Author: RogerG

Accounts of the last moments of Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi depict him retreating into a tunnel with a dead end and blowing himself up with three of his children. The tale proves that a dead end is what you make of it. For al-Baghdadi, it was off to his 70 virgins (I don’t know where the kids ended up in Islamist theology.). For the Democrats in their incessant drive to impeach Trump, similarly at a dead end of facts, they are weaving a fairy tale in order to create the illusion of the light of dastardly and impeachable offenses at the end of the tunnel. The reality is that there is nothing but a wall of rock and compacted dirt.

Let’s see, we’ve experienced a “whistleblower” complaint which proved to be a collection of hearsay water cooler and lunch room talk among the minions of the administrative state.

The conspirators couldn’t spin the call at the center of their scheme because Trump released the transcript to everyone on the planet. Then the story is repeated, nothing much added, in the tales spun by others vaguely mentioned in the initial yarn. If anything is added, it’s nothing but feelings of anger of people who are upset about how the president is conducting foreign policy. They’re flabbergasted that an elected official – the president – would dare skip over they’re unelected, self-anointed wisdom. Then they’ve attempted to establish a “quid pro quo” as if something that is common in the course of foreign relations is somehow illegal, while it clearly isn’t. What does all this add up to? Nothing!

Shakespeare spun a tale of “Much Ado About Nothing”. The Democrats are trying to steal the mantle of master poet laureate. Their fiction, though, says more about them than Trump.

RogerG

The Coriolis Effect: the natural bending of global air and water currents due to the earth’s rotation on its axis.

I’ve often wondered why liberals since the late 19th century have a reflex to lean ever further left.  The tendency is very pronounced in today’s Democratic Party.  Propositions that were soundly rejected only a couple of years ago have morphed into near dogma in the party.  Take for instance the almost universal embrace of gargantuan social engineering in Green New Deals; or the racially charged seizure of wealth from one generation to fund awards to a current and specific racially-favored group 150 years removed from the wrong; or the open and broad avowals of faith in socialism, while, for some, still denying it; or the proud espousal of confiscatory taxation in spite of its historically ruinous effects (JFK would be shocked.).

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn presents a possible answer in the second volume of his 3-part historical novel, “The Red Wheel: November 1916”.  In describing the rise of Russian left radicalism in the decades prior to the 1917 revolutions (there ended up being two in March and October), he compares the liberal’s leftward reflex to the natural phenomena of the Coriolis effect.  Here’s how he puts it:

“Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such a way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left.  Their sympathies [are] always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments – but they [are] disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right.” (p.59)

Makes sense to me.  Daniel Pipes in his magisterial works on the Russian Revolution described the blind spot in the outlook of the liberals as they deposed the Tsar in March of 1917 and tried to build a constitutional republic.  If there was a threat, they were convinced it would come from the right.  They ignored the warnings of the intelligence services that left extremists, the Bolsheviks, were arming and planning a seizure of power.  Low and behold, Petrograd was left mostly undefended and the rest of Russian history thereafter is one of villainy and misery.

What lies in store for us as we approach the momentous date of November 2020?  We have a president wounded by the incessant drumbeat of an increasingly radical left Democratic Party with numerous allies in the media, academia, entertainment, and among the campus and street mobs.  His opposition, the Democratic Party, has become the vanguard of the radical left’s implementation of an all-encompassing transformation of all of society to fit their warped vision.

Will the political Coriolis effect in modern America duplicate the misery foisted on Russia?  This is the time for some serious adult thinking on the question … before it is too late.

RogerG

Proverbs 18:17 (ESV): The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.

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The madhouse in DC over impeachment is more reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials during his purges than American jurisprudence.  The House spectacle is all about a predetermined verdict being sold behind a facade of serious-sounding rubbish.  The American public is being misled.  Putin is taking notes.

The Democrats have been on a jihad since November 8, 2016.  The latest gambit hinges on a nefarious Trump “quid pro quo”.  If the ploy was limited to that, it’s a nothingburger.  “Quid pro quo” literally means “something for something”.  If that was all there was to it, it’s a very thin reed to support a massive structure of impeachment.  Does the Louisiana Purchase remind you of anything?  International relations are almost solely conducted on a quid-pro-quo basis.

Really, though, what the show-trial prosecutors are trying to conjure is something more: a quid-pro-quo-or-else.  And that, the call’s transcript doesn’t support.  The “favor” doesn’t mention the Bidens till further down in the conversation.  At the top of Trump’s mind is the skulduggery conducted against him in 2016.  The Bidens were an afterthought.  Many interpretations are possible whenever a verbal conversation is put to paper, but you can’t say that only Schiff’s reading is the viable one.

The “or else” part is the withholding of a weapons sale, or so they say – while confusing a “sale” with “aid”.  Well, whatever, the Ukraine got the weapons a month later.  The only president to withhold military aid to Ukraine was Obama.  And further, Zelensky and his government wasn’t even aware that they were being allegedly coerced.  It’s a strange quid-pro-quo when quid has no knowledge of the purported quo.  This is nonsense on stilts.

Schiff and his sorcerers have to create the illusion of a grand evil out of thin gruel.  How?  It’s simple: control the process!  In other words, hold a show trial but call it something else.  The Dems liken this charade to a grand jury.  They’re right in an infantile way: charges (articles of impeachment) come out of it.  But there the resemblance ends.  It’s a strange grand jury proceeding when people representing the defense (Republicans) are present alongside people representing the prosecutors (Democrats).  Instead, the whole affair has the adversarial characteristics of a trial.  As such, the situation cries for full due process, not the secret hearings with Schiff the only one allowed to call witnesses and his serial leaking of cherry-picked statements to make his fiction seem like non-fiction.  All the while, the Republicans are muzzled by keeping the thing secret.  This is scandalous.

Another underhanded excuse is often bellowed to make the outrage more digestible.  The process is said to be exclusively “political” in nature.  But is that true?  No.  Impeachment is a blend of politics and statute.  If “politics” was the sole driving force, once we developed political parties in the late 18th century, opposing parties controlling the Presidency and Congress would be embroiled in impeachments right and left.  The fact that we have had so few impeachments tells us something.  It tell us that something more than the fulfillment of political vendettas should be at the core of the process.  It must be anchored in a clear and unmistakable violation of the Constitution or a serious criminal statue.  A high bar is required, not the low bar of grotesque interpretations of paper transcriptions of phone calls or previously Court-approved exercises of executive privilege.

If Trump is guilty, what of Obama’s use of his “phone and pen”?  He created by his lonesome new categories of immigration law violators to be free of those same laws.  Is this an example of the Article II branch acting like the Article I branch?  What about “faithfully executing the laws”?  Or how about the Fast and Furious episode in an entrapment scheme against our Second Amendment?  Have we forgotten the IRS vendetta against Obama’s political opponents?  There’s more here against Obama, using Pelosi’s standard, than there ever is against Trump.

Republicans, remember this time.  It’s no holds barred regarding impeachment.  The Democrats have unleashed the tactic of hiding election loss anger and ideological and policy disagreements under spurious claims of misbehavior.  You too, Republicans, can follow the same show trial script when the time comes.

RogerG