RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/lockdowns-are-killing-us

We are now nearly a year into the most self-destructive social experiment in the recorded history of human civilization.

On this day a year ago, we enjoyed the greatest economic expansion in our lifetimes. The poverty rate was the lowest in 60 years. The unemployment rate was the lowest in 50 years. Wage growth was the strongest in 40 years. The wage gap was narrowing, with blue-collar wages growing the fastest. Unemployment rates for minority groups and women were the lowest ever recorded.

And then, over the course of just a few catastrophic weeks, our government took a wrecking ball to it all. In the second quarter, GDP plunged by a third — the worst decline in productivity ever recorded. Unemployment exploded to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Tens of millions of people lost their jobs. Trillions of dollars of the nation’s wealth were squandered.

In the months since, our children have been robbed of a year of education. Millions of people have been forbidden from earning a living by their own government. Shopkeepers have seen their life’s work destroyed, and when in desperation they try to hold on, they are led away in handcuffs. Our most cherished rights to worship freely, to assemble peaceably, and not to be deprived of our lives, liberty, or property without due process of law have been destroyed.

COVID-19 didn’t cause this damage. Public officials did. They promised us it was for our own good, that it would save lives.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17071/impeachment-constitution-mcconnell

[I]t is CNN and the other media that failed to understand the distinction between defending the Constitution and defending the person.

To have voted to convict citizen Trump would have given Congress a roving commission to seek out and disqualify any potential candidate who ever held federal public office or who might run for office in the future. McConnell correctly rejected that open-ended power grab.

One does not have to agree with the substance with what President Trump did or said on January 6, in order to correctly conclude that the Senate had no jurisdiction over him once he left office, and that the statements he made — whatever one might think of them — are fully protected by the Constitution.

Back in the bad old days of McCarthyism, anyone who supported the constitutional rights of accused communists was deemed to support communism. That was wrong then, just as it is wrong today to believe that everyone who defends Trump against an unconstitutional impeachment necessarily supports his views or actions.

CNN and other left-wing media went on a rampage after Senator Mitch McConnell delivered his speech explaining why he voted to acquit Donald Trump, despite his belief that Trump had engaged in improper behavior. They accused McConnell of hypocrisy and inconsistency — arguing that if he believed Trump had done wrong, he was obligated to vote for conviction. But it is CNN and the other media that failed to understand the distinction between defending the Constitution and defending the person.

McConnell taught the American people a civics lesson by explaining that the Senate had no constitutional authority to place a former president on trial, even one who had been impeached while still serving in office. In doing so, he echoed a constitutional argument I have been making from the very beginning of this unconstitutional power grab by the Democrat-controlled Congress. The language of the constitution is clear:

“The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/14/the-wages-of-trump-hatred/

Over the last five years, the pathology of Trump Derangement Syndrome has been widely described. It was more than a chronic disease and was often characterized by an array of rapidly advancing symptoms of deterioration in reasoning, emotional stability, and personal ethics. 

More practically, often the deranged Trump hater found in his odium a cover for all sorts of prior personal intemperance and careerist dissipation. Loudly hating Trump became a passport for excess, private and public, and a sort of preemptive insurance that excused or rather greenlighted smears, slander, and personal misdeeds.

The Anti-Lincoln Project

For over a year, the theme of the NeverTrump Lincoln Project was the organizers’ professed superior morality. They had it; most others on the Right did not. Only a select heroic few of the Republican Party would dare to break ranks to end the danger to the country posed by a supposedly morally inferior Donald Trump. 

Forget Trump’s economic, domestic, cultural, and foreign policy record that had belied critics by its successes—despite historic opposition, investigation, denigration, and obstruction. No matter. Character was king. Again, the Lincoln Project had it; Trump followers did not. 

The Lincoln Project’s Band of Brothers—initially four financially strapped, embittered middle-aged white male Washington insiders—lectured the country that those few, those happy few, that band of brothers would fight for us. If only they were adequately funded, they could save us from the moral turpitude of four more years of Trump. 

Their ostensible promise to the Left was that they would hold down their end of the bargain by maintaining the 10-12 percent of Republicans who did not vote for Trump in 2016. In truth, they may have had nothing to do with preserving a bare six percent of Republicans who would again vote against Trump. That was a modest aim, but apparently, every bit of Trump derangement was fundable. Or as the departing, now mansion-buying Steve Schmidt put it, “I really didn’t give a sh-t how many Republicans were voting for Trump or not.”

If one were to believe all the sermonizing of these latter-day Elmer Gantrys, then their inherent paradoxes, hypocrisies, and selfish agendas might magically disappear.