Hoo Boy: Are Democrats Planning to Move Forward With Impeachment, Regardless of What Mueller Finds?

By Guy Benson

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For months and months, we’ve been told the following — and not without good reason: (1)The House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation is hopelessly partisan and beset with intense infighting.

(2) The Senate panel’s parallel probe has been much more professionally handled, with sober bipartisan leadership, but its resources and powers are incomplete, so its ‘no collusion‘ findings cannot be considered conclusive. (3) What really matters are the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team.  Mueller is so important, in fact, that there has been constant hand-wringing about his investigation being canceled or disrupted by Trump.  But now that it’s reportedly almost Mueller Time, there appears to be a concerted effort in anti-Trump circles to redefine the battlefield.  No matter what Mueller’s verdict may be on Russian ‘collusion,’ we’re increasingly told, Trump is already guilty:CAP

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That first tweet is a CNN analyst preparing his audience for a potential letdown, preemptively pivoting to focusing on already-known facts if Mueller doesn’t drop new bombshells.  The second is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member (who is slowly backing away from his call for his state’s governor to resign) not exactly contradicting Chairman Burr, but basically arguing, “what we already know is bad enough.”  Perhaps most importantly, the new leader of the House committee that would instigate the impeachment process against the president went on television over the weekend and declared that he’s seen enough to conclude that its “very clear” the president has committed an impeachable crime:

Amid last week’s Michael Cohen hearings, a number of liberalsjournalists, and Republicans observed that the proceedings felt like the first step toward removing Trump from office.  Byron York argues that Democrats have now officially tipped their hand:

Think what you will about the reasons — calling an investigation a “witch hunt” is obstruction of justice? — but Nadler sounded less like a man weighing the evidence than a man who has has made up his mind.Given that, Nadler’s ABC interview led to a question: President Nixon was threatened with impeachment for obstruction of justice. President Clinton was impeached for obstruction of justice. Why is Nadler, who heads the committee in the House that originates articles of impeachment, not moving forward with impeaching President Trump right now? … Nadler’s talk with ABC was the clearest indication yet that Democrats have decided to impeach Trump and are now simply doing the legwork involved in making that happen. And that means the debate among House Democrats will be a tactical one — what is the best time and way to go forward — rather than a more fundamental discussion of whether the president should be impeached…

Other House Democrats are sending similar messages. “There is abundant evidence of collusion,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said on CBS Sunday…So now the Democratic plan is coming into sharper relief. The impeachment decision has been made. Various committee chairs are moving forward in gathering and organizing the formal justification for removing the president. The timing decision is still up in the air, as is an overarching communications plan — selling impeachment to the American public, or more specifically those Americans who don’t already support impeachment…whatever the stated rationale, impeachment is on.

The goalposts are moving before our very eyes.  But Allahpundit seems to agree that the Axios-floated grand strategy from House Democrats is not to pull the trigger on the I-word over the next year-plus, but rather to execute a slow-bleed of politically-damaging pain over that time span. The idea would be to cripple and overwhelm Trump’s presidency all the way up to election day, then let the voters oust him from office. “The smart play is to do what they’re doing, launching an open-ended investigation that will dig up plenty of dirt on Trump and grind on to Election Day next year,” he writes. “Instead of passing articles of impeachment and seeing them die in the Senate, they’re probably going to produce a Democratic counterpart to the Mueller report, laying out everything they find in gory detail and publishing it next summer so that the Democratic nominee and the media have a treasure trove of oppo to use against Trump.” If I were a betting man, that would be my wager, too. I’ll leave you with Trump-skeptical conservative writer David French attacking the Steele Dossier (the credibility of which was further eroded by Cohen’s testimony):

Gowdy did, in fact, make this point, and Russia’s 2016 electoral interference undoubtedly deserved very serious scrutiny. But a shady and unverified Clinton/DNC oppo research scheme serving as a primary driver of key elements of the investigation is a very bad look — and it almost certainly fed a pernicious spiral of mutual mistrust between Trumpworld and the DOJ that has convinced people on each side that the other is dangerous and must be stopped.  The toxicity in American politics right now is palpable and worrisome.  By the way, not all Democrats agree that Nadler’s sprawling, open-ended investigation is a smart move:

UPDATE – Adam Schiff has apparently decided that Mueller’s verdict on collusion won’t be good enough. This is absurd:

American Civil War 2: US media will have only itself to blame if all hell breaks loose

By Robert Bridge

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For the first time in years, the drumbeat of civil war has become audible across the United States. The nation looks destined to repeat history thanks to a media that is no longer able to objectively perform its job.

The predominantly left-leaning US media has just entered its third consecutive year of open warfare against President Donald Trump. This non-stop assault risks aggravating political passions to the point where ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ snowballs into something completely beyond our ability to control. Like full-blown Civil War.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post, one of most prominent serial producers of partisan agitation, publishedan article entitled, ‘In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil War’. The piece, which deftly places Democrats above the fray, opens with the following whiff of grapeshot:

“With the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up … there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war,” the Bezos-owned paper forewarned.

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With a level of audacity and self-righteousness that has become a trademark of the Left, not once did the article float the possibility that just maybe the mainstream media is complicit in the ongoing deterioration of political discourse, or that the Democrats are just as much to blame as the Republicans for the political fallout that now presents a grave risk to the Republic.

As many knowledgeable Americans will openly admit, battle lines have been drawn across the political and cultural frontier. This division is perhaps most conspicuous on social media, where friends and family who disagree with our political worldview get the ‘nuke option’ and are effortlessly vanquished (‘unfriended’) with the push of a button. This is a worrying development. The real danger will come when Americans from both sides of the political divide stop talking and start erecting electronic barriers around their political belief systems. Not even family members are spared from the tumult; just because people share the same bloodline does not automatically mean they share the same political views. America, though still green behind the ears, may understand that fact better than many other countries.

