What To Do With the Left After Their Coming Spanking

by Conrad Black

Even as the giant Potemkin village of Democratic Trump-hating self-righteousness crumbles week by week, the last gasp is audible: the grotesquely overstaffed January 6 committee investigating the events at the Capitol on that day last year is full of belligerent former prosecutors who, in interviews with the New York Times and others, acknowledge that they are pursuing their task as if they were after prominent alleged gangsters. The Congress has no power to indict and all it can do is claim to unearth facts that would justify an indictment from Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland claims to believe that parents concerned about critical race theory and other subjects taught to their children are a principal threat to public order in the United States. Though he is in lock-step with the far-Left policy agenda of the administration, even he might not be prepared to indict a former president on such a weak set of facts as this case presents.

The FBI director, Christopher Wray, reported shortly after January 6, 2021 that there was no evidence connecting those who had trespassed and vandalized the Capitol with the Trump campaign. They’ve detained hundreds of alleged Capitol trespassers without trial for many months, presumably subjecting them to the customary American prosecutor’s interrogations designed to extort useful evidence with threats of indictments or release and immunity from perjury charges, (with reckless disregard for accuracy).

The entire impetus to attack Trump is inspired by the desperate partisanship of a failed Democratic administration and Congress awaiting a severe electoral rebuke in November, and facing an array of apparently well-founded investigations themselves. The Trump-haters have been trying desperately to create the necessary ambiance of righteous unction; reputable commentators like George Will and Peggy Noonan refer to the incident at the Capitol as “1/6” to confer upon it the infamy of 9/11 and to confirm the George Will view that he and his staff were in physical danger on that particular January 6, even though they were miles away from the Capitol. The even more lapidary Thomas Friedman at the New York Times is of the opinion that January 6, 2021, ranks with Pearl Harbor and 9/11, as well, of course, as the imaginary Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election that he endlessly touted.

A moron can see that the last thing Donald Trump wanted on January 6, 2021, was an assault on the Capitol. He asked for increased protection for the Capitol, and Speaker Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser refused. He urged his followers to demonstrate peacefully and 99 percent of them did so. For five years Democratic leaders have been unable to function without a much-publicized and comprehensive criminal investigation riveted on Trump’s back. Much more likely to produce real indictments and justified convictions is the ever broadening, inexorable snail’s march of the Durham investigation into the politicization of the intelligence services of the FBI and the issuance of illegal FISA warrants for surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016. Durham has revealed that he is expanding his criminal investigation with a subpoena for 500,000 pages of documents from the FBI.

The administration has policy disasters mounting and multiplying at every hand: millions are pouring across the southern border; while Biden struts and ponces about increasing employment, he ignores not just rampaging inflation but the fact of a shrinking workforce following the shutdown of much of the economy, which the Democrats demanded in 2016. Iran has apparently won the issue on nuclear development and, as in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the administration has effectively capitulated—another unambiguous defeat for the United States, following the Afghanistan debacle and the professions of solidarity between Russia and China over Ukraine and Taiwan.

This is the consequence of the Democrats’ hysteria about Russia. If either Ukraine or Taiwan is invaded, it will confirm that both the Kremlin and Beijing have written the United States off as “a pitiful helpless giant,” as President Nixon’s chilling phrase warned, and they will be correct to do so, at least while this gang infests Washington’s public buildings.

The administration’s COVID strategy, built upon the Democrats’ and their media allies’ terrorizing the nation in the last Trump year in order to promote a massive shutdown and economic recession, has been rejected by most Americans and is now being scientifically assaulted as having caused more deaths than it saved. As the lockdown was debunked, Black Lives Matter has been exposed as a scam, as well as a largely terrorist organization. (Warm congratulations to useful corporate idiots like Jamie Dimon who funded them with the shareholders’ money.) The firing of CNN’s Jeff Zucker, not, presumably, because of an unexceptionable relationship he was conducting with another CNN executive, or even his own flak catching for the Cuomos, but because of the catastrophic failure of CNN, which has lost 77 percent of its viewers in the last year and has practically no credibility with any discerning person. Even the New York Times is heading for the lifeboats and publishing unflattering stories about the administration. Yet the Democrats, administration, Congress, and the media, continue to cling to Trump-hate as their only recourse for political self-preservation.

The “defund the police” movement and the election of pro-crime district attorneys in major cities are now fixed around the neck of the Democratic Party like a mighty, rancid albatross. The nonsensical Build Back Better boondoggle and the attempt to achieve the permanent theft of presidential elections championing ballot harvesting and abolishing the verification of votes have failed, although the related attempt to qualify illegal migrants as voters, protect sanctuary cities, and the refusal to enforce constitutional requirements of citizenship for voters remain to be dealt with. The Democrats will be hammered in the congressional elections in nine months and in the meantime the convalescence of Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico deprives the Democrats of their paper-thin majority in that chamber, apparently until April. The comparative absence of President Trump from the public’s attention has, in itself, reduced the teeming atmosphere that his enemies had promoted throughout his presidential term.

This raises the great question of how to complete the settling down of American public life after evicting the incumbents and conducting a comprehensive 180° turn on virtually all policies of the Biden Administration. So great is the rot and failure of the system that Trump attacked in 2016 that not everyone can be punished for their complicity in it. It will be a little like the Liberation of France in 1944 when General de Gaulle, recognizing that a high percentage of the population had been collaborators, executed a few of the more conspicuous traitors and serenely declined to notice the failure and often the treason of the others.

The day is now not far off when wokeness, American self-hate, foreign appeasement, and the indulgence of criminal and corrupt organizations like Black Lives Matter will end. When that happens, only the most egregious should be prosecuted; the self-inflicted wounds involved in pursuing all those responsible for the horrible crash of American public policy would require a decade of recrimination. The escalated use of the criminal justice system to resolve political differences took off with Watergate; it is about to reach its climax and the national interest requires that the temptations of comprehensive vengeance yield to the necessity for a more civilized political atmosphere.

First published in American Greatness.