#136 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday September 6)
Good morning!
Jay Wintrob sent me an article by Victor Davis Hanson, a well-regarded conservative columnist, encouraging me to respond. Hanson is not an inflammatory Fox News commentator but a well-regarded “intellectual” of the right helps understand the intellectual underpinnings of the current Republican party. Because I enjoy a challenge, here are Mr. Hanson’s comments in his July 11, 2021 column, followed by my responses:
HANSON: Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain…
RESPONSE: Hanson correctly cites the danger posed by the abandonment of the rules and norms of any system. I am amused that Mr. Hanson doesn’t see the irony of his comment in light of the Republicans’ attack on the very legal institutions, customs and traditions of which he speaks. They have been merciless in attacking our elections accessibility and systems, including the substitution of partisan legislators as the ultimate arbiter of state election results. I’m curious whether Mr. Hanson thinks the attacks by the right on our free press (the “enemy of the people”) and our courts isn’t precisely what Thucydides warns about. And how does he feel about the Trump administration’s complete disregard for the independence of the Attorney General and the Justice Department, nor the long-held norm that the Secretary of State does not engage in partisan politics
HANSON: The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. What was common to the media’s… promotion of a series of abject hoaxes… the Steele “dossier,”… the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn?
RESPONSE: I won’t suggest that the Left doesn’t overlook norms when to its benefit, but never as blatantly and with utter disregard for our institutions as the Trumpists. As for the promotion of hoaxes, how about the attack on the legitimacy of the recent election? Does he think leveraging of Ukraine to do the President’s political bidding was a hoax? Much of the Steele dossier has been proven accurate. Mr. Trump’s clear bias toward the Russians, regardless of whether what calls it collusion, cooperation, coordination, or just a couple of friends helping each other out, is hardly in dispute.
HANSON: Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin?
RESPONSE: The Charlottesville construct was no invention—the perpetrators of most of these crimes are from far-right extremist groups (or single actors in support of their dogmas). The claim that COVID-19 might have been the result of a lab was attacked for its premature conclusion without facts and was a tool the Trump administration used to deflect legitimate criticism for its failure to effectively respond to the pandemic. The lab theory remains just that—a theory—currently under consideration.
HANSON: And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth?
RESPONSE: Men (and women) with guns did stage an insurrection. And they did kill Officer Sicknick and wounded others. And they were carrying zip-ties to take prisoners and talked of violence they wanted to commit against elected representatives. The fact that a coup was unsuccessful is not dispositive of the intent of the participants (any more than attempted murder isn’t a crime because it didn’t succeed). The shameless Trump Caucus now claims it was just a tourist adventure. Watch the films and you decide.
HANSON: What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?
RESPONSE: The Mueller “witch hunt” elected not to indict because it was not their charge. The impeachments had more than adequate grounds and the report did not exonerate the president (far from it, despite Mr. Barr’s misleading Cliff’s Notes version). The Republicans in the first trial in the Senate (the one that Mr. Hanson apparently uses as a model for the second trial) would not hear a single witness, staging a kangaroo court of a trial, notwithstanding their constitutional duties. Trump has done more than any president (and I include Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson) to justify his removal from office. He was unfit and dangerous. There was more than enough to convict but the Republicans didn’t even allow for a trial, much less a conviction. Another case of ignoring the law and traditions of which Mr. Hanson seems so concerned. As for the Hunter Biden laptop? Puh-lease…
HANSON: [W]hy in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws?...
RESPONSE: Mr. Hanson conflates several issues here. First, no one is talking about destroying the Electoral College. The claims of “packing the court” are based on the fact that the Democrats would like to “right the wrong” of the cynical Republican refusal to advise and consent to the Garland nomination in the Obama administration and Mr. McConnell’s complete flip when the shoe was on the other foot. The sophistry trying to justify this inconsistency holds no water and resulted in a two vote swing on the court.
As for admitting new states, that’s completely within Congress’s prerogative. There is no justification for denying the nearly 800,000 citizens of Washington, D.C. the right to Senate representation, any more than denying the citizens of Puerto Rico. Sure, the Republicans can claim it is “intended” to create more safe Democratic Senate seats, and they might even be right. But to resist this by denying the franchise is unconscionable. And hiding behind “founders’ intent” is a silly argument without justification. And by the way, Victor, the filibuster is not a constitutional principle…it was created to protect the slave state minority.
HANSON: Since when did regaining a House majority equate to impeaching a president on the eve of a reelection campaign, with his future and fiercest campaign opponents possibly as senators to be sitting in judgment on him in any Senate trial?
RESPONSE: The timing of an election ought not govern when a president should be tried for having committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Plus, in this political charade, Mr. Trump’s biggest supporters comprised a high percentage of the “jury.”
HANSON: What was common to all the “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” mythologies regarding meetings with Russians in Trump Tower, or mysterious “pings” of Trump tower machines automatically communicating with Russians, or the certain impending indictments of the Trump family?
RESPONSE: The bombshells are extraordinary and in any prior decade and with any reasonable Republican leadership would have been bombshells. There were meetings with Russians, leverage imposed on Ukraine, and successful manipulation of the Justice Department to the president’s purposes. As for impending indictments of the Trump family (and others in the Trump criminal enterprise), just wait.
HANSON: Since when do we go back over three decades to destroy a Supreme Court nominee, with rumors of teenage drinking and supposed sexual harassment, charges brought without independent witnesses and evidence, but with plenty of solid refutation?
RESPONSE: Well, they didn’t do that good of a job. He’s now sitting on the Court. But all candidates need to answer for their actions. Now answer why Merrick Garland didn’t even get a hearing.
HANSON: When did the 25th Amendment become a political tool to remove a president before a scheduled election? Since when does a Yale professor become a congressional deity for unprofessionally tele-diagnosing the president as mentally enfeebled—to the acclaim of Congress? Since when do the acting FBI head and the acting Attorney General spin mad ideas of entrapping the president with a wire to oust him as crazy?
Since when do former officials and public intellectuals write openly about the possibilities of a coup d’etat ? Or when was it honorable for an “anonymous” and supposedly “important” administration insider to brag publicly about deliberately obstructing and undermining a president, or for retired admirals to address the nation in op-eds raising the possibility of removing a president “the sooner, the better”? What exactly does “sooner” mean?
RESPONSE: The 25th Amendment was considered for exactly the purpose intended—to remove a physically or mentally unwell individual from office. Trump was the greatest danger to American democracy, the press, the justice department, free and fair elections, and mores in our lifetimes. He is mentally and emotionally unfit. The reports of Trump’s attempts to steal the election, send out troops, and stay in the White House are now accepted fact.
There is more bending of the facts and twisting of the Constitution in the balance of the article. But it’s all more of the same.
Have a great day,
Glenn
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