"The FBI has a duty to 'We the People' to investigate any appearance of impropriety."
Fox's Bill O'Reilly, as regards Hillary Clinton, 2016.
We have a failure to communicate.
Comedy Central played a mash-up of prominent Republicans demanding that the FBI investigate Hillary Clinton. How dare she possess government documents! The Republicans seem so righteous. So adamant. So supportive of law enforcement. Watch. It's about a minute:
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Maybe we can just simply chalk it up to hypocrisy and whose ox is being gored. No need to overthink this. They are fighting for their team. When the target was Hillary, they demanded the FBI go at her hard. Now, with Trump the target, they switched. The FBI isn't honest and professional. Now it is thoroughly corrupt and political. It isn't a "search." It's a "raid." Moreover, they likely planted any documents they will claim to find.
The pole star is that Trump is an innocent victim and their teammate. Their posturing follows from that premise. That means a superstructure of GOP brand attributes needed to be abandoned. The GOP isn't the "support the blue" party, after all. It is now the civil liberties party. It is the innocent-until-proven-guilty party. It is the Fifth Amendment party. It is the party that presumes that the police are picking on the suspect out of prejudice and profiling. Defund the FBI! And IRS enforcement, too. They sound like leftist critics of racial profiling and prejudice, except that now the victim of police injustice is a powerful, wealthy, White, male ex-president.
Of course, Republicans don't mean it. The posturing is entirely a matter of Trump being their ox. Republicans are treating this as a game of tit for tat. They did what they could to smear Hillary, who deserved some of it, and now they presume Democrats are doing what they can to smear Trump, who also deserves some of it. As soon as the GOP gets control of a chamber of government they are already promising to hold hearings to smear Merrick Garland ('clear your calendar") who maybe deserves something, but at least he can be badgered. Hunter Biden surely deserves some smears, and Antony Fauci made some enemies, as did the January 6 committee. They are great targets. This is pay-back, and it is the GOP's turn.
I look at it very differently. I perceive Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election as uniquely wrong and illegal. It was dangerous. It was a greater threat to our republic than was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no realistic way that Japan could have invaded and occupied the U.S. and gotten troops to the Capitol to replace our president with one Americans did not choose. There would be ugly fighting and tens of thousands of American deaths, yes, but the continuity of legitimate government in the United States was never in question. We now realize that Trump nearly succeeded, and did so with the enthusiastic support of a significant block of people in positions of power in the federal and state governments. They are still there.
Prominent Republican leaders--Senators, Governors, Members of Congress, media spokespeople--are treating Trump's insurrection as a tit for tat game, as if there are good guardrails in place to protect our republic. As such they can make statements they will forget or recant soon. It is just harmless posturing, right?.
It is not harmless. Trump lit a fire of delegitimization of government. Prominent GOP leaders continue to feed the fire. Trump really did urge Georgia's Raffensperger to "find" 11.000 votes. He really did--as Mitch McConnell said immediately after January 6--instigate a riot to overturn an election. He really did possess government documents at Mar-a-Lago that he denied having. The FBI wasn't playing tit for tat on behalf of Democrats. It was doing its job, investigating crimes, real crimes. As Bill O'Reilly said, that is the FBI's duty.
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7 comments:
The old adage “Time will tell” wasn’t written in the age of the Internet. Time is running out on the Union, and our form f government. The wheels of Justice do in fact move slowly. With the midterm election less than 90 days away we don’t have a clear picture of Trump and the attempted coup, that I contend is still moving in the swing States.
It’s as if we are blind and each encounter the GOP elephant and sense the beast. The great body of Trump is the wall and security. The tail discovered is the ass and a fool is found. The trunk is met with fear as you would a very large snake. And the leg is perceived as a tree trunk of a new government order. Most of the GOP ignore the stink of the manure that is the wreckage of Trump’s (The elephant) business, personal and political life. The different takes on Trump are real. To many he is a strongman they crave to smash their perceived foes he has manufactured with the Big Lie. To most, he is an enraged bull elephant intent on destroying everything in his way. He maybe unstoppable.
As far as I can tell, Hillary Clinton was wrong and the Traitor was wrong.
It does look worse for the Traitor, in my opinion, because he was the President, DOJ made several attempts to get the stolen documents before the search/raid and he made such an issue about Clinton's emails, over and over.
Hillary Clinton paid a great price. Technically, she lost the election, even though she won the popular vote.
T-Rump and his cronies excoriated Hillary Clinton for doing much less than they now condone from him. However, such grotesque hypocrisy and contempt for the law have come to be expected from Republicans anymore, because they're as crazy as he is.
"...we don’t have a clear picture of Trump and the attempted coup"
It sure is taking quite a long time. Perhaps that's because there wasn't an attempted coup.
I am a conservative that abhors some of what Trump has done, and has praise for several things he has done for the country.
Perhaps if he's ignored, we'll hear less about him.
Be sure to check out George Will's column from last week. He's no fan of Trump. He provides several sound reasons why the latest FBI search will only embolden Trump and his supporters. The FBI search also diminished Biden's good news last week, except for his claim that inflation is now only 0%.
Believe it or not, there are other things going on in the country and world that require attention. Focusing on Trump only helps the viewership (and readership?) of all things Trump. Of course, the media is depending on this. They need the viewers and readers to justify their advertising rates.
Remember, if you aren't paying for your news and media consumption, advertisers and other supporters are. Those eyeballs don't come for free.
Someone once said there aint no such thing as a free lunch. TANSTAAFL
T-Rump is the undisputed leader of the GOP, supported by the vast majority of Republicans who swallow his stupid lies, Big and small, without thought or hesitation. I can assure you that ignoring him will neither make him go away nor make his ongoing efforts to trample our democracy any less consequential.
Change the names, and Democrats indulged the same topical and situational piety when it comes to the proper handling of classified material. The apt reply to that here is “Physician, heal thyself”.
Concerning the effort to cast Trump’s conduct—as known or reasonably suspected to date—the apt reply is, “Agreed. Trump alone, compared with e.g. HRC or Comey, could unilaterally declassify.
Poor AG Garland managed to embarrass and contradict himself even in a five minute “press conference” of makeweight bromides. He prated about a “narrowly-tailored” inquiry, “integrity”, and “transparency”.
Trouble is, the explicit date range in the warrant at issue covers….the entire Trump presidency. Integrity as in scrupulous due process….yet his stooges immediately leaked supposed details to the legacy media.
“Anonymous sources” close to the investigation, and to the WaPo and NYT, dontchaknow! Sounds every but as reliable as the auspices for the much-bruited FISA court warrants….which proved to be hogwash.
Transparency….yet just as I along with others predicted days ago, the DOJ and Democrats, unlike Republicans including Trump himself, now want the probable cause affidavit justifying the search to remain sealed.
A caveat? DOJ has evidence that Trump deliberately retained and hid top secret items with a view to selling them or trading on them. He’s weasel enough. If not, the DOJ has done the nation a major disservice.
A slight correction:
The argument above is based on a misleading premise: “Trump alone, compared with e.g. HRC or Comey, could unilaterally declassify.”
It’s true the president can classify or declassify almost anything he wants, but there’s a procedure. It includes identifying the specific documents, putting the order in writing (for bureaucratic and historical purposes) and having staff physically modify the classification markings on the document. So far, we’ve seen or heard no evidence Trump did that. However, I doubt if even the president would be allowed to walk off with documents labeled TS/SCI.
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