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Democrats Cross The RubiconAs Awful As He Is, Vote For The Convicted Felon: It's Important
So now Donald J. Trump is officially a crook a convicted felon. This was a transparently political trial, a radically destabilizing case of a political party in power using that power to sabotage the presidential campaign of a sitting president's opponent. Believe me, I cannot stand Trump, consider him to be corrupt, and desperately wish the Republicans were running Ron De Santis this fall. But the awfulness of Trump does not negate the fact that the Democrats have made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Before I get started, I will concede that Trump blew a winnable case by awful lawyering. Even the conservative legal commenter Andy McCarthy warned the other day that Trump's legal team followed a strategy no doubt dictated by their client that was more geared toward helping him in the fall election than helping him win in court. From what I've read in terms of legal analysis of Trump's defense, it seems clear that the defense failed not only because of bias, but also because of the same egotistical, blustering qualities that made Trump such a weak president. The man cannot get out of his own way. If he is re-elected this fall something I hope happens, for reasons I'll get into below I expect his presidency to be another sh*tshow, for the same reason he needed a top-notch defense to defeat the rigged court proceeding, but sabotaged it.
I say that to put my cards on the table.
Trump is in part the author of yesterday's verdict. But only a small part. What happened yesterday was the crossing of a Rubicon a woebegone cliche that, for once, is appropriate. Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River guaranteed civil war. I don't anticipate actual civil war in America
, but the verdict certainly accelerates the dissolution of our national bonds.I'm not even going to quote the Right this morning.
Here's center-left commenter Nellie Bowles:Quote:
Now, I'm all for jailing politicians. But the idea that counting hush-money payments as a business expense should lead to 34 felonies? This is the big crime? Of all the various legal efforts that might lock Trump up or bankrupt him before the election, the New York endeavors always seemed like the weirdest and most obviously political. Even cable news analysts are baffled when it comes to the specifics, and here I'm pulling from the reporter Byron York who brings us tales from cable news, like a CNN analyst: "The crime here is not easy to explain or understand." MSNBC analyst: "It is difficult because it's a very nuanced argument. . . . It's never been prosecuted before."
Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had to dig. To raise Trump's questionable accounting to the level of a felony, the prosecution had to demonstrate that it had been done in aid of another crime. As Eli Lake explained last month, there was no other crime per se. So what did the DA do? He dug up an obscure New York election law to claim Trump had used "unlawful means to influence an election." In closing arguments, prosecution lawyers argued that the hush money "could very well be what got President Trump elected" and that he conspired "to manipulate and defraud the voters."
I'm old enough to remember when the libs chastised us right-wingers for being imprudently zealous in our attempt to nail the hated Bill Clinton. And you know, some of us (me, anyway) came to see in time that they were right. Clinton might have been a lying dirtbag about Monica Lewinsky, but in our eagerness to see him brought low, we went too far. Again, it's about
prudence. In the
Commedia, Dante takes the Augustinian view of sin, saying that one can sin by loving the right things in the wrong way. I wouldn't say that the Ken Starr prosecution was sinful, but it was a case of allowing zeal for justice to overrun other considerations.
The Democrats and their allies have now done the same kind of thing. But
America is not the same country it was in 1998. We are a far more fragile country. If the Republicans going on a witch hunt against Clinton in the 1990s was imprudent from the broad view, the Democrats going after Trump on these Manhattan charges in 2024 was extremely reckless.
The left-wing anti-Trump commenter Michael Lind has a red-hot, utterly convicting take. Excerpts:
Quote:
Whatever you think of Donald Trump and I for one think very little of him his conviction as a felon for what would ordinarily be a minor misdemeanour by a biased jury is a grim day for democracy in America.
… But now, anti-Trump Democrats, have put the rule of law in America to the test again and this time it has been bent to the point of breaking. In February, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of civil fraud in a case involving alleged overstatements of real estate values. And yesterday, following the prosecution of Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg, another Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of alleged violations in a case involving the reporting of hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. It was the first time a sitting or former US president has been convicted of a crime. It was also the first time that the allies of a president of one party have successfully weaponised the American judicial system in an attempt to destroy the presidential candidate of another.
More:
Quote:
For in the future, by weaponising state law to try to destroy federal candidates and officeholders of the rival party, Democrats have opened a Pandora's box. It is probably only a matter of time before Republican attorney generals start prosecuting present or former Democratic politicians on their own trumped-up charges. And why not?
Why not indeed? Lind says that the long-term ramifications of what happened in New York yesterday are likely to be far more serious than January 6.
He's right about that. Spend a little time googling "trust in institutions," and you'll find hard statistical evidence (e.g.,
here and
here) that the American public's trust in our institutions is at a historic low. One of the things that people like me, who back Viktor Orban, keep pointing out is that the power-holding European elites fault and even punish Orban for things that they and their allies do with impunity. Any American with eyes to see can grasp that the same double standard is applied to Trump.
