Public tunes out as parties take up same old tricks

SAN DIEGO — Is impeachment old news? Already? The Senate trial has ended. Still, given the overheated rhetoric from the left about how Donald Trump had supposedly committed high crimes and nearly destroyed the Republic, I expected more of a postmortem on what went wrong with the case and where the country goes from here.

But we’re hearing precious little of that. Instead, the talking heads have sprinted off to a discussion about President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 economic stimulus.

Democrats — both in Congress and in the media — can’t wait to turn the page after Trump’s latest acquittal. This suggests the Senate trial was never about Trump or the charge of inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by MAGA misfits. It appears this was merely a show trial meant to smoke out Republican senators from their holes and get them on the record saying and doing dumb things in defense of Trump.

This is the GOP’s specialty, and so Republican senators were all too happy to oblige. Mission accomplished. Democrats now have plenty of incriminating footage to use in the 2022 midterm elections.

But there is another side to that coin. And it isn’t very flattering to the left. When Trump’s attorneys put on their defense, Democrats found themselves on trial and accused of dishonesty, hypocrisy and phony indignation. Trump’s legal team played videos that wound up televised as part of the proceedings. These were “selectively edited” videos, protested the anti-Trump media — as if all video isn’t edited. The footage showed liberals and Democrats are no shrinking violets. During the Trump era, the left was not above advocating violence against the president, Republicans and government buildings when they didn’t get their way.

The Democrats did have a defense, though. And, once again, it was put on by their friends in the media. Outlets ranging from ABC News to National Public Radio — in covering the video presented by the Trump lawyers — were careful to focus on the benign word “fight,” which has been so overused by members of both political parties that it has lost its bite.

Sure, they said, Republicans use the word “fight” in their political speeches, but so do Democrats.

What shocked me, however, wasn’t the word “fight” but other words and phrases fancied by Democrats, like “punch,” “beat,” “take him out,” “shoot,” “bullet,” and threats to track down Trump supporters and “make them pay.”

There’s a good look for the party of tolerance, compassion and love. These aren’t the Democrats of old — George McGovern in 1972, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988. This is more like Bill Clinton in 1992, who hired brawlers like political strategists James Carville and Paul Begala.

“Don’t get mad, and don’t get even,” Carville used to tell Democrats. “Just get elected. Then get even!”

I’ll allow it. Like a lot of Americans, I got bored — all through the 1980s and beyond — with seeing Republicans steal Democrats’ lunch money thanks to shenanigans pulled by ruthless GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes. By the time Clinton arrived on the scene, Democrats had decided to give as good as they got. I was glad to see them toughen up.

So why, in 2021, do Democrats feel the need to clutch the pearls and feign horror over Trump’s rhetoric, as they wallow in all this bogus sanctimony? Just whom do they think they’re fooling? Why not admit what they’ve become, instead of pretending they’re something they’re not — at least not anymore?

The same goes for their compadres in the media, who became so transparent in the Trump era that now everyone can see through them.

That reminds me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to my liberal colleagues in the Fourth Estate. To paraphrase what Ingrid Bergman said to Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” I’m just so relieved that they’re willing to do the thinking for all of us.

If not for the media’s attempts to control the narrative, I might not have properly understood what I was taking in with my own eyes and ears.

Here’s what I took away from Trump’s second impeachment trial: The two parties are more alike than different. Both sides have the same goal — to raise money and get reelected, by making themselves look good and their adversaries look bad. And this often means skipping the process of looking in the mirror.

This isn’t “whataboutism” or “bothsidesism.” It’s a truism — and it’s realism.

And guess what? I figured this out all by myself, without the help of a media that — despite being corrupted and compromised by its bias — is all too eager to explain it to a nation that, because it knows better, is no longer listening.