http://Lost Innocence? Let’s not misread the moment. Tue Dec 15, 2020 Bruce Bawer
It used to be that every time something big and unpleasant happened to America – Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the JFK assassination, Watergate, 9/11 – there would ensue a spate of articles about how America had finally lost its innocence. This year’s apparently successful election fraud, too, feels like one of those occasions.
To be sure, the fraud was not a stand-alone event but the culmination of several years of Democratic chicanery, beginning with the effort to destroy Trump’s campaign and continuing with the attempt to bring down his presidency. During these years, one public figure after another was held up to us as a hero and then shown to be yet another Big State sewer rat.
So fast-moving have events been during the age of Trump that it can be hard to keep track of all the betrayals – some of which, though just a couple of years old, feel as if they took place in the distant past. Remember the gut punch that was Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe? Remember when you thought Jim Comey was a good guy who’d pull back the curtain on the Clinton crime family and bring Hillary to justice? Remember being assured by people you trusted that Bill Barr and John Durham would get to the bottom of the Russia hoax? The other day, when Texas AG Ken Paxton took his election-fraud case against four other states to the Supreme Court, were you among those who expected the three Trump appointees to join Alito and Thomas in stopping the steal?
Yes, the Trump administration has yielded one triumph after another. But living through it has also meant experiencing one crushing disappointment after another. It’s been hard not to feel that the swamp was too deep even for Trump to drain, and that, by dreaming otherwise, we were being hopelessly naïve.
For heaven’s sake, not only did Barr, after promising to deliver a long-overdue reckoning, drag his heels on the Russia probe; it now turns out that during the entire campaign season he’s known about investigations into the Biden clan that, if made public, would almost certainly have reduced voter support for Joe to a point that would’ve made the election steal impossible.