Friday, August 24, 2018

All the Talk About Impeaching the President Is Nonsense - The American Spectator - DOV FISCHER


(Nothing better than a well written and funny dose of reality - TGIF! - CL)
The networks will need to find another way to excite their ratings.
First a preliminary word from someone whose published writings of the past two years demonstrate quite clearly why these past nineteen months under President Trump mark him already as one of America’s greatest Presidents in contradistinction to the nightmare of the prior eight years that saw one of America’s three or four worst-ever Presidents occupying the White House:
1. When a man is married to one of the most beautiful women who ever lived… and she also is quite brilliant… and she also has a wonderful head for business… and she is profoundly loyal to him… and she loves that man enough to be pregnant with his child… and she stands by him publicly no matter what scandals and other controversies embroil him amid his public ventures… then it is quite unacceptable to imagine that such a man would cavort on the side with a bimbo (or even a coherent person) whose sole assets are two balloons that some physician presumably superimposed onto her torso. If a man truly desperately needs to get his hands around two balloons, he can get himself invited to a children’s birthday party, or he can go to Party City. The last I looked, balloons at Party City were selling at ten cents each. For an incredibly keen business tycoon, a billionaire, it seems a no-brainer to prefer grasping two balloons at a dime apiece rather squeezing them at $65,000.00 per balloon. And, when you get the balloons at Party City, you don’t have to take those balloons out to dinner or pretend to be interested in whatever babble they expel under the misconception that they are engaging in “conversation.”
2. Two hundred and forty-two years of recorded American history document that nothing good ever comes from being involved with someone named “Stormy.”
Now, to impeachment and why the whole discussion is nonsense…
The television-news media desperately need to fill twenty-four hours every day in order to sell advertising to support their stations, their management, their employees, and their negotiated settlements and non-disclosure-agreement pay-outs to women whom they must silence after one or another of their male employees has violated them. CBS has had Charlie Rose. NBC Matt Lauer. With too much money, too much perceived power, many intelligent media-attractive women who benefit further from the daily efforts of world-class aestheticians and make-up artists, the ingredients are there. Certainly Fox News has had their share of pay-outs, too. And the thing is, we have no idea how many others also are being paid to shut up. So the television-news media have to keep the money pouring in. Same with the print media. They need to grab your attention and hold it all day and night, every day.
Would you watch TV news 24/7 to get the latest commodities reports on oranges? For how many hours daily? Unless you deal in oranges, probably not a whole bunch. How about “sweet crude oil” futures? It would have to be pretty sweet, indeed, to keep your attention. I am an Orthodox rabbi, and I cannot remember the last time I put down a volume of the Talmud to keep abreast of the latest prices on pork bellies.
So they have to figure out how to keep the ratings up. They love a murder — oh, how they love a murder! Especially of a young pretty White girl. That grabs the attention of everyone: men, women, liberals, conservatives, young, and old. (Amazing how, for all the Political Correctness of “Black Lives Matter,” the media do not care a whit about the genocide happening to African Americans under Democrat governance in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, and Detroit.) And omigosh how they love serial killers who murder young White women! They make them as famous as Babe Ruth, Abraham Lincoln, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus: The Hillside Strangler, Ted Bundy, the .44 Caliber Killer/ “Son of Sam,” the Zodiac Killer, Richard Speck. Imagine how they would have loved to cover Jack the Ripper! Even an isolated unsolved murder of a single young White woman gets the media exercised into a frenzy: Jonbenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Short, Chandra Levy, Kate Steinle, Mollie Tibbets. The Seedier Media obsess over these individual murders round-the-clock until it emerges that the murderer was an illegal alien. Only then do they return to sweet crude and pork bellies.
Other methods to grab viewers and hold them are more idiosyncratic, like the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370. In its time, CNN milked it for all it was worth. You would think that CNN had become the Travel Channel. And then the great natural disasters: tsunamis that destroy much of Japan, volcano eruptions that threaten to end Hawaii as a vacation spot, tornadoes that devastate Oklahoma, and California wildfires enhanced by liberal environmentalist extremes that bar responsible forest management and clearing dead and rotted wood and brush from forests, thus assuring the fuel to create true man-made disaster. You would think that CNN had become the Weather Channel.
