Michael Ejercito
2017-05-18 01:29:59 UTC
http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/17/all-this-impeachment-talk-is-pure-trump
All This Impeachment Talk Is Pure Trump Derangement Syndrome
That man in the White House is vulgar, disrespectul, maybe even dangerous.
So what?
Nick Gillespie|May. 17, 2017 5:00 pm
Reason
Reason
Well this didn't take long, did it?
Donald Trump, the most-unlikely and least-liked president in the history of
the United States, had barely celebrated his first 100 days when calls for
his impeachment started flying faster than Andrew Weiner dick pics at a Girl
Scout cookout. For the good of democracy, don't you see, the Republicans
must not only be kicked to the curb in the 2018 midterms, but the president
himself must be thrown into the street, just like he once tried to evict
that old lady from her house in Atlantic City!
In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, whose recent
testimony on Hillary Clinton's emails was so flawed and incompetent that his
underlings immediately issued a clarification to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, virtually every non-Republican #NeverTrumper (plus Sen. John
McCain, who has some good reasons to hate Trump) has called for The Donald's
head on a platter. And this was all before the tantalizing possibility of a
"Comey memo" detailing various attempts by Trump to shut down an
investigation of possible ties between former National Security Adviser Mike
Flynn and Russian operatives.
But let's get real: At this point in the game, all the explainers about how
impeachment works (the 1990s called, they want their sex scandals back!) and
adapting the 25th Amendment's ability to remove the president from
decision-making during colonoscopies to the current crisis are evidence-free
exercises in ideological masturbation. If we are going to survive not just
the Trump years but eventually get around to kick-starting the 21st century,
we're going to have become smarter media consumers and demand more from both
our politicians and the press. "The New York Times has not viewed a copy of
the memo," explains the Paper of Record, "but one of Mr. Comey's associates
read parts of it to a Times reporter." As Reason's Scott Shackford has
noted, that's what Joe Biden would call a "big fucking deal" if it turns out
to exist and to be accurate. It's also a pretty big if at this point.
But even before Comey's possible "paper trail" documenting President Trump's
demands (which may or may not actually rise to the level of impeachable
offense) came to light, his enemies were out in force. For god's sake, they
wanted him impeached even before he was the Republican nominee.
"An attempt to obstruct justice is an impeachable offense," huffed Andrew
Sullivan in New York magazine last week. "And Trump has just openly admitted
to such a thing" because "sources close to Comey" said the president-elect
asked the FBI director for his "personal loyalty." What unemotional
analysis. Remember that a year ago, Sullivan called the possibility of a
Trump presidency an "extinction-level threat" to mom, apple pie, and
Chevrolet. Elsewhere in New York, Jonathan Chait, who is as doggedly a
Democratic partisan that exists in print, put out an article under the
headline, "The Law Can't Stop Trump. Only Impeachment Can." Trump's high
crime for Chait was the completely opaque charge that Trump shared
classified intel with Russian officials visiting the White House, a charge
flatly rebutted by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who said the
shared info was "wholly appropriate" and that "the president in no way
compromised any sources or methods." For Chait though, and so many more
either openly in "the Resistance" or just fellow-traveling, the real problem
is that America never anticipated peckerwoods being in the Oval Office. "The
system is set up with the unstated presumption that the president is a
responsible person who will act in a broadly legitimate, competent fashion,"
writes Chait. "The system is designed so that the only remedy for a
president who cannot faithfully act in the public interest is impeachment."
Forget all that Madisonian mumbo-jumbo about "if men were angels, no
government would be necessary." A real-estate developer from Queens with
history's worst comb-over is about the bring the Statue of Liberty to her
knees like an ISIS captive. Indeed, whether or not James Comey's memos
detailing his version of Trump's perfidies against a free-and-independent
FBI—you know, that august institution which has one of the very worst
records among any law-enforcement agency of abusing power —The Atlantic's
James Fallows has already said that the mere firing of Comey is "worse than
Watergate." Think about that for a second. No one disputes the FBI director
serves at the pleasure of the president and he can fire him whenever he
wants. What "Watergate" revealed was not simply Richard Nixon's willingness
to lie and cover up criminal activity committed on his behalf, but an entire
apparatus to spy on, pervert, and undermine elected government.
Assuming the worst about Trump at this point, his behavior doesn't come
close to rising to that level or the actions undertaken by, say, Ronald
Reagan during Iran-Contra. If anything, Trump is such an idiot that he is
sealing his own fate by forcing congressional Republicans, most of whom
don't particularly care for him anyway, to call for bigger and better
investigations about Russian influence in the 2016 election. Short-termers
such as Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz are already subpoenaing whatever memories
James Comey jotted down during his generally mediocre-to-awful tenure as
head of the FBI. Comey is the guy, we should recall, who tried to strong-arm
Apple into undermining its phone encryption even though it was able to crack
the San Bernadino's phone just fine, who gave Hillary Clinton aides immunity
and allowed them to destroy their laptops, and recently attacked the First
Amendment because it gave Wikileaks space to publish authentic-if-purloined
documents. The best thing you can say about Comey is that he's no Louis
Freeh or J. Edgar Hoover, