RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oh no! The walls are closing in again on Trump! We’ve reached a ‘tipping point.’ This time, finally, at last, we have the fatal ‘bombshell’ that will destroy him. The testimony of Bill Taylor, Deep State apparatchik and acting Ambassador to Ukraine, has given ‘devastating‘, ‘explosive’ testimony to Adam Schiff. They’ve certainly got Trump this time. An establishment lifer with deep ties to Burisma, the corrupt energy company that was so generous to Hunter Biden, has said that Trump insisted on a quid in the form of probing cokehead Hunter and his dad, Joe, in exchange for the quo of $400 million in military aid.

Or was pelf the quid and the investigation of the Joe and Hunter show the quo? Our experts are working on untangling that.

How do we know about this devastating quid pro quo-ness? Schiff’s press outlets, from CNN to The Hill, have said so. No, you cannot examine the testimony, silly. It took place behind closed doors. For the most part, the lynching — er, the hearing — even excluded Republican lawmakers. Moreover, the bits that GOP congressmen were allowed to witness are covered (or covered up) in a shroud of ‘non-disclosure’. Still, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did mention that in a mere ‘‘90 seconds’ Rep. John Ratcliffe ‘destroy[ed] Taylor’s whole argument.’ Quoth McCarthy: ‘Adam Schiff won’t let us talk about what happened.’ But the bottom line is: ‘There is no quid pro quo…the one thing that you find out in this process is all this information is just like that whistleblower…everything is second-, third-, and fourth-hand information.’

Of course, we all know now that ‘second-, third-, and fourth-hand information’ is just the underhanded sort of hand-me-down ‘evidence’ that the Dems like to parade before a weary public in order to justify their demand for Trump’s head. Remember Christopher Steele? Just like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, it’s ‘Sentence first — verdict afterwards.’

It’s pathetic, isn’t it? The first time around, the anti-Trump fraternity at least had the solemn imprimatur of Special Counsel Robert Mueller with the weight of officialdom and all the echoes of Watergate that that process brought with it.

But Mueller’s investigation ended not with a bang of condemnation but exoneration and a senile whimper. Now we have moved the show off shore and handed the leading roles to time-serving bureaucrats who cite things that someone said to someone who overheard someone else complaining darkly about somebody asking for quiddity in exchange for — well, whatever.

The real motor of Schiff’s Ukraine farce is not to be found in anything that happened in that far off land of DNC computer servers and Democrat-friendly cyber security companies. No, the real motor is the 100 percent domestically sourced reality that is captured by this headline: ‘Trump’s 2016 online advantages persist and grow ahead of 2020‘. That mournful reality is bearing in upon the Deep State apparatus. Rep. Al Green cuts to the chase: ‘I’m concerned,’ he said in a moment of candor (if also shaky diction), ‘if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.’

That’s right, Al. The Democrats and their Deep State enablers may feel that the presidency, indeed, the whole engine of government, is properly their province and theirs alone. But the people felt differently in 2016. And by the look of things — those things embracing the economy, the employment numbers, wages, the regulatory environment, the return of manufacturing to the US, general morale, not to mention the judiciary, the military, and our Southern border — the people may do it again in 2020.

The Dems know that there is a vanishingly small, indeed a nugatory chance that that the Senate would vote to remove Trump. But they hope that talk of impeachment will buzz about his head like a cloud of horse flies, discommoding, distracting, disconcerting him. Perhaps it will also inspire, on the ‘where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire’ principle, some people to revisit their support for the president.

My own suspicion is that this is a doomed and desperate ploy, a charade intended to buy time and distract from the troubling reality of Trump’s extraordinary success.

There is also the issue of the accelerating pace of Attorney General Barr’s investigations. I predict that we’ll see a spate of indictments, and that we’ll see them soon. Officials like Bill Taylor will pity those whose felonious actions are exposed. Perhaps they will at the same time reflect on Aristotle’s description of pity in The Poetics. Pity, says Aristotle, is ‘a feeling of pain caused by a painful or destructive evil that befalls one who does not deserve it, and that might well befall us or one of our friends, and, moreover, to befall us soon.’

The only difference in this real-world exercise revolves around the question of just desserts. A distinguished jurist of my acquaintance likes to caution that courts should be in the business of dispensing not poetic but prosaic justice. Quite right. But once the Band-Aid of secrecy, evasion, equivocation, and skulduggery is torn off this festering sore, we will discover a teeming, pus-filled infection that calls out for the catharsis of legal action. Hold on to your seats.