Understanding the Impeachment Charade

By Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel
https://townhall.com/columnists/tuckercarlsonandneilpatel/2019/09/27/understanding-the-impeachment-charade-n2553796
September 27, 2019



Washington scandals are moving at a record pace. It was only a week ago that The New York Times launched its unfair hit piece on Brett Kavanaugh. This is the Trump-era news cycle. Scandals that used to go on for months now seem to end in hours. Nothing illustrates this better than the bizarre Ukraine story we're all living through. A week ago, no one had even heard of it. Then we were on the brink of impeachment because of it, and now it seems it may be over already.

The same angry news anchors who brought you Stormy Daniels and the Russia hoax now want you to know Big Orange's days in the White House are over. Why? Because Donald Trump, they say, threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine did something bad to Joe Biden and his family. Supposedly, Trump was finished.

Once again, the mob turned out to be wrong. The administration released a transcript of the president's phone call with the Ukrainian head of state, and it says none of the things the news anchors claimed it would. Read it for yourself. It's online. Try to find the extortion in there. There isn't any. Trump never even mentions military aid. There's certainly something unseemly about a president asking a foreign government to investigate an American citizen, but it's not illegal, and it's not all that different from three Democratic senators' writing a letter to Ukraine just last year demanding investigations into Trump.

Now that the call turns out to be nothing like what the media told us it would be, some on the left have started a conspiracy theory that the transcript can't be real; it must be doctored. These conspiracies aren't confined to weird corners of the internet. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff have already questioned the trustworthiness of the transcript, despite the fact that there's no evidence of wrongdoing. Numerous career national security officials -- many not fans of our president -- have access to the original call and would have to be in on any conspiracy.

What's driving all this insanity? Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, has been more honest about it than most. Green admitted it straight up: "I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get reelected."

Lots of Democrats, including many of today's party leaders, stood up when Bill Clinton was impeached to give impassioned speeches about the perils of taking away the American people's choice. Here's today's impeachment ringleader, Rep. Jerry Nadler, in 1998:

"The impeachment of a president is an undoing of a national election. And one of the reasons we all feel so angry about what they are doing is that they are ripping asunder our votes. They are telling us that our votes don't count."

And here's Nancy Pelosi in 1998 on the hatred behind the Clinton impeachment push:

"Today, the Republican majority is not judging the president with fairness but impeaching him with a vengeance ... We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer."

Sadly, Nadler and Pelosi were right in 1998. Republicans should not have impeached Clinton, and they paid the price. Democrats today hate Trump. It's not about justice or truth. What they care about is winning the 2020 presidential election. Democratic leaders have decided that impeaching Trump is essential if they're going to win next year. So they're staking everything on this bizarre, flimsy scandal that the rest of us can barely understand.

Personal attacks on Trump have proven ineffective. If calling him a racist or a traitor actually worked, Hillary Clinton would be running for reelection right about now. That's not going to work. If you want to beat Trump, make a case on the issues. He won on the issues. So make a countercase. But the geniuses can't figure that out.

In the end, the loser in this impeachment nonsense is likely to be Biden, who, you will recall, is the apparent front-runner. He's supposed to be the safe choice, the guy who's going to reenergize the Obama coalition and win back the White House. Yet Democrats have now in effect demanded that we spend the next six months talking about Biden and his son's alleged corruption. That's what's at the core of this Ukraine story.

The issues aren't really complicated. Why in the world would a Ukrainian company pay Hunter Biden $50,000 a month? We still haven't heard an answer. If we're talking about Ukraine and impeachment, we're talking about Biden's alleged corruption. That can't help his campaign for president. In fact, it's likely to tank it. It looks like sabotage, really. They must have gamed this up. Or maybe Democrats have just become so obsessed with destroying Trump that they're accidentally destroying themselves.

Dems Propose First Gun Grab Since Lexington And Concord

"Mandatory Gun Buyback" is a Silly Euphemism


By David Harsanyi
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/dems-propose-first-gun-grab-since-lexington-concord/
September 4, 2019


Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders

The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.

What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.

The “mandatory gun buyback” exemplifies the impracticality and absurdity of do-somethingism (although Biden’s proposal to ban “magazines that hold bullets”—so most guns—is also a contender!). Democrats want to turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transforms the exercise of a constitutional right into a crime.

And they do it without any evidence that it would curtail rare mass shootings or save lives.

While national confiscation would be unprecedented in American history, we already possess hard evidence that bans of assault rifles don’t alter gun violence trends. Gun homicides continued to drop steeply after an “assault weapons” ban expired in 2004. It’s also worth noting that in 2017, the last year of available FBI data, there was a near-historic low of 7,032 murders with handguns, and 403 by “rifles” of any kind, not only “assault weapons.”

To put that in perspective, there were 1,591 knife homicides during that same span, 467 people killed with blunt objects, and another 696 with fists and kicking. (Not every police department reports the type of gun used in homicides (3,096 of them), but it’s reasonable to believe that similar trends apply, since those murders took place in big cities where handguns are most prevalent.)

Although a number of Democrats now unequivocally support a “buyback,” no one has explained how the procedure will unfurl. What will the penalty be for ignoring the “buybacks”? Fines? Prison terms?

Will local police be tasked with opening case files on the 100 million homes of suspected gun owners who are armed with hundreds of millions of firearms, or will it be the FBI? Maybe Democrats will propose “paying back” family members and neighbors who snitch on gun owners? How else will they figure out who owns these AR-15s? There is no national tracking of sales.

Then again, many Democrats support “universal background checks,” which would necessitate a national database. So subsequent confiscations would be far easier, I suppose. (I can remember a time not very long ago when liberals accused a person of being a tin-foil-hatted nutter for merely suggesting that anyone had designs on their guns.)

It’s unclear to me if every candidate supports mandatory buybacks. Imprecision, after all, is the hallmark of gun-control rhetoric. Of course a non-coercive “buyback” program wouldn’t work either because no patriotic American is going to sell his firearms under market value. If you pay gun owners more than market value, they will surely turn a profit and purchase new weapons.

The criminal class and deranged would-be mass shooters have absolutely no incentive to participate, anyway. But you knew that.

Then there is the little matter of constitutionality. I’ve noticed an uptick in gun grabbers—a phrase that’s no longer hyperbole—arguing that Americans don’t need AR-15s to hunt, as if it mattered.

Although ARs are used by hunters, I’m certain nothing in the Second Amendment mentions hunting, because the right of self-defense—an individual concern, as well as a collective one—has nothing to do with shooting deer, and everything to do with protecting Americans from those who endeavor to strip them of their inalienable rights.

The District of Columbia v. Heller decision found that the Second Amendment protected weapons “in common use by law-abiding citizens.” The AR-15 clearly meets both criteria. It’s one of the most popular guns in America. Its semi-automatic mechanism is the same mechanism found in a majority of other legal firearms in the nation.

The arguments for a ban on “assault weapons”— a purposefully elastic phrase that allows the liberal legislator’s imagination to run wild — is centered on aesthetics, on the false claim that the AR is a “weapon of war,” and on the firearm tastes of a handful of deranged, sociopathic murderers.

Democrats and their allies like to mock these sorts of arguments as nothing more than semantics; mostly because they need to conflate and euphemize terms to make their arguments work. It’s how they generate favorable polling. I’m sure you’ve heard about the popularity of gun-control measures. But like “Medicare for all,” and other vaguely positive sounding policies, once voters learn what specifics entail, those numbers tend to settle along the usual partisan lines.

If you think you’re going to have overwhelming support for “mandatory gun buybacks” when people learn that you’re really talking about “the confiscation of 20 million guns,” you’re fooling yourself.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

Hey Joe Biden, Here Are Some Scandals You Forgot

A historical refresher

By David Harsanyi

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/12/hey-joe-biden-here-are-some-scandals-you-forgot-about/

June 12, 2019

(Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

“Know what I was most proud of?” presidential candidate Joe Biden told a crowd on Wednesday. “For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie.”

In an era where every presidential tweet is an existential threat to democracy, there are probably plenty of people who believe this myth. Off the bat, though, it should be mentioned that even liberal factchecking outfit PolitiFact once awarded Barack Obama the “Lie of the Year” for misleading the American people about his technocratic health-care plan.

Our former vice president, no slouch about misleading the public on the ACA, probably forgot.

Obama’s most famous lie, of course, upturned millions of lives. Without it, it’s doubtful Obamacare—which was perhaps the only wholly partisan national reform effort in American history—would ever have passed. Even with a stream of falsehoods, the bill had to be shoe-horned through Congress. Media did a lot of heavy lifting for the administration in those heady days.

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was only one of an array of demonstrably false statements fed to the public to give (now-extinct) moderate Democrats cover. You might remember one of Obamacare’s architects, Jonathan Gruber, explaining how this “lack of transparency” compounded by “the stupidity of the American voter” was a huge political advantage for the administration. Or maybe you don’t.

How many Americans knew, for instance, that “Operation Fast and Furious” put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexican citizens, and at least one American, a border agent named Brian Terry? Not enough.

There must have been at least a sniff of scandal, by the way, because even after a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the operation, the administration wouldn’t budge. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, refused to cooperate in the investigation, becoming the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats.

That’s odd, because today asserting executive privilege is exactly like Watergate. And ignoring courts? Well, Obama did that all the time.

Then again, Obama could secretly send planes filled with cash to pay ransom to an Islamist terror state responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American servicemen(using money that had been earmarked for terror victims), and most reporters would still regurgitate echo-chamber talking points. You remember Ben Rhodes bragging about how the Obama administration could trick 27-years-olds whose “only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns” because they “literally know nothing?”

Politico’s Josh Meyer, who did know something, would write a deeply sourced piece—featuring numerous real-life, on-the-record administration officials— about the Obama administration’s efforts to undermine investigations into a drug-trafficking ring run by Hezbollah operating in the United States, and most major news organizations never even mentioned it.

Today, President Trump’s Twitter attacks on CNN reporters are threats to the future of free expression. Back in 2012, the Obama’s Department of Justice spied on the Associated Press, tapping around 20 different phone lines—including cell phone and home lines—that captured at least 100 staffers who worked for the outlet. The government kept records of all outgoing calls “for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters” and the main line used by reporters in the House of Representatives.

The Justice Department had already spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails, and tracking his movements. Holder, by the way, shopped the case to three separate judges, until he found one who let him name Rosen a co-conspirator in the crime of reporting the news. If only this episode had gotten a fraction of the breathless coverage of a William Barr letter.

There is, of course, so much more. Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a staffer of the legislative branch of the U.S. government. At least five agency officials under his watch broke into Senate computer files, viewing drafts of a report on torture and reconstructing emails of at least one staffer. Brennan would attempt to cover up the agency’s actions by doubling down, blaming the Senate, and pushing to fire at least one staffer charged with investigating his agency.

Then there is Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who brazenly lied to Congress about spying on American citizens.

Biden might not remember that Internal Revenue Service leadership aggressively targeted conservative groups to undermine their voice in elections. The IRS admitted as much in an apology letter. Then there was Obama national security advisor Susan Rice, who went on national television and claimed that terrorist attacks against Americans at Benghazi were a “spontaneous reaction” to “hateful and offensive video,” even when she knew it was a sophisticated and pre-planned terror attack. Defenders of free expression were nowhere to be found as the maker of the video was conveniently thrown into jail.

There were cronyistic green projects that enriched political allies. There was the Secret Service’s many embarrassing breaches and general debauchery. There was Hillary Clinton’s infamous attempts to circumvent transparency — more than likely to cover up favor-trading. Even more seriously, there was Veterans Affairs negligence.

Then again, perhaps Biden feels “most proud” of his mythical eight years of non-scandals because it’s about the only thing in his political past he isn’t going to be forced to abandon.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.Follow him on Twitter.