RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am not thinking of that scene at the beginning of Dickens’s novel where Mr Blotton says he regards Mr Pickwick as a ‘humbug’. That was nice, especially when Mr Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or ‘common sense’. No, no responded Mr Blotton, he had ‘merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view’. Well, that’s all right then, rejoined Mr Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club.

There is a lesson in there somewhere for the Democrats, but when it comes to their virulent case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, more pertinent is the episode describing the case of Bardell v. Pickwick. The widow Bardell, ‘fat, fair, and forty’, is Mr Pickwick’s landlady. She willfully misconstrues some innocuous comments he makes. Item: ‘Dear Mrs. B., Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.’ Out such gossamer musing she constructs a proposal of marriage and, when no proposal is forthcoming sues Pickwick for breach of promise. Much hilarity, and not inconsiderable inconvenience, ensues, but it all comes right in the end, at least for Mr Pickwick.

It’s not so great for Mrs Bardell, but what happens to her is nothing like what is about to happen to the Democrats. Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi announced that the House was opening a ‘formal’ impeachment inquiry. Why? Because the president had a conversation with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in July. President Trump congratulated Zelensky on his recent victory and expressed the wish that the US and Ukraine would work together in a spirit of friendship. He noted that the US had an ongoing inquiry into Ukrainian-based efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election and he asked Zelensky to talk to Attorney General Barr. ‘There are a lot of things that went on,’ Trump said, and ‘I would like you to get to the bottom of it.’ For his part, Zelensky expressed the hope that Rudy Giuliani would be available to help them with the inquiry. Trump is enthusiastic about that idea and notes that ‘there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.’

The Democrats, worried like Mrs Bardell about being disappointed, are pretending to see all manner of nefarious things in that innocuous comment. Read the transcript of the call. It’s all chops and tomato sauce. The president is completely, 100 percent right. Peter Schweitzer has detailed cokehead Hunter Biden’s corrupt activities, poaching on his father’s authority as vice president to line his pockets, not only in Ukraine but also in China, where dear old dad cozied up to officials in Beijing and, presto, Hunter gets a $1 billion contract for his green as green grass private equity firm 10 days later.

Joe Biden now claims to be shocked, shocked at this news, but why? Just a year ago he was bragging about forcing a previous Ukrainian president to fire a prosecutor that was investigating a natural gas company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. ‘I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.’

All of this has been part of the public record. In Andrew McCarthy’s masterly Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, we read that

‘Vice President Joe Biden pressured [former Ukrainian president] Poroshenko into firing Viktor Shokin, one of his top prosecutors. Shokin just happened to be investigating a natural gas company called Burisma, which just happened to have placed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, on its board of directors. While the Veep pushed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to grant Ukraine a $17.5 billion loan package, Burisma lavishly compensated Hunter’s law firm, to the tune of more than $3 million over an 18-month span. (A lot of money, but chump change compared to the Chinese government’s $1.5 billion infusion in a joint investment fund with Hunter Biden while Vice President Biden, administration point man on China issues, turned a blind eye to Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea.)’

All you need to do is read the transcript and compare its anodyne narrative to the mad impeachment hysteria that has addled the brains of the anti-Trump sorority in the Democratic party and their megaphones in the so-called ‘mainstream media’. The utter absurdity of the situation was dramatized this afternoon when Presidents Trump and Zelensky held a brief impromptu press conference. The ‘reporters’ kept trying to get their claws into the two men, but they were scratching against glass. Zelensky, obviously a clever and amusing man, clearly could not believe the inanities he was hearing, and Trump underscored the Bidens’ bad behavior, Hillary Clinton’s corruption, and the takeover of the Democratic party (and the soul of Nancy Pelosi) by the radical left.

The Democrats’ impeachment hysteria will probably hurt the country. It will not succeed in damaging Donald Trump’s chances in 2020, much less in removing him from office. It will, however, destroy Joe Biden and further undermine the credibility — assuming that is possible — of a Democratic party that is warped beyond recognition by its untrammeled thirst for power and unhinged hatred of the duly elected president of the United States.