This is in part a manifestation of the Left abandoning liberalism in favor of a progressive indeed, Leninist theory of "Who, whom?" That is, the Left doesn't even make a pretense of fairness now; the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on who it benefits, and who it hurts. This is how woke identity politics works: discrimination on the basis of race is fine so long as it benefits racial demographic groups favored by the Left.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38136ac6-a3ef-45bf-9bcd-8330ba12a5e2_1204x1436.png?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailNow, if the Republican Party cannot link this kangaroo court verdict against Trump to the broader left-wing institutional discrimination against unfavored minorities including whites, who are still, alas for the Dems, the majority group in America then they deserve to lose.
We live in a country in which more and more young people do not wish to sign up for its armed services especially whites.
From Military.com:Quote:
The Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last half decade, according to internal data reviewed by Military.com, a decline that accounts for much of the service's historic recruitment slump that has become the subject of increasing concern for Army leadership and Capitol Hill.
The shift in demographics for incoming recruits would be irrelevant to war planners, except it coincides with an overall shortfall of about 10,000 recruits for the Army in 2023 as the service missed its target of 65,000 new soldiers. That deficit is straining the force as it has ramped up its presence in the Pacific and Europe: A smaller Army is taking on a larger mission and training workload than during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- leading to soldiers being away from home now more than ever.
A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year.
Now, the Forever Wars of our Ruling Class could account for the overall dropoff. But why are whites in particular disproportionately refusing the military. Note this from the story:
Quote:
Internally, some Army planners are alarmed over the data trends, but see it as a minefield to navigate given increasing partisan attacks against the military for its efforts to recruit and support a diverse force, according to interviews with several service officials.
Translation:
the Army can't admit that its stupid woke policies are causing whites to stay away from the military. Seriously, read the story. The military cannot admit that its embrace of wokeness is actually hurting its appeal to whites. Idiots.
Now, imagine that you are a conservative white guy
of whom there are many in the 18 to 29 year old demographic, even though liberal identification has soared among women in that age cohort and you see yesterday's verdict as evidence that the American system has been weaponized against people like you, how likely are you to want to kill or risk death to protect that system?
Again: I don't like Donald Trump at all. I think he's a weak and ridiculous man, an egotist with no morals. And yet, I say vote for the convicted felon it's important. It's important because the Democratic Party and its backers throughout American institutional life cannot be allowed to get away with this. It's important also because whatever Trump's many flaws, he doesn't hate people like me, and people like many of you. Biden and the Ruling Class do and we now see that they will weaponize institutions to ruin us if they so desire.
Josh Hammer, a lawyer and conservative pundit, may not realize it,
but he's calling on the American Right to go full Viktor Orban that is, to use the system against the Left the way it routinely uses it against the Right. Excerpt:
Quote:
Third, it has never been more incumbent upon the Right to finally wake up and realize what is going on right now in this once-great nation. Many conservatives and Republicans like to wax nostalgic about blindfolded Lady Justice -- about neutral enforcement of the law, and about general norms of liberal neutrality. Will those on the Right finally wake up and realize where, exactly, our attempt to seize an unsustainable faux-moral high ground has gotten us? The imperative of this late hour of the American republic, in order to even attempt to rebalance our wildly off-balance pendulum, is to respond to the Left as it has acted toward us: by wielding political and prosecutorial power to reward friends and punish enemies -- to reward our side's forces of civilizational sanity and punish their side's forces of civilizational arson -- within the broad confines of the rule of law.
If we want to get back to "neutrality," at this perilous point, it's going to first take bloodying up some noses. That is unfortunate for those Americans who actually do value and cherish neutral enforcement of the rule of law. But yet again, here we are.
Above all, it is imperative that the Right not bat an eyelash. Do not be intimidated by this blatant show of crass thuggery masquerading as a legal proceeding. It's now full steam ahead through November. We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done.
The bumper sticker you see above is one that I, and many others in Louisiana, put on our cars in 1991.
Vote For The Crook: It's Important was a slogan acknowledging that Democratic Gov. Edwin W. Edwards was an ultra-sleazy politician, but his opponent in the gubernatorial election, former Klan leader David Duke, was in a different category of badness. A far worse category. The sentiment of that slogan was to say:
Look, as bad as Edwards is, we have to suppress our gag reflex and vote for him, because the alternative is far worse.That's how I feel about our newly convicted Orange felon. He's officially a certified crook now. Vote for him. It's important that the Democrats not triumph here. America can survive four more years of Trump's hot mess. It can't survive the capture of its institutions by these woke Leninists.
And yeah, America is going to continue tearing itself apart. That's coming no matter what now.] -Rod Dreher
