Witch hunt

Getting worse all the time

TALLEYRAND might have said it first: This is worse than a crime; this is a mistake. There was a lot of ink spilt (do they still spill ink?) in the press the other day when Donald Trump uploaded an image of himself with a baseball bat with another image of the New York prosecutor who’s looking into one of the various investigations of the former president. Word around the campfire is that the former president might have committed another act that his enemies could prosecute him for: Threatening a DA is a crime in New York state.

Oy.

This guy’s character and personality (they are different things) probably kept him from being re-elected. Because his administration wasn’t bad at all, if you’re somebody looking at it from the starboard viewpoint in American politics. But see the things he’s done since leaving office, including Day One Minus An Hour, when he refused to attend President Biden’s inauguration—the first president to do so since the Civil War era.

Donald Trump tells supporters that there’s witch hunt to get him. And here we thought Donald Trump wasn’t a regular politician. One thing that’s as sure as the sun rising in the east is a politician finding himself in trouble and calling it a partisan witch hunt.

The man seems to enjoy the hunt. He went to Waco the other day to hold a rally, and we will go ahead and give him the benefit of the doubt (although others won’t) that he had no idea about the anniversary of the Branch Davidian disaster. But put that aside, if you can, and get this: He opened his rally with the song “Justice For All,” the song created by a choir of men imprisoned for their roles in the Jan. 6 riots. Does anybody think that’s classy?

For the record, the “witch hunt” consists of grand juries of American voters. The Jan. 6 Committee was bipartisan as much as it could have been, with only two Republicans. But one of those Republicans voted with Donald Trump’s agenda while in office 97 percent of the time before she was run out of office. And most of the political witnesses called to testify about what Donald Trump had done in the lead-up to Jan. 6 were lifelong Republicans. Who served in his administration. Because they were the ones on the inside. Their testimony was the textbook definition of elevating country over party.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Bill Barr, the hand-selected attorney general for Donald Trump who conducted the investigation into election fraud. He came up empty-handed, and was brave enough to tell his president just that. It should be noted Bill Barr was also AG under George Bush the First and served in the Reagan White House.

Is there a witch hunt in Georgia, too? The key players there are Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican who certified the election and refused to come up with the 11,780 votes that then-President Trump asked him to “find.” Additionally, we now know that the longest-serving speaker of the Georgia state House of Representatives received a call from the White House asking him to convene a special session to overturn the election. That speaker was a Republican, too.

It would be easier to complain about a partisan witch hunt if those testifying against you weren’t in your party.

When the grand jury testimony and evidence are made public, if they are, everyone should remember who provided it.

THE INTEREST is up and the stock market’s down and you only get mugged if you go downtown. With all the problems with the current administration, you’d wonder how Joe Biden could get all the way up to 37 percent in the polls. A year is an eternity in politics, they say, so anything could happen between now and next summer when the presidential race heats up to the boiling point. But you’d think that somebody running for president against 37 percent would allow that administration to keep imploding—instead of calling negative attention to himself.

Political opponents are said to be enemies of the country. A lost election wasn’t lost as much as taken away by sinister forces. Fellow party members who don’t enjoy having to answer for all this are “stupid warmongers, neo-cons and RINOs.”

This is the way to run a campaign for high office?

A Jan. 6 convict choir?

Who knew?

Like the French say, it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.