All indications now are that the Democrats are finally about to pay for using hate of Donald Trump as a substitute for governing for two years, just as, for four years prior to that, they used Trump hate as a substitute for normal opposition.
The entire fabric of myths, frauds, and defamations that the national political media have conveniently held up as a safety net for the Democratic Party and this terribly incompetent administration is about to disappear, and the Democrats will finally carry the can for 14 years of incompetence and venality—10 failed years under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, with a four-year interlude when frenzied antagonism to the Trump administration was a divertissement of shamefully unconstitutional and obstructive opposition.
The greatest liberation of all in the national purgation that now seems likely in the midterm elections in two weeks will be the debunking of the totalitarian fiction that the 2020 election was unquestionably fair. This fraud hangs around the neck of America like an albatross and has been repeated like a catechism by practically every member of the national political media for two years. The ranks of Congress and of the nation’s governors will be crowded with highly motivated, capable, and ethically elected occupants who have campaigned explicitly and energetically on the alleged fraudulence of the 2020 presidential election result.
Most of the more knowledgeable upholders of this almost manifest untruth know that there were potentially millions of harvested ballots; that it was impossible to verify the authenticity of those alleged ballots; that a great many of them likely came in huge bulk at the improvised dropboxes in the middle of the night; that 50,000 fewer Biden votes in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have given the election to Trump in the Electoral College; and that the entire judiciary from state courts to the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear on their merits or judge any of the 19 lawsuits against the constitutionality of the voting and vote-counting rules that were altered, supposedly to promote voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the least, 2020 was an election like 1960 (Kennedy–Nixon) and 2000 (Bush–Gore), where it will never be certain who would have won the election if all the valid ballots and no invalid ballots had been counted.
Noonan also attributed the views of the “election deniers” (an annoying phrase designed to incite the opprobrium of Holocaust denial) to the argumentative, ornery, and individualist nature of many Americans. She must know this to be a pastoral dream substituting for the inconvenient facts of a partially rigged result (as is well-documented in Mollie Hemingway’s rigorously non-conspiracist book, aptly titled “Rigged”). The almost unanimous and carefully confected and enforced consensus that it was a fair election, like the fraudulent claim that “97 percent of scientists believe climate change is dangerous” and like the 99 percent of people who once thought the sun revolved around the earth, is bunk.
For two years, one of the many irritating aspects of the frenzied Democratic harassment of the Trump administration was the sanctimonious belief that they had an almost constitutionally entrenched right to have Trump constantly under criminal investigation.
The Russian collusion inquiry was proved to be nothing but a smear job. But when then-presidential candidate Joe Biden was asked about his son’s financial activities in Ukraine, he self-righteously remarked that the investigative focus was on Trump and that he wouldn’t be a party to allowing Trump to escape the well-justified inquiries into his probably illegal conduct by permitting any distraction from it.
Questions about Hunter Biden’s large income as an adviser to Ukrainian, Chinese, and other potentially controversial connections were impertinent (and Joe Biden knew nothing about them anyway). We now know that there’s allegedly extensive evidence of questionable activities of Hunter Biden in a number of foreign countries and that his father almost certainly financially gained from these activities.
I’ve never believed that there was any evidence that money given by foreign entities to the Biden family caused a change in U.S. government conduct toward those countries. But Joe Biden has allegedly lied to the public about all of this for years; he wasn’t under oath, but that kind of breach of faith with the people doesn’t do wonders for a leader’s political capital.
It has always been obvious that the last thing Trump wanted on Jan. 6, 2021, was mob violence in the U.S. Capitol. The Jan. 6 hearings of the House of Representatives will take its place beside the Mueller commission and the two Trump impeachments as the greatest mockery, not only of legislative investigative justice but of the entire broad canvass of select congressional investigative committees. It didn’t do as much damage as the demagogic grandstanding of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy in the early 1950s, but it was, if anything, a more heavily loaded and biased committee and was even more contemptuous of normal civilized rules of production of evidence, the examination of witnesses, and bipartisan composition.
Trump did everything he reasonably could to warn the speaker of the House and the mayor of Washington of possible disorder and to encourage the presence of adequate forces to assure the Capitol’s security. Despite nearly two years of prosecutors’ outrageous shakedowns to extort inculpatory evidence under the corrupt American plea bargain system, no link between the wrongdoers of “1/6” (jargon attempting to link it to “9/11") and Trump has been exposed. This is just another attempt at bloodless Trump assassination.
Six years ago, Trump’s only supporter in the U.S. Senate was Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), whom Trump rewarded by naming him attorney general (where he was a complete failure). The shock of Trump’s election was so great that almost nobody believed that it was a genuine result. Trump has now seen off the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Bushes and remains the principal political personality in the country. It’s obvious to everyone that Trump’s administration, while afflicted by serious stylistic infelicities, was as successful as its successor is a failure. Everyone sees America floundering, and everyone sees who’s now its dominating political personality.
If the Trump-backed Senate candidates win any two of Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Trump is almost certainly the next president. And it’s unlikely that the country will indulge another completely spurious, desperately political, legal assault against him. The Democrats have shot that bolt, and Trump is the recent political past, the preeminent present, and the likely future. The country could do worse, and it has, ever since the retirement of Ronald Reagan.
Obama remains popular personally as a somewhat charming public personality who’s fluent and physically agile and the personification of the immense and largely successful effort that the United States has made these 60 years to promote the comprehensive equality of the long-subjugated and then segregated African American people. But the Obama administration’s only accomplishments were the Iranian nuclear deal, which has been a disaster; various green measures and the Paris Climate Accord, which have also been disasters; and Obamacare, which was dishonestly claimed to enable everyone to keep their existing doctors. It undoubtedly extended benefits to many people, but it seriously inconvenienced tens of millions of others.
The Biden administration has been a colossal fiasco in every significant respect but especially inflation, exploding crime, allowing millions of illegal migrants into the country, the Afghanistan debacle, and the inability to gain the respect of China, Russia, or even North Korea.
