OPINION:
If you are going to shoot a grizzly bear, you better kill it.
In Kodiak, Alaska, in the deep wilderness of America’s last frontier, ladies and children who pick berries wear bells so as not to startle an unsuspecting bear nursing a similar — albeit much longer — sweet tooth. And though there are no black bears on this rugged island of Sitka Spruce and salmon streams, locals joke about how you tell the difference between the droppings of black bears and the fearsome brown bears that roam these mountains.
Black bear droppings contain berry seeds. The droppings of grizzlies and Kodiaks contain little bells.
So if you go hunting for a brown bear, you better bring a gun big enough to kill it. And the cojones to keep up with it.
This is a harsh lesson that the landlocked swamp creatures of the Potomac River apparently never learned.
President Biden’s thoroughly weaponized Department of Justice dispatched a swat team of armed agents from the FBI to raid former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Never before in American history has any president used the FBI against a political opponent for such nakedly partisan punishment.
This is not about classified presidential records. This is not even about Jan. 6, 2021.
This is all about destroying Mr. Trump so that he cannot run for reelection in 2024.
Mr. Trump has been a man pursued since the moment he entered the political arena. During the 2016 election, then-President Barack Obama’s FBI spied on Mr. Trump’s campaign, peddled Russian disinformation designed to hurt Mr. Trump and scuttled an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s intentional and widespread mishandling of classified information from her days as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state.
A couple of quick points about that investigation that Mr. Obama’s FBI squashed just weeks before the 2016 election. Mrs. Clinton’s notorious “bathroom server” exposed reams of classified government records to our enemies around the world. And since she was never president (and never will be), Mrs. Clinton had no authority to declassify those records.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, allegedly retained records when he left the White House that he was not supposed to take with him. Those records are accessible to no one other than perhaps the maids at Mar-a-Lago. And since the FBI apparently had to break into a safe to retrieve them, maybe they were not accessible even to the maids.
Anyway, the records in question were generated by the Trump administration, and since Mr. Trump did get elected president, he and he alone would have had the power to declassify them while he was in office.
This unprecedented raid by paramilitary thugs from the FBI directed by a geriatric junta in Washington is not about presidential records. It is all about punishing Mr. Biden’s political opponent ahead of the next election. It is entirely about Democrat politicians preserving their power by destroying Mr. Trump.
They despise him not because he can be brash and vulgar. Not because he is a Russian stooge. And not because he is a danger to Democracy.
Precisely the opposite.
They despise him because he is democracy in its rawest form. They despise him because he is effective. And they despise him because he is not one of them.
They despise him because he is a threat to the kleptocracy they have built for themselves.
Consider three of the biggest issues in the 2016 election that propelled Mr. Trump into office.
Build the wall to stop illegal immigration, ignite the long-slumbering economy and quit all the devastating and expensive wars around the world. Exhaustive polling shows that Mr. Trump’s positions on each of these issues align perfectly with those of the vast, vast majority of American voters — both Democrats and Republicans.
Only the government droids in Washington support the free flow of illegal immigration, byzantine government regulations that strangle the American economy and endless wars around the globe.
Mr. Trump is a threat to that regime. And we now see that Mr. Biden and his lawless henchmen will stop at nothing to destroy Mr. Trump.
These are grim days for the Republic. But if they don’t kill him, there will be nowhere for them to hide and nothing they will be able to do to protect themselves.
Godspeed, America.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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