RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/the_democrats_are_imploding.html

It’s too soon to predict that the Democrats will go the way of the Whigs, but the oldest political party in the world is tripping over its own doctrines; making a public spectacle of its inability to coherently sponsor debates; riven by ideological fissures that seem to be widening; driving away two bedrock constituencies, the white working class and black voters; and hitching itself to a doomed impeachment effort that could cost it dearly next November.

It’s a great time to be alive if you are a Republican!

Consider the forthcoming presidential debates.

Next Thursday’s scheduled debate is being boycotted by all its candidates because the food service provider at the host institution, Loyola Marymount University — itself a second choice venue after UCLA was chosen and rejected because of a strike there — is experiencing a strike, and the candidates refuse to cross a picket line.  DNC chair Tom Perez, a former secretary of labor, is leaning hard on the parties to the strike to settle their differences (do you suspect there may be some quid pro quo promises?), so the squabble between the two constituencies of the Democrats, higher education and left wing labor unions, can end.

But solving that issue is child’s play compared to the “diversity” issue facing the debate scheduled for next February:

Nine Democratic presidential candidates have called on the Democratic National Committee to relax its debate standards next year, allowing some lower-polling rivals onto the stage.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/474887-democrats-repeat-failed-history-with-mad-dash-to-impeach-donald-trump

“Let them impeach and be damned.” Those words could have easily come from Donald Trump, as the House moves this week to impeach him. They were, however, the words of another president who not only shares some striking similarities to Trump but who went through an impeachment with chilling parallels to the current proceedings. The impeachment of Trump is not just history repeating itself but repeating itself with a vengeance.

The closest of the three prior presidential impeachment cases to the House effort today is the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson. This is certainly not a comparison that Democrats should relish. The Johnson case has long been widely regarded as the very prototype of an abusive impeachment. As in the case of Trump, calls to impeach Johnson began almost as soon as he took office. A southerner who ascended to power after the Civil War as a result of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson was called the “accidental president” and his legitimacy was never accepted by critics. Representative John Farnsworth of Illinois called Johnson an “ungrateful, despicable, besotted, traitorous man.”

Johnson opposed much of the reconstruction plan Lincoln had for the defeated south and was criticized for fueling racial divisions. He was widely viewed as an alcoholic and racist liar who opposed full citizenship for freed slaves. Ridiculed for not being able to spell, Johnson responded, “It is a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” Sound familiar? The “Radical Republicans” in Congress started to lay a trap a year before impeachment. They were aware that Johnson wanted their ally, War Secretary Edwin Stanton, out of his cabinet, so they then decided to pass an unconstitutional law that made his firing a crime.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/17/the_blues_at_st_james_comey

When your best explanation for humiliating failures is that you were incompetent, not criminal, you are in trouble. When your defense is that underlings are to blame, you can expect them to bite back. That’s the situation facing James Comey, former FBI director. His current story matches Richard Nixon’s lame admission: “mistakes were made.”

Not that Comey made those mistakes himself, mind you. Mere sloppiness by others, he says. That’s his new story. His old one was that the FBI did everything by the book and that his critics were dishonest partisan hacks. His self-righteous stance went down the garbage disposal last week when Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his devastating report and then told a Senate committee that Comey was wrong when he said the report vindicated him and the bureau.

Comey is still drifting down that river in Egypt, denying he failed in his basic duties. Yet he signed surveillance warrants as “truthful and verified” when he knew (or should have known) they were neither. He and senior officials at the Department of Justice used the same misinformation four times to spy on Carter Page, claiming, without evidence, that Page might be a Russian agent.

Caught in these lies, Comey is reluctantly admitting that he relied on the FBI’s standard procedures for gaining warrants and that underlings may have been careless. They may well have been, but so was Comey. Moreover, it was the director himself who gutted the safeguards designed to prevent overzealous agents from deceiving the court.