sunday, june 2, 2024 at 05:12:11 p.m. edt
"powerline's John Hinderaker: indict all dems"
guilty
A grotesquely biased jury of Trump-haters, led by a judge who put service to his party above his judicial responsibilities, has returned guilty verdicts against Donald Trump on all 34 counts with which he was–absurdly–charged.
What this shows is that the most important variable in any case is who decides it. Here, the Democrats knew that they could impanel a rabidly anti-Trump jury in Manhattan, so they did so. It is very much like the lawsuit that Michael Mann brought against Mark Steyn and others, of which I observed some of the latter stages. The defendants were properly happy about how the trial had gone, but the facts didn't matter. The Democrats had chosen the right venue, Washington, D.C., and a biased jury found for Mann. Same thing here.
What to do now? First, it is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president. The Democrats cannot be allowed to get away with this effort to turn America into a banana republic.
Second, the Democrats understand nothing except the raw exercise of power. Therefore, Republican attorneys general and district attorneys should bring criminal charges against Democratic officeholders wherever possible. No Democratic officeholder should be allowed to retire, in any jurisdiction with Republican law enforcement, without facing criminal charges. There can't be a single Democratic official in America against whom a criminal case can't be brought that is better than this case against Trump. It should be open season on Democrats in the criminal courts.
Third, the criminal prosecutions should begin with Joe Biden. Unlike Trump, Biden is actually a criminal. He is already known to be guilty under the federal bribery statute. If Trump wins in November, his Department of Justice should immediately indict Biden, and Biden should be hounded until the day he dies or goes to prison, whichever happens first.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
For the second time in their ignoble history, the Democrats have fired on Fort Sumter. Now the question is, what are we going to do about it?
I wrote my initial thoughts on the Trump verdict yesterday afternoon. I want to add to them here.
If Joe Biden is re-elected following this outrage, he will be an illegitimate president. What does that mean? It means, I think, that no one should be obliged to follow his executive orders. All such orders will be illegitimate and should be disregarded, as appropriate. Likewise, residents of the sane states, and their public officials, should be free to disregard rules and orders that come out of the Biden administration's agencies–the Biden EPA, and so on. And rulings of Biden-appointed judges, or of panels on which one or more Biden judges were part of the majority, should not be given any precedential effect.
More fundamentally, the Democratic Party is now illegitimate. We should stop treating it as a normal political organization. We conservatives have played by the rules, trying to hold our country together in the face of increasingly radical and irrational conduct from our political foes. Those days should be gone. The Democratic Party is now exposed as the enemy of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and should be treated accordingly.
Yesterday was one of the worst days in our country's history, the worst, I think, since 1861. I do not know whether we can survive the lawless regime that the Democrats have thrust on us. I have been saying for a while that we are on a path to disunion. I don't think that fate is inevitable, but in their abuse of the legal system, the Democrats have taken another giant step down that road.
IMPLICATIONS OF CONVICTION
The trial of Donald Trump on jerry-rigged charges produced the foreordained outcome. Trump was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of 34 felony charges. It couldn't have been otherwise. This was a show trial.
It would have been more efficient — it would have saved a day or two in show time — if Judge Merchan had simply directed a verdict of guilt and sent the jury home when the parties' rested. It would not have been more unconstitutional than having the jury pick from Column A, Column B, or Column C for the "other crime" that was vital to the case.
Instead Merchan let the prosecution run wild. He constrained the defense. He all but stripped Trump's defense to the charge of federal election misconduct to which Michael Cohen had pleaded guilty.
He gagged the defendant. He excluded evidence that might have helped the defendant, say with respect to the allegation of misconduct under federal election law. He crafted jury instructions that adopted the show-trial theory of the case.
And the jury performed predictably under the circumstances. In this case its role was ministerial. The guilty verdict on each of the 34 charges was for show.
The show trial lacked certain elements of the Stalinist show trials of old. Most notably, the defendant did not confess or repent. He has not professed to accept the opinion of his accusers. He may even prevail at some point on appeal after the election.
But appeal is irrelevant. As in the show trials of old, the point of the case is political, not legal. Democrats have achieved their immediate political objective. Trump is now a convicted felon.
As if to put an exclamation point on this aspect of the case — for dummies — Judge Merchan has scheduled sentencing four days before the Republican convention this coming July. The finality of the verdict on each of the charges yesterday is only seeming. The show's not over in this show trial.
The Democrats are guilty of every sin they attribute to Trump. Election interference — this is how it's now to be done, with a strong dose of humiliation, a patina of legality, and the threat of incarceration. The threat produces an erotic effect on the Democrats and their media allies, but that is not the point. The point is to take down a political adversary. The point is the electoral effect — the point is political.
The Democrats lack confidence in their ability to defeat Trump at the polls. The point of the rigged trial is the rigged election, and not in the "who's voting" or "who's counting the votes" departments, although there is that too. The intended audience of the show trial is the few voters who occupy the middle of the road and could go either way in November. If they move them to one or two or three percent to Biden, as seems plausible and even likely, that is the point. This is the Democrats' objective in the medium term. Intelligent readers can draw a straight line to infer the long-term objective.
Every metaphor descriptive of what is happening here falls short of the moment. "Crossing the Rubicon," "sowing the wind," and so on, have a remote and clichéd quality that fails to capture what the Democrats have done. In political terms, one might think of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. But that is too remote as well.
One has the sense that Democrats do not fully grasp what they have done. If the Democrats' show-trial moves only enough voters to swing the election to Biden — a not implausible outcome that is what the case is all about — how can the outcome be acceptable to the many who understand what the Democrats have done. The show-trial bears seeds of alienation, discord, turnabout, and violence. That is the point buried in the clichéd metaphors. That is the implication of the conviction rendered in the show-trial.
2 comments:
But we all wait for the sentencing,which in my opinion will not be jail time--as it shouldn't.If however,Merchan sends President Trump to prison for say,six months,I expect Whites to rise up,martial law to be declared on Whites and the election "delayed".The commies are pushing the envelope.We'll see how much we push back to save this,so called,"democracy".
--GRA
"It's a principle called Game Theory. When your opponent breaks a norm you need to answer in-kind to either restore balance or act as deterrence against further breaking of norms. Applied here it means that if the right does nothing there is no reason for the left to stop."
Correct. They will not stop with Don. They are after everyone that even for a second thinks that maybe the election was stolen or that the President got a fair trial. The Republicans MUST fight back. Mitt Romney types cannot be allowed to play nice.
"Your attitude is noticed."
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