“Deflection,” “Distraction” and “Dishonest” are just some of the accusations leveled at President Trump recently for saying he’d like to look into past Democrat conspiracies against him.
The president’s critics have claimed he is simply trying to push attention away from the Jeffrey Epstein story.
Even some of the president’s defenders have sighed that surely he should focus on moving forward and not get distracted by these past problems.
But putting aside for a moment the fact that Trump has shown himself able to do more than one thing at a time, he is right to bring up the Russia collusion hoax and more.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the entirety of the Democratic court media spent four years exciting themselves and boring the American public with their claims.
When Trump won his surprising election victory in 2016, the Democrats already had their Russia attack lined up.
Because the DNC had been hacked that year, exposing some of the unbelievable chicanery that was going on, they were already ripe for a Russia angle.
When Trump jokingly said he’d like the Russians to expose Clinton’s notorious emails, they put their spin into overdrive.
“Trump is asking the Russians to hack us,” they said.
“Trump is openly colluding with Putin,” they went on — showing themselves intent on turning an off-the-cuff joke into some sort of national security alert.
Once Trump was in office, they more than doubled down.
Clinton, the Democrats in the House and Senate and their whole amen chorus in the media decided that Trump had only gotten into office because the Russians had “hacked” the 2016 election.
In doing so, they not only told a lie, they also undermined the idea that American elections are safe and secure and that the ballot is accurate.
For four years, they then tried to bring Trump down. They tied him up in investigations. They tied him up in impeachments.
Every single night, hosts like the unwatchable Rachel Maddow worked themselves into a frenzy, promising that they had the evidence.
Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others insisted to the American people that there was a smoking gun, that they had the smoking gun and that they were going to produce the smoking gun — if not today, then tomorrow, or the day after that. They worked themselves, their audiences and voters up to a fever pitch.
And what evidence did they end up providing for their claims?
Nada. Zilch. A big, fat nothing.
And then, having spent four years lying and exaggerating and slandering and plotting, they got away with it.
The people who had insisted that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump had colluded to steal an American election just moved on and hoped that nothing would happen, or that no one had noticed.
Schiff moved seamlessly into the Senate.
Maddow and the hosts of the asylum breakout that is “The View” kept pretending that they had been right all along.
At present, the mainstream media seem to have decided to pretend that they never pushed the Russia hoax and that they don’t know what Trump and his supporters are even talking about.
Fortunately, not everybody has their Biden-esque short-term memory problems.
Speaking to my colleague Miranda Devine this week, Trump said he had resisted calls to go after Clinton during his first term in office, despite all the rally chants against her.
As he told “Pod Force One,” he felt it would be “inappropriate” to go after his political opponent in that way, and to pursue his former rival in the courts.
There was a time when that might have been the case.
To have pursued a former first lady, senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate would undoubtedly have been divisive.
Unfortunately for Trump, the Democrats had a different set of standards. They had no problem going after him even after he had won an election fair and square. They had no problem toxifying the political landscape and undermining the sanctity of the voting booth.
Now they say that Trump is being merely vindictive, or trying to distract attention, by going back to these issues.
But they are important issues.
If elected officials and parts of the media spend years pushing conspiracy theories that have absolutely no evidence to back them up, there should be a price to pay.
And there should, at the very least, be some kind of investigation.
After the disaster that was January 6, 2021, the House had no problem at all with setting up a committee to look into what happened that day. If there can be a House committee on January 6, why shouldn’t there be one on the Russia collusion hoax? Why shouldn’t we find out which parts of the intelligence community knowingly worked on promoting lies about a sitting US president? And why shouldn’t we learn just how wide, deep and high up that conspiracy really went?
Trump can easily focus on moving this country forward. Another week of trade deal successes shows that. But as a country, we can´t just move beyond an era in which powerful people tried to undermine the presidency and got away with it.
by Douglas Murray NYP
No comments:
Post a Comment