A tale of two quids: The Democrats have decided to weaponize impeachment. By Roger Kimball.
The ostensible predicate of this spectacle is President Trump’s alleged effort to influence the 2020 election. Specifically, the allegation is that Trump made aid to Ukraine (the quid) conditional on Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden’s demand (the quo) that the prosecutor investigating a company on which his son, Hunter, sat be fired. Biden’s demand is not controverted. He bragged about it himself, in public, at the Council on Foreign Relations:
“I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.” …
Efforts to meddle in the 2016 election: that is what the call was chiefly about. Since that effort was part of a larger concern about corruption in Ukraine, Trump also asked about reports that Biden’s son Hunter was trading on his father’s name and position to peddle influence and line his pockets. …
What about?
If you are worried about President Trump asking about Joe Biden in his telephone call to President Zelensky, what do you make of Ukraine’s efforts to aid Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump during the 2016 election? Back before ‘Ukraine’ and ‘quid pro quo’ became memes, even Politico, no friend of Donald Trump, was frank about that reality. On January 11, 2017 before Trump even took office, Politico reported that:
“Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.”
The Democrats would never have attempted to get away with this Big Hypocrisy unless they owned the media. An honest media would be pointing out the double standards and blatant corruption of both the last Democrat administration and the current Democrats’ use of the impeachment process. But most Americans will never know, instead being breathlessly told over and over that their elected non-Democrat president is a criminal. (Trump used to be a Russian agent, but “we” don’t talk about that any more.)
Pretty breathtaking, but there it is.