But no subject, no Holy Fire, has proven as sure-fire a media grabber as President Donald J. Trump. Half of us have come to appreciate him so much that we cannot get enough of him. Many watch each-and-every one of his almost-weekly stadium-overflowing live campaign speeches. One week in Wisconsin. Another week in Pennsylvania. Missouri. Montana. West Virginia. The fans cannot get enough of him. Eighty percent of each speech is the same as all the others, but fans like to hear it again and again — like listening again and again to a favorite song. And one never knows what kind of comical inanity he will interject in any given speech at any given moment. Will he start talking off-script about flies and mosquitoes? About some childhood inanity? One never knows, and that makes it even more fun. In a completely different way from the way that President Reagan meant it when he said it about Jimmy Carter, when President Trump goes off-script into inanity and ridiculousness, fans gleefully chuckle: “There he goes again!”
At the same time, half the country really oppose him. Many hate him. Some despise him. Others just don’t care for him. But they also are glued. They also cannot get enough of him. And so the media feed the beast that pays the bills — heavy daily doses of Trump.
The thing is, people will get bored if the Trump story is the exact-same every day for nineteen months. So the Seedier Media have to vary it. One week, they generate the lie that Trump has Alzheimer’s. Then he runs a cabinet meeting with such proficiency that they need to change the story. So maybe it is that Trump is a traitor because a guy who voted for the Soviet Communists says so — a guy whom Obama made head of the CIA and who conducted the CIA as though he still were a supporter of Soviet Communism. (Come to think of it, what better way to cover your own tracks as an insider Soviet Double Agent with access to top American security secrets, colluding with the Russians, than by tweeting that some other guy is the double agent?) The next week it is that Trump is going to cause a nuclear war with North Korea. Then when the North Korea Doughboy invites Trump to talks, the media change the story line to Trump being unprepared for such high-level negotiations. Then when the talks result in a signed agreement, and the Doughboy stops shooting missiles and returns the bodies of American heroes who fell there half a century ago, the media change the story to Trump not having achieved enough. When the Admiral who serves as the President’s personal physician reports that Trump has passed his physical with flying colors, the media start picking it to pieces and start analyzing his cholesterol numbers and whether he is taking enough statins — because they are oh-so-concerned that he live to 120 years of good health. Then when his wife undergoes surgery — understand that doctors are cutting her up, then sewing her back together — and she understandably decides that she does not want to appear before the media for a few weeks while she recovers, the frenzied media report that maybe she is divorcing the President or maybe she is dead. Then when she shows up in public at the border to evaluate the situation there first-hand, they obsess over the writing on her jacket. (A good thing they cannot see the writing on her undergarments, or they would start a two-week frenzy over whether she is having an affair with Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, or whoever else’s name is on the label. One can imagine the headlines: “Is First Lady Melania Cheating with a Lover Code-Named ‘Wash in Cold Water with Like Colors’”?) And, of course, when all else fails, Omarosa.
So now that Omarosa has played out her fifteen minutes of media usefulness, the new idiocy is the impeachment story: Michael Cohen, at the behest of Clinton Enabler Lanny Davis, has pleaded guilty to election-law violations for having remitted some $130,000 to Stormy (at $65,000 per balloon), and now the media have President Trump out of office. So let’s get real:
Let’s say two Antifa members hold up a bank. That means they are wearing masks over their masks. One gets caught and faces a hundred years in prison. He or she makes a deal with Robert Mueller and pleads guilty as follows: “I held up the bank, and my masked accomplice was Donald Trump.” OK. So the person who copped a plea is guilty. But that does not mean that Trump was in the bank with him or her. Well, you may ask: “Why would a person plead guilty and knowingly set himself up for a prison sentence if the underlying plea were not true?” Lots of reasons:
Let’s say he is facing $500,000 in future legal bills in defending himself, and he just cannot bear that cost. Let’s say he faces 50 years in the hoosegow, but this deal will assure him that he is out in 3-5 years. Let’s say he also has perpetrated tax fraud or $20 million in bank fraud. Or — only in New York — taxi-medallion fraud. (And, in a state where it once cost over a million dollars to have the right to drive a taxi, Andrew Cuomo can say that American never was that great?) Let’s say he, an attorney, also has been exposed to the world as a creep who audio-records his own law clients — pretty much assuring that his legal career is over: either the New York State Bar will close him down for good, or he simply will find that no new clients ever again retain him. (OK, one exception: Omarosa. Can you imagine Omarosa coming into Michael Cohen’s law office to retain him, and the two of them are secretly recording each other?) So, Cohen has any number of reasons to cop a deal.
