btrollinger@summitdaily.com
“(T)he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” — Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election
And there we are, ladies and gentlemen. All those panting heads on CNN and MSNBC; all those Madame Defarge wannabes in the press waving gibbets at the slightest new inuendo and crying for the President’s head on a pike; all the social media mavens squealing that Donald Trump was Putin’s puppet; and yes – all the deranged Democrats howling that President Trump’s treasonous betrayal was as plain as the nose on one’s face; they all now have to face the fact that the party is over. They were completely, utterly, vigorously and repeatedly wrong. The man they idolized for almost two years when they thought he would bring the President down has told them all so.
“I’m sorry, I was wrong” would be nice. “I was misled” might even do it a pinch. But don’t hold your breath. So great is the Democrats’ unreasoning hatred for Donald Trump that it is already moving them to invent new conspiracies and new crimes, and demand new investigations to pursue these new mirages which, being mirages, will always remain tantalizingly just out of reach. With one important difference.
Henceforth, anyone spouting nonsense about the President’s “collusion” with Russians being behind Hillary Clinton’s drubbing in 2016 is either unmoored from reality or a slanderer – an author of libel if writing such falsehoods. Knowing the result of the Mueller report, one cannot now continue to bleat that President Trump conspired with Russia to fix the Presidential election without malice attaching. I’m looking at you, Adam Schiff, with your “lots of evidence” of said conspiracy.
For almost two years the American people have been treated to a never-ending litany of inventions about President Trump’s treason; about his family’s connivance with his betrayals; about the mountains of evidence gathered by Mueller against him and about the nefarious dealings of his cronies like Michael Flynn, now awaiting sentence for his crimes, discovered by Saint Robert the Righteous. Now the entire fabrication has exploded into flames like the reeking pile of compost it always was.
For more than two years, the intelligence apparatus of the United States government was mobilized not against a foreign power but against the leader of a major political party, apparently because a small band of high-level partisan bureaucrats couldn’t abide the thought of his winning. So they applied all the tools and tricks at their disposal, from surveillance obtained via secret warrants from secret courts to entrapment to the crudest of threats and heavy-handed pressure – all to no avail. They searched to the tune of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, thousands of warrants, hundreds of interviews with hundreds of subjects in fruitless pursuit of proofs that President Trump and his henchmen were conspiring with Vladimir Putin to undermine America’s faith in the democratic process. They found none, because they were looking in the wrong direction.
In fact it was they, with their standover tactics, their dawn crash-in raids, their process-crime prosecutions, who were eroding Americans’ faith in their institutions. What we have witnessed for the past 22 months and more is nothing short of an attempted coup. The miserable attempts we are now seeing to perpetuate this dangerous travesty only serve to make its original intent — to destroy President Trump by any means necessary — clearer. They have the added effect of making Putin’s smile broader as he contemplates the work of those who couldn’t have done more to tear the fabric of this country apart had they actually been on his payroll.
Their works of wrecking would have been impossible without their steno pool in the national media. From Mika Brzezinski to Don Lemmon to Rachel Maddow and their print and internet clones, they daily poured fuel on this conflagration, their infernal rage against the president doing terrible damage to the country and to their own image. One is reminded of Captain Ahab’s last words: “From Hell’s heart I strike at thee, for hate’s sake…” The objectivity of most American media outlets will not be trusted a long while to come.
Finally there are Putin’s true allies, those who have done his will unbidden because they seek personal advantage from it. They are those who began this monstrous lie; those who labored to breathe life into it, and those who sustained it. Those who now want to continue it whatever the cost, whatever the damage, because they see political hay to be made in division, hatred and malice. Who knows? Perhaps there will be another investigation now, to see what laws they broke, and to bring them to book for it.
Don’t hold your breath.
Morgan Liddick writers a weekly column for the Summit Daily News.