My radio colleague John Batchelor has pegged U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-NY) as “the Pathfinder.” The reason being that, as ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff has been most vocal and visible in trying to divine the truth behind the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia—and, in a fortuitous confluence of circumstances for Schiff, find a path to taking Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.
Whether the truth will out and the Pathfinder will oust Feinstein remains to be seen, as does any evidence the Pathfinder insinuates exists to prove the Trump-Putin collusion allegation.
Thanks to the tender mercies of his friends in the media elite, Schiff’s failure to produce any shred of evidence regarding collusion—let alone a crime—has not proven problematic for the Pathfinder. Obviously, the media elite dislikes the president and will brook no facts—or the absence thereof—from getting in the way of a good smearing. The Pathfinder facilitates this mutually advantageous, tawdry political theater by ascribing the “appearance” of the most insidious motivations and actions to President Trump and his campaign in relation to Putin’s Russia; then artfully dodging his lack of evidence with the limp two-step, “I’d love to tell you more, but it’s classified.”
And how the Left-wing applauds and approves! For the media elite, ratings, circulation and “clicks” soar; and the Pathfinder treks ever closer to his coveted senate seat. Yes, their off-Broadway/on-Beltway production of “Trump Done It (Whatever It Was)?” is the smash hit of the post-Obama season.
But what of the country’s sane center praying its president didn’t commit treason by colluding with a foreign power to attain his office? Yes, they realize that sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire. But they also know that when dealing with the Left, oft times where there’s smoke there’s reefer.
Thus, fair minded citizens respectfully ask for evidence before impeaching a president for “high crimes and misdemeanors” and withhold their judgement of the Pathfinder and media elite’s anti-Trump production, despite the Pathfinder and the media elite’s self-bestowed rave reviews.
In sum, in terms of “Russia-gate”, the disconnect between the nonpartisan public and the Pathfinder and his media cohorts is this: the former don’t want to believe it; the latter need to believe it. Or as one character memorably put it in Werner Herzog’s “Incident at Loch Ness,” when asked if the monster was real: “They say show me the evidence. I say show me the non-evidence.”
Certain President Trump is a monster capable of monstrous deeds, for months Pathfinder Schiff has been parading across the media stage dolloping out his Russia-gate non-evidence to Democrats howling for more. Yet, one of the things nonpartisan Americans find off-putting about politics is how normal rules of reason are abrogated for political gain. Perhaps then, to accommodate their wish to find our own path the truth about Russia-gate, let us depoliticize the discourse in order to objectively assess the veracity of Pathfinder Schiff’s schtick.
But how? One can take a contested debate between two apolitical camps, such as scientists and cryptozoologists, and endeavor to settle it to one’s satisfaction. Thus, what if Pathfinder Schiff was alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin but, instead, was alleging the existence of the chupacabra—the bloodsucking critter alleged to feast upon livestock in the Americas? Hmm…
On the March 5, 2017 episode of “Meet the Press” came this statement from…
Former National Security Advisor James “The” Clapper: “We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say ‘our,’ that’s NSA, FBI, and CIA, with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had any reflection of the chupacabra. There was no evidence of the chupacabra included in our report.”
Moderator: “I understand, but does it exist?”
“The” Clapper: “Not to my knowledge.”