And what is the Trump link? That (i) Trump cavorted with two balloons, (ii) the mouthpiece attached to the two balloons threatened to tell the public about a man whose relationship with the “fairer sex” the voting public already knew quite well after 24/7 reportage of his taped comments years earlier in that trailer, (iii) Cohen paid $65,000 per balloon to shut the mouthpiece, and (iv) Trump paid Cohen $130,000. Oh — and by the way: instead of Trump handling the whole messy matter through a business associate, he specifically went to his attorney, a member of the New York State Bar presumed to have expertise in the law, to assure that everything would be handled in proper compliance with governing law.
And that is a supposed to be a violation of election law?
First of all, such men, alas, pay women to be quiet all the time. What elected office was R. Kelly seeking? Howzabout Tiger Woods? (For theater-goers and ten-dollar-bill lovers: Alexander Hamilton.) It almost seems to comprise actionable societal sexual discrimination against men: If only more men could be eligible to get $130,000 to stay quiet about something (other than baseball). Wouldn’t it be amazing — and just plain fair — to live in a society where men likewise have women paying $130,000 to remain quiet? Most men are pretty quiet anyway. And most men even would be glad to give the paying woman two balloons as a gift. But married male tycoons throughout history have been paying such women to shut up. That is not election law. That is erection law.
Second, was it a violation of campaign election law when Wall Street insiders were paying Hillary Clinton $225,000 a pop for 15-minute “speeches” behind closed doors? In three speeches, she pocketed $675,000. They knew how to invest without listening to her. They did not need her advice for investing in land deals like Whitewater — and it was the insider pros who advised her on cattle futures. So what wisdom were they paying Hillary for? Obviously they expected her to be President, and they were contributing to her effort in return for having a pro-Wall Street President who would “talk the talk” of “sharing the wealth” and would condemn “Deplorables” but who, like Obama, actually would take good care of friends on Wall Street.
Likewise, was it a violation of election laws when mobster and later-convicted felon Tony Rezko helped the Obamas acquire a magnificent house for hundreds of thousands below market? Gimme a break.
The bottom line is that this is The Swamp. Our billions and trillions in tax money float around Washington and attract the mosquitoes and tsetse flies that inhabit The Swamp. They infect the public not with Yellow Fever but with Green Fever — the color of money. The President has done an amazing job of exposing Swamp People: James Comey, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Ohr’s Wife, the Hillary Basketful of Deplorables (Huma, Weiner, Hillary Herself, etc.), Andrew McCabe. That is how it goes.
None of this has anything to do with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Realistically, in order for the President to be impeached it will take a majority of the House of Representatives to vote for impeachment. If Republicans hold the House in November, all the talk about impeachment will be so much Fake News like all the talk about Alzheimer’s: there will be no impeachment. End of story. By contrast, if the Democrats take the House they might very well pass a Maxine WatersAl Green bill for impeachment. It then will go to the United Senate, where a two-thirds majority will be needed for conviction. The Republicans will control the Senate with between 51-57 seats. Even if the Democrats miraculously grab the Senate in November, there still would be at least 48 Republicans in the Senate. The Democrats would need to get 15-20 Republican Senators to vote with them to oust President Trump. Any Republican Senator who would vote that way would be signing his or her political death warrant — the end of his or her political career. They all know it. Therefore none of them would do it. Thus, after much ado about nothing, and two weeks of evidence presented in the Senate about the cost of two balloons and how they were reimbursed, a vote on conviction would go down in flames anyway. The last time this gambit was tried, the Republicans paid severely for wasting the country’s time and money over a President who lied under oath about cavorting with women behind his wife’s back. This time will be no different, and this President has not even lied about it under oath. Thus, another weekly drama will pass.
In the end, the media will need a new Omarosa, a new missing plane, a new murder of an innocent pretty White young lady. Or it will be back to orange futures, sweet crude, and the revival of much-lamented pork bellies futures.