alexander Hamilton had warned that the decision to move forward with impeachment will be “more regulated by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut and now investigating the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, spoke in March 2018 at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, CT: “One thing that I try to bear in mind, and try to encourage in new young prosecutors, particularly those who are making their bones or cutting their teeth, is an awareness of the incredible power that is wielded by law enforcement, and perhaps federal law enforcement in particular. Issuing a subpoena can destroy someone’s reputation. It can damage their business, hurt their families. It is an awesome power that we have, that should only be used in appropriate instances.” Wise words that should be heeded by powerful agencies like the IRS, the Justice Department and the EPA, as well as by members of Congress, especially the latter, as they satiate a lust for revenge that had its genesis in hatred.

In the recent vote to formally launch an impeachment investigation, the fact that not one Republican voted with the majority suggests that Hamilton’s concern is real. Looking at the three previous impeachments – Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton – two were acquitted (Johnson and Clinton) and Mr. Nixon resigned, as he likely would have been convicted, as his was a crime that could be deemed nonpolitical. The attack on Mr. Trump has been political from the GetGo, as the Resistance began before he took office. The Russian probe came to naught, as did attempts by Stormy Daniels and others to discredit him. The odor from Ukraine has more of a Biden smell than a Trump aroma. Unlike some Republicans when attacked, Mr. Trump fights back, a response that has surprised a Left used to submissive opponents.

The Left would have us believe that any defense of Trump is a “defense of the indefensible,” a phrase that has a nice ring, but one which has no applicability in this instance, as the aggressor has been for three years the Resistance, comprised of those who do not believe Mr. Trump deserves the Presidency, that he did not win  fairly, that  he is dangerous and unqualified, a potential dictator. What these detractors fail to see is their own, undemocratic behavior – using intelligence bureaucracies to find dirt on Mr. Trump, conducting closed-door meetings to which Republicans are barred, denying freedom of speech on social media and in universities, curtailing freedoms of religious expression. A government that wants to regulate one’s behavior is one that is dangerous to liberty. Which Party wants to provide Medicare for all, free college and cradle-to-grave care? As attractive as those programs sound, they come with a cost, not just in dollars, but more importantly in freedoms foregone. As Kimberly Strassel wrote in her new book Resistance: “Tyrants don’t get rid of rules; they pile them on.” Love him or hate him, President Trump has rolled back regulations, providing more freedom to individuals, not less. It is not he who is a threat to liberty.

There will always be extremists in a nation of 330 million people – psychos that represent the far right and the far left. They need to be watched, but they don’t represent the real risks to our democratic Republic. It is when extremism infiltrates mainstream thinking we have to worry, and that is what we are seeing in the resistance to Donald Trump. I have often expressed my dismay at Mr. Trump’s character, his Tweets, his rudeness and his profanity. But he does not represent a threat to our Country. If coarse language speaks louder than positive deeds, then criticism of Mr. Trump is warranted. But if mellifluous words disguise odious actions, then it is the Left that bears watching. The media have their eyes Right, leaving the Left unguarded. They are enamored by the “wokeness” of progressive politicians, with their political correctness and identity politics, by the charisma of Hollywood and late-night TV talk-show hosts, and with ivory tower-ensconced social justice warriors in our universities.  

Impeachment is but the latest attempt to destroy the man who was elected in 2016, the most investigated President we have ever had. In hanging Russian collusion around his neck in January 2017, the Resistance thought they had him. Two years later, the Mueller Report found no collusion. The whole idea that Putin would have preferred the mercurial Donald Trump whom he did not know to Hillary Clinton whom he knew well and whom he had handled successfully never made sense. That Mr. Trump is boorish lent credibility to the belief he was chauvinistic, but, again, nothing incriminating was found. The conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, while Trumpian, was harmless and not unlike conversations other Presidents have had with their counterparts over the years. Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over.” That seems to define Democrats in Congress today, in their search for a grail that contains evidence implicating Mr. Trump in some impeachable offense.

Impeachment is a distraction to a people who must decide what sort of country they want – Socialism, with its costs in dollars and lost freedoms, or free market capitalism, which offers the social and economic escalator of opportunity that takes people up and down. For all of our sakes, I hope they choose the latter.

"What Has Become of Us?"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“What Has Become of Us?”

October 31, 2019

“Have we lost our minds?”

                                                                                    Andrew Cuomo (1957-)

Governor, New York

                                                                                    October 26, 2019

While Governor Cuomo’s exclamation was in response to the increasing number of assaults by the mentally deranged in New York City, it is one that has applicability across our political landscape, not just for the unhinged way Leftist politicians treat truants and criminals in our cities, but in most all ways political. Have we all gone bonkers? I wince at President Trump’s coarseness and grimace as he Tweets as fast as a Shetland Pony sheds its winter coat. Then I listen to anti-Trumpers and their lemming-like hatred that betrays an emotional response rather than a reasoned reaction. Seen as a threat to the comfortably established elite, the majority of Democrats wanted to impeach Mr. Trump on November 9, 2016. And I wonder: What ever happened to e Pluribus Unum?

Phrases and words: Identity politics; victimization; equality; wokeness. Identity politics is segregation by a different and more politically correct name. Real victims are ignored, while perpetrators are mollycoddled as deserving of special care for having been “victims” of society governed by old, white men. Equality has morphed into homogenization, deflating the individual to an inflated collective. The cream in our public schools can no longer find its way to the top. Wokeness is a Tesla-like vehicle for social justice warriors.

