“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].” Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)
Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia? Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law. The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny. Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.
Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang. To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters. If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst). Execrable potentates produce execrable government.
As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.
“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime. Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits. Ask them. Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process. If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them. But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.
But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump. Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.
In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain. In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president. What a thin reed to hang a political rival. Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?
Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity. Hogwash. Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals. Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump. Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety. If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.
The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe. We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices. We should be under international observation, not be the observers. And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.
The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything. Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible. Reprehensible behavior is impeachable. For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary. Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.
The documents indictment similarly has legal legs. But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places. It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia. Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?
Are we a banana republic or something worse? What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us. Is this the best that we can come up with?
RogerG