The United States has taken part in its fair share of military conflicts over the years, but its deadliest war to date has been the one that pitted Americans against each other. The so-called Civil War (1861-1865), waged between the North and South over the question of Southern secession from the Union, resulted in the death of some 620,000 soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies (and possibly as high as 850,000, according to other estimates).

Put another way, more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of the country’s other conflicts combined. For a country that has been at war for much of its existence that is a sobering fact.

With that historical footnote in mind, the mainstream media should better appreciate its responsibility for presenting an objective and balanced depiction of modern events. Yet nothing today would suggest that is the case. One need only look at the way it has blotched recent politically charged events – like the Covington High School and Jussie Smollett scandals, not to mention the ‘Russia collusion’ hoax – to say that something is seriously out of whack inside of the Fourth Estate. The muzzled mainstream media has simply lost its mind over Donald Trump and can no longer perform its duties with any discernible amount of objectivity.

Indeed, the US leader continues to serve as a piñata for the agenda-driven media, which takes daily swings at him and his administration – and despite the fact that his popularity remains very high among voters. Only on the fringes of the media world, in the far away land of Fox News and Breitbart, will the reader find level-headed reports on the American president. This is not to suggest, of course, that Trump is beyond criticism. Not at all. There is a lot not to like about the 45th president. At the same time, however, to assume that Trump and his administration is the root of all evil, as the media would lead us to believe, is not only ridiculous, it is outright dangerous.

With no loss of irony, a good example of the media bias against Trump can be found in the very Post article that frets over the outbreak of another Civil War. While everyone knows that it takes two to tango, you would never guess that by reading this piece. In the sheltered world of the Liberal-dominated media, ‘tango’ is a solo event where the political right is portrayed as engaged in a dance with itself, while the political left watches – innocuously, of course – from the sidelines.

Michael Cohen, for example, Trump’s turncoat personal lawyer who committed perjury by lying to Congress, was quoted high in the article as saying“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Now that is certainly rich. Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Washington has been consumed by the Mueller investigation, and amid mindless chatter that Trump is an illegitimate president slated for impeachment. In other words, the last thing that can be said about the Democrats is that they facilitated a “peaceful transition of power.” In fact, they have hobbled Trump and his administration ever since he entered the Oval Office.

Another pro-Liberal voice dragged into the Civil War story was Robert Reich, who served on Barack Obama‘s economic transition advisory board. The Post linked to an article Reich wrote last year where he posited the fictional scenario where an impeachment resolution against the president is enacted, thus kicking off mass civil strife on the direct command of dear leader.

“Trump claims it’s the work of the ‘deep state’”, according to Reich’s febrile imagination. “Sean Hannity of Fox News demands that every honest patriot take to the streets. Right-wing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Mr. Trump commands the armed forces to side with the ‘patriots.’”

“The way Mr. Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest, Reich continued. “That’s how low he’s taken us.”

Now that is some world-class chutzpah. In fact, it is the same self-righteous, ingratiating tone that weaves itself throughout the Post article. In keeping with the mainstream media’s non-stop narrative, Trump and the Republicans are blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country, while the Democrats come off as little angels trying to piece the fractured country back together.

As already mentioned, Donald Trump is certainly not above criticism. Far from it. But for the mainstream media to place all of the blame for the current political malaise at the Republican’s door is about as responsible as lighting up a cigarette inside of a Chinese fireworks factory. The US media has an unmistakable agenda, and that is to make damn sure Trump is not reelected to another term in 2020. To that end, it has shown a devious willingness to betray all journalistic ethics and standards, which has the effect of increasing the political temperature to boiling point. It then points the finger of blame at the political right for the accumulated pile of pent-up tensions, which are ready to ignite at the first spark.

If the mainstream media continues to slavishly serve just one political master over another, it will only have itself to blame for what comes next. Its prejudiced and agenda-based reporting is a disgrace and really nothing short of a bona fide national security threat.

@Robert_Bridge

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Schumer says ‘enough with the memes’ in attack on Trump, gets bombarded by sea of memes

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US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer inadvertently activated the meme-generating powers of President Donald Trump‘s supporters after criticizing his handling of the government shutdown on Twitter.

“Enough with the memes. Just quit hurting innocent people and re-open the government,” Schumer tweeted on Saturday in response to a ‘Game of Thrones’-inspired meme that Trump had tweeted earlier to champion his border security fence project.

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Trump tweeted a photo showing a barrier of steel slats below an image of his frowning face. The photo was captioned “The Wall is Coming,” channeling the famous “Winter is Coming” motto from the popular HBO series.

READ MORE: ‘Wall is Coming’: Trump raises stakes with another Game of Thrones meme

It was not the first time that Trump altered the Stark House slogan to bolster his agenda. Back when he reintroduced sanctions against Iran in November, the president tweeted a photo with “Sanctions are Coming. November 5” transposed over his image.

The president’s clumsy meme-making was entirely lost on Schumer, who chided Trump for indulging in picture-editing instead of working to reopen the government, now in its third week of shutdown.

The Twittersphere’s response was instantaneous: Schumer’s comments were flooded with dozens of memes.

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The unproven ‘Russia collusion’ allegations were also brought up.

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The anti-Trump resistance crowd entered the meme battle with a few sorties of their own, dragging the Mueller investigation, the “blue wave,” and impeachment calls into the snowballing thread.

 

 

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