What Caused the Political Hysteria?

Loading

By Victor Davis Hanson

The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump—past, present, and future.
 
The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.
 
Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.
 
In this context, the Republicans retaking control of  the House of Representatives once again raises the question whether they should reply in kind.
 
Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Biden’s lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency?
 
Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tore up the president’s State of the Union address on national television?
 
How many Democratic House members should be denied committee assignments to remind the Congress that Pelosi’s rejection of Republican nominees was a terrible precedent?
 
How many congressional subpoenas with threats of criminal prosecution and performance-art arrests should be issued to Democratic politicos to stop the criminalization of political differences?
 
In our current age, will all former president’s private homes, closets, and drawers now be subject to FBI raids to ensure that “classified” documents were not wrongly stored there?
 
Are Joe Biden’s current homes also a logical target, given his sloppy handling of classified foreign policy papers—eerily reminiscent of an abandoned laptop belonging to son Hunter Biden and daughter Ashley Biden’s lost diary?
 
Was it ever a good idea to impeach a first-term president the moment he lost his party’s majority in the House—but without any hope of a conviction in the Senate? Would such a similar impeachment send a warning to Biden to honor his oath of office and start enforcing U.S. immigration law?
 
Does a phone call now an impeachment make, on the grounds that Trump mixed domestic politics with foreign policy?
 
But was Trump’s Ukrainian call that much different from Barack Obama’s 2012 quid pro quo in Seoul, South Korea, where he asked the Russian president to convey a deal to Vladmir Putin: stay calm and give Obama space during his reelection bid while Obama in turn would be flexible on missile defense.
 
Putin did just that and put off invading Ukraine until Obama was reelected. And Obama made sure there was no joint missile defense projects in Eastern Europe. Was that deal in America’s interest, or Obama’s own and thus similarly impeachable?
 
Or consider Joe Biden mixing foreign policy and politics on the eve of the midterm elections. For example, he kept draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dangerously low levels while begging hostile foreign dictators to pump more oil.
 
Thereby Biden sought to win votes from angry commuters buffeted by high fuel prices. And he also appeased the Left by not ordering more drilling for gas and oil. Was that gambit in the nation’s—or Joe Biden’s—best interest?
 
What is wrong with the House investigating whether the FBI infiltrated and contracted social media companies to warp news coverage and suppress free expression of American citizens?
 
The Left certainly thought it was necessary in 1975 for the Church Committee to investigate the CIA. That committee found the agency was contracting new organizations to front for its covert operations, while partnering with telecommunications corporations to monitor the data of citizens on CIA watch lists. Sound familiar to today’s FBI?
 
Was it a good idea for the Democratic House to release Trump’s tax returns?
 
If the Republican House were to do the same with the Biden consortium’s tax records, would the result be far more incriminating?
 
There was much talk once in Congress of evoking the 25th Amendment to remove a supposedly mentally impaired Trump. A Yale psychiatrist was even paraded before Congress to attest the president was dangerously unbalanced. Calls for aptitude testing resulted in Trump acing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

Read more
 

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Trump has committed no crimes, and is the most vetted man in Washington right now.

That’s a fact.

Any attempts to “charge” or “arrest” him are Putin-style and Xi-style totalitarian monkey moves that only banana republics do.

It would help if the Deep State would just come out and admit our nation isn’t a democracy. No one is buying their silly efforts to put the genie back in the bottle.

It’s out. They sculpt events, rig elections, and keep the rest of us arguing about “GOP vs. Democrats” when it’s really American Citizens vs. Bureaucracy n’ Friends.

Somehow, the general public needs to be made aware of how corrupt Democrats have made the government. We are, indeed, at an existential turning point. The rare instances when the “conspiracies” get outright proven are just the tip of the iceberg. We are clearly seeing that the vast majority of what they accuse Republicans, in general and Trump, specifically, of they themselves are engaged in. It’s reasonable to assume that is 100% of what they accuse, and they accuse some pretty nasty stuff.

Republicans need to pursue the corruption relentlessly. Though I am of two minds on this, I think Democrats need to feel the sting of their power plays. McConnell did a good job of making them feel the pain of killing the filibuster on judicial nominations, but was it a lesson? As long as the Democrats see single-party rule down the road, it doesn’t appear so. However it is completely right to kick the worst of the scum off of all House committees.

But, if the public can be made to understand the utter trash they support and, if they actually support the Constitution, that the Democrats are utterly undercutting it, the idea of single party totalitarian police state rule could be relegated to a wet dream.