Bruce Plante cartoon credit: laprogressive.com
Conrad Black has another provocative analysis of the
national political landscape (“The Fatuous Democrats” at National Review online here):
As the revelations of
political manipulation and malfeasance in the FBI and the intelligence agencies
under the Obama administration and the early Trump days oozes out of the slowly
accelerating investigation of those events, and from the self-serving books of
people who are prime targets for indictments, the character of the Democratic
opposition is evolving in unusual and even exotic ways. The Clinton party,
founded as “new Democrats” who favored the original Gulf War and whose standard
bearer declared “the end of the era of big government,” has been renounced as
abusive of women and generally insufficiently progressive. After 25 years as
the Napoleon and Josephine of the Democracy, the Clintons have been banished to
the broom closet, an embarrassment from another day.
The successor royal political couple,
the Obamas, isn’t faring much better. He presided over the deluge of slime that
his Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence agencies poured over the 2016
election and its aftermath, and that is now finally being exposed. The extent
to which the former president was involved in the Clinton-email whitewash and
the false applications for surveillance of the Trump campaign will become a
matter of high public interest. Practically the entire Obama legacy was
Obamacare, Green Empowerment and the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran Nuclear
Treaty. All were disasters and all have been dismembered or repudiated. Mr.
Obama was cranking up to being a long-term, high-prestige ex-president.
There have not been such since Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower. President Johnson
and President Nixon and George W, Bush left office in too much controversy;
President Ford and President Carter were not successful enough to have great
impact, President Reagan was elderly and in declining health, President Bush
Senior enjoyed a bit of it, but not the great eminence of Truman and
Eisenhower, two-term victorious war-time leaders identified with great
enterprises such as the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO.
The Democrats placed all their bets
on Hillary Clinton, and kept raising the ante in the misplaced belief that
President Trump could be driven from office as a traitor, a crook, and an
incompetent. They bet everything and will lose everything, and some of their
prominent personalities will be doing the tap dance before the grand jury in
the run-up to the next election. Their vast media claque will suffer a severe
lapse of credibility and ratings, given how heavily invested they are in
peddling hatred and contempt of the president, which has vastly exceeded fair
comment and any acceptable standard of journalistic professionalism.
. . .
If whoever limps through the
Democratic nomination process looks and sounds anything like this group and is
weighed down by the hare-brained nostrums the party worthies have been spouting
in the last few months, they will provide an entertaining variation on what will
then be the lengthy and numerous legal trials of some of the stars of the
Clinton and Obama administrations.
Mr. Black’s column is here. He seems confident that miscreants
at FBI, DOJ, etc. will be indicted, while many other pundits and readers expect
nothing to happen to any of them.
Mr. Black's column further describes -- in unflattering terms -- the leading contenders so far in the Democratic presidential primary race. It's an expanding field; Battleswarm blog has the latest update on the "Democratic Presidential Clown Car."
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