Thread by @JewhadiTM

Impeachment Madness and the Twisted World of NeverTrump

Rage against a president who is just doing his job. frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/th…

We still have to hear homilies from the Church of NeverTrump, once again trying to turn the president’s blunt, take-no-prisoners, what-you-see-is-what-you-get style into a Constitutional crisis.

In fact, Trump was elected because enough voters rejected the vision of politics as the purview of technocratic elites who define “democratic norms,” “presidential decorum,” and “political normality” in terms that happen to suit their tastes, interests, and prejudices.

For them, Trump’s discussion with Zelensky with its alleged implied quid-pro-quo was outrageously out of bounds and unprecedented. So let’s see, the Constitution gives the president wide authority to conduct foreign policy, including interactions with other heads of state.

It does not specify by what rules of manners and diplomacy he do so. His only job is to see to the national interests and security of the United States, using whatever tools––except for undeclared war––he finds will achieve those aims.

Trump’s critics, of course, will claim that he corrupted this authority to suit his personal political interests, offering Zelensky foreign aid for investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Marc A. Thiessen has set that record straight:

“When this story broke, WaPo reported that ‘2 former U.S. officials’ said ‘Trump's interaction with the foreign leader included a ‘promise’ ... so troubling it prompted a US intel official ‘to file a formal whistleblower complaint’

“Well, it turns out Trump makes no ‘promise’ anywhere in the transcript. He makes no threats, either. Indeed, it was Zelensky who raised the issue of investigating corruption, not Trump.”

“... @KatyTurNBC claimed that the transcript shows Trump said, “Will you do me a favor and investigate Vice President Biden’s son?” No, he didn't. When Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor,” it had nothing to do with Biden.”

“According to the transcript, he was asking Zelensky to cooperate with an official Justice Department investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe that is being led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, a career prosecutor.”

“A Justice Department spokesman says Durham is ‘exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.’”

In other words, Trump was doing his job, asking his Ukrainian counterpart to help a country that gives it aid get to the bottom of the electoral malfeasance and interference that went on in 2016.

You remember, the same pretext for the soft coup waged for three years by the Obama administration and our national security, justice, and police agencies in order to serve rank partisan ends.

Nor does the claim that Trump was trying to hamstring a 2020 election opponent pass the laugh-test. I think Trump knows that Biden’s gaffe-a-thon campaign doesn’t need any help in self-destructing.

Let’s compare Trump’s supposedly unprecedented violation of “presidential norms” for conducting foreign affairs, with Biden’s strong-arming of Ukrainian govt officials to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company that paid his underqualified, inexperienced son $50K/month.

Here, if things are as they seem, is an explicit act of extortion, not a subliminal quid-pro-quo that has been claimed in Trump’s case, but that in fact didn’t happen.

Of course Trump mentioned Biden’s actions during the general discussion of corruption in intergovernmental business, and he was right to do so.

We can’t have our public officials who are conducting foreign policy exploiting public contacts and leverage for private gain, not when the security and interests of the U.S. are involved.

And these days, the equality of all before the law, something Dems now consider a relic like whale-bone corsets, desperately needs some reinforcing.

Biden at the time was still Vice President, conducting foreign policy as the president’s surrogate. His leveraging of aid was not the problem. We should expect reciprocity for our help and foreign aid.

What’s unseemly is doing so to benefit financially a family member under the guise of rooting out corruption [sic!]. Worse, when he was challenged about not having the authority to withhold the $1B loan guarantee, Biden dared the officials to call the president.

They caved, and Obama never said a thing indicating that Biden had talked out turn and wasn’t speaking for the president, thus implicating him.

Like Joe’s efforts in Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s travels with Pop to China, and returning home with a fat contract are mere coincidences––similar to the coincidence that his international business took off only after Biden became the vice president.

The big point here is that the Caesar’s Wife standard that Trump critics employ is considerably more elastic when it comes to progressives, who are always given the benefit of the doubt despite how unsavory the optics, or how abundant the circumstantial evidence.

With Trump, however, it’s not just that he seldom, if ever, is given the presumption of innocence, but that the “evidence” of his alleged transgressions is frequently manipulated, distorted, or invented out of whole cloth.

We saw it happen in this latest media fiasco, when the fabricated evidence was publicized as the predicate for an impeachment investigation.

Within a few days the transcript of the phone call and the so-called whistleblower’s complaint became available for all to see, making it obvious that the whole affair was full of sound and fury but signified nothing.

That NeverTrumpers continually validate this double-standard, along with their self-righteous blather about “norms” and “decorum,” is what infuriates Trump’s base who are not denizens of the Acela Corridor combine. Indeed, some NeverTrumpers have become unhinged on the topic.

.@monacharenEPPC, writing about the latest hit on Trump, ends her screed: “But if Trump is twisted and occasionally delusional, partisans who cloak him with excuses and sympathy are exactly what Trump thinks everybody is — corrupt.”

There you have it: question-begging personal insults followed by the condemnation of millions of ordinary voters.

Forget the impeachment farce and ginned-up scandals. The decision we will face in 2020 is simple: do you want someone who loves this country, believes it is exceptional, wants it to be great, and has proven it by restoring our international prestige & revitalizing our economy?

Or do you want a self-anointed technocrat who disdains our country, obsesses over its alleged crimes, thinks it should be just one nation among many, will bankrupt it w/utopian policies, and will surrender sovereignty to an international cabal of elites just like them?

The choice is stark: either America, or Anti-America.