Politicians, abetted by a media that has foregone any semblance of investigative independence, to become a propaganda arm of the Party they prefer. They have given new meanings to those phrases and words mentioned above. The consequence has been a shock to the Judeo-Christian culture in which most of us were raised, when Albert Einstein once wrote, and we all believed, that “only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

Here we are now, three years after the fact, yet a refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election persists. Civil discourse is a thing of the past. We have intelligence agencies that colluded against a Presidential candidate. Public schools, especially those in inner cities who keep a watchful (and jaundiced) eye on equality, teach to the lowest common denominator, which means that those who have been identified as “gifted and talented” cannot be separated, so taught differently and thus given a chance to disengage from the claws of mediocrity that entrap them. In many of these same cities, the homeless – some mentally sick, others addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and a few simply down on their luck – ply our parks and streets. Instead of offering the dignity of a job and asking proper behavior in return for food and shelter, we provide them free needles and let them soil streets, sidewalks and parks. In our desire to explain away criminal acts and civil misbehavior as a consequence of victimization, we ignore the plight of real victims. Men and women are tried in the press, without benefit of due process. The “broken windows” policy of policing, first described in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling and based on the theory that if man lives in a neighborhood where property and people are respected crime rates will decline. It worked in New York City in the ‘90s and early 2000s but has been abandoned because of accusations that minorities were unfairly targeted. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss: “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

We have coastal mayors and governors who tell us, in dystopian language, that we are facing imminent danger from man-caused climate change; that streets will soon be under water and fires will rage, unless we address these immediate apocalyptic climate threats, which always involve more spending. As Holman Jenkins wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal regarding the California fires: “PG&E can’t keep trees off its power lines but can supply exact numbers for how many LGBTQ workers it employs.” The coming Armageddon due to climate change is a rallying cry in political campaigns and an argument used when suing oil companies in these blue, coastal cities and states, yet the bonds these same entities issue carry little or no warnings of any climate scare. Can it be that these paragons of virtue are not so direct when it comes to the interest rate costs they would have to pay if honesty prevailed? An op-ed on this subject, written by Peter Schweizer of the Government Accountability Institute, was in this past week’s Wall Street Journal.  When a psychotic individual commits mass murder, we first blame the weapon and second cite the NRA as facilitator, yet, to my knowledge, no NRA member has been accused of mass killings. Cities with some of the toughest gun laws in the country have the most gun deaths. Gun safety, taught by the NRA, is never considered an option. Mark Zuckerberg is demonized for saying that Facebook is committed to supporting free expression, while Google is lionized for walking away from a U.S. defense contract based on ideological concerns. California has allowed the non-profit NCAA to pay student athletes. But, have they considered the negative effect on college athletic programs, like skiing, swimming, hockey, rowing, squash, softball, track and field that rely for funding on profitable sports like basketball and football? Where California goes, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey will follow. “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

Politicians use their index fingers to sense the direction of the wind, then go with the flow. It matters not the long-term consequences of their decisions. It is winning they want. If Socialism is wanted, even if misunderstood by the electorate and the politician, then Socialism it shall be.  Yet, as Anthony Trollope wrote about politics and politicians more than 150 years ago in Phineas Redux: “The best carriage horses are those which can steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill.” Like the three blind mice, Paul Krugman, Frank Bruni and Nicholas Kristof (among dozens of similarly endowed columnists for the New York Times and Washington Post) chase after one another in their end-of-the-world prophecies if the Trump Presidency continues. Yet, minority employment is at record highs and overall unemployment at record lows. Even the third quarter GDP, which was expected to be slow, came in at plus 1.9 percent, better than expected, and above the average for Obama’s eight years. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) placed in charge of the impeachment inquiry (a rare event), bizarrely parodied before Congress the President’s telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – the phone call that was the basis for the impeachment inquiry in the first place.  “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

As Americans, we are fortunate to live in this extraordinary country, with its democratic government, free-market capitalist system, its people and natural resources. Yet, do we appreciate what we have? Michael Walzer, a professor emeritus at Princeton, writing in the Spring 2002 edition of ProQuest, said that maybe “…the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics.” Even the poorest among us live lives of luxury (central heat, flush toilets, prepared foods and cell phones) unimaginable by our forefathers. And now, progressives put all that at risk. California is the epicenter of progressive thinking. If it were to stand alone, the State would be the world’s fifth largest economy, producing 3.5% of the world’s GDP. Its people have had a living standard as high as any in the world and it produces just one percent of global emissions. But that lifestyle is at risk, as the State insists on policies harmful to the economy, yet helpful to the wealthy – rebates for electric vehicles – while detrimental to the poor and middle classes – gas and energy prices that are the highest in the United States, zoning that forces low and middle income people into long commutes and urban public schools that pay attention to union demands rather than the needs of students of poor and middle class families. In a First World State, they today have a Third World electrical system. The Left insists that progressive states like California, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Jersey are the future. “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce described a politician as “an eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared,” a description which is indisputable. I look upon what we have wrought and recognize that the Founding Fathers would be aghast. I answer Governor Cuomo’s exclamative question, “Have we lost our minds?” with a resounding Yes!