{"id":1316763,"date":"2019-11-15T23:32:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-16T06:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/reagan-column-the-impeachment-follies\/"},"modified":"2019-11-15T23:32:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-16T06:32:00","slug":"reagan-column-the-impeachment-follies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/reagan-column-the-impeachment-follies\/","title":{"rendered":"Reagan column: The impeachment follies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Spoiler alert.<\/p>\n

The Democrats\u2019 big dream of impeaching President Trump is going nowhere.<\/p>\n

Act I of the pathetic Trump impeachment hearings they are staging in the House for the next week was not just an obvious sham, it was a political bust that is going to backfire badly on the Democrats.<\/p>\n

There were no fireworks, no bombshells. Just boring-as-hell TV.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s bigger-than-Nixon crime, claim the Democrats and liberal media, was an alleged quid-pro-quo deal that he tried to pull off with Ukrainian President Zelensky \u2013 what the deluded Democrats now prefer to call an act of \u201cbribery\u201d \u2013 for his own political gain.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s fictitious deal involved withholding U.S military aid to Ukraine until Zelensky publicly investigated Hunter Biden, who became a highly paid board member of a corrupt Ukrainian gas company while his father Joe just happened to be in charge of the Obama administration\u2019s Ukraine policy.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter to the Democrats that the U.S. military aid to Ukraine was not withheld, and that the investigation of the son of Trump\u2019s potential 2020 political opponent by Zelensky\u2019s government never happened.<\/p>\n

Those important facts, like so many others, are irrelevant to serial liar Adam Schiff and his Housemates who are still desperately searching for an actual high crime to hang their fading Trump impeachment dream on.<\/p>\n

The Democrats\u2019 lead-off \u201cstar witnesses\u201d on Wednesday were two supposedly nonpartisan State Department diplomats stationed in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

CNN and most of the liberal media \u2013 who couldn\u2019t stop calling them patriots \u2013 think the testimony of these bureaucrats proved beyond a doubt that Trump was close to being a war criminal.<\/p>\n

But all we really got from the stuffy diplomatic duo were several hours of \u201che-said, they-said, I-heard-that, I-overhead-this\u201d hearsay and complaints that their boss, President Trump, was not conducting foreign policy the way they wanted him to.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d never know it from the liberal media\u2019s historical ignorance and biased coverage, but Trump isn\u2019t the first president to have differences with his own state department or use non-state department personnel to perform foreign policy work.<\/p>\n

State departments are staffed by career diplomats and bureaucrats who never leave, never seem to die and often end up working for many presidents of both parties.<\/p>\n

All state department employees have their own opinions about what our foreign policy should or should not be, but their job is not to form it or even like it.<\/p>\n

Their job is basically to shut up and implement the foreign policy of whatever president is elected.<\/p>\n

For good and bad, that\u2019s how it works and always has \u2013 the president is the chief executive and gets the final say when it comes to foreign policy.<\/p>\n

For example, in 1983, when my father was president, the Organization of American States asked him if he\u2019d send U.S. troops to Grenada to free the hostages there.<\/p>\n

My dad called a group of nine others into the Oval Office to discuss the idea. The Senate, the House, the intelligence community and the State Department were all represented.<\/p>\n

After discussing what the U.S. should do, if anything, the group decided to put it to a vote.<\/p>\n

As my father later told me, the vote was 7-3 not to intervene in Grenada. But 48 hours later what happened? We were in Grenada.<\/p>\n

One of the senators who had been at the meeting reached out the next day to my father.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. President,\u201d he said. \u201cWe voted 7-3 not to go into Grenada. You were part of the three, not part of the seven. You lost the vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, that\u2019s right,\u201d my dad said. \u201cBut I\u2019m the president of the United States and my one vote trumps your seven.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to foreign policy, the president \u2013 whoever he is -can always trump the vote of the secretary of state, theambassador to China or a third- or fourth-level bureaucrat.<\/p>\n

This week we saw two unelected career diplomats testifying against the president in an impeachment proceeding.<\/p>\n

Neither of them had any firsthand information about what President Trump said to President Zelensky.<\/p>\n

All they had were their opinions and complaints about the direction or back-channel operations of Trump\u2019s foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Sorry gents, your \u201cvotes\u201d don\u2019t count. What counts is winning presidential elections.<\/p>\n

And if the rest of the House\u2019s impeachment hearings are as embarrassing as Wednesday\u2019s, the Democrats will make sure they won\u2019t win the next one.<\/p>\n

Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spoiler alert. The Democrats\u2019 big dream of impeaching President Trump is going nowhere. Act I of the pathetic Trump impeachment hearings they are staging in the House for the next week was not just an obvious sham, it was a political bust that is going to backfire badly on the Democrats. There were no fireworks, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 13:06:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}