OPINION:
Politics is a mean competition, one that makes pro football look like two-hand touch by comparison. The game on the gridiron, at least, has rules meant to ensure a level playing field. Not so with the contest currently underway in Washington in which Democrats are using every trick at their disposal to knock out the opposing party’s star player. Americans are witnessing the savaging of their president, and the quiet voice of conscience says it’s fundamentally unfair.
From the start, Washington establishment types who drank deeply from Barack Obama’s globalist well branded Donald Trump and his “America First” crusade a last-century throwback. They launched the Trump-Russia collusion ploy even before he arrived at the White House. Special Counsel Robert Mueller ultimately found the accusations baseless, though it required a million pages of Trump documents and half the president’s first term to expose the hoax.
That was just a practice game for the never-Trumpers. The Democrat-hatched probe of the president’s interactions with Ukraine demonstrates a political offensive mastered through experience. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff fashioned an impeachment campaign over Mr. Trump’s telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky using careful control of the narrative allowed to reach the public.
There is little that news organization dread more than the loss of credibility and little they despise more than being caught serving up lies. Yet major media haven’t lifted a finger to expose the falsehoods or correct the record. When the president calls them out for peddling “fake news,” rather than re-examine their judgment, they double down.
By nature, water flows downhill and finds every crevice. Washington Democrats do the same, ceaselessly probing for every conceivable ambiguity in law and language that can be exploited to turn political custom upside-down. Mrs. Pelosi has wormed her way past House convention by initiating her investigations into Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine without first gaining approval with a full chamber vote.
Further, the Democrat-authorized probes have granted the president’s party no investigatory powers, no right to call their own witnesses and no opportunity for the president’s lawyers to participate in his defense. If Republicans are eventually allowed any role in the process, it may come only at its conclusion when the House votes on whether the impeachment mob elects to hand over Mr. Trump to the Senate for trial.
The deployment of “whistleblowers,” so-called, represents an additional fissure in House convention for dealing with charges of presidential wrongdoing. Hiding in anonymity meant to shield witnesses from retaliation, Trump accusers are whispering their charges of impeachable offenses in Star Chamber-like proceedings. Holdovers from the Obama administration, they would not be more creepy if they were spies. The constitutionally protected right to confront one’s accusers is thus denied the president.
The initial whistleblower was first described as a member of the intelligence community on loan to the White House. The individual produced a disturbing description of a phone call in which Mr. Trump purportedly threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless Mr. Zelensky dug up dirt on Vice President Joe Biden, now a Democratic presidential candidate. Provably false: The phone transcript showed no such thing.
More details emerged, painting the leaker as a Europe and Russia analyst who previously worked with Mr. Biden in the White House and is a registered Democrat. Dirty political tricks are usually a little less obvious.
Additional “whistleblowers” are reportedly emerging from the shadows, piling their tales one on top of another. And media headlines report that Mr. Schiff recruited two Obama-era National Security Council staffers who were kept on in the Trump White House, turning their insider knowledge against the president. Backstabbers are the sort of villains the public loves to hate.
There is something fundamentally sinister about a political organization that rejects the people’s choice and makes paramount his downfall by any means necessary. Mrs. Pelosi’s scheme for dispatching the president reeks of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” in which the Queen of Hearts sputters, “Sentence first — verdict afterward.”
Offspring of a nation born out of revolution against tyranny, Americans instinctively rally to the defense of the falsely accused. If Democrats persist in the use of secretive schemes to level charges against the president that he is not allowed to contest, they may wind up inviting the honest and decent to line up in his defense. Only fairness is fair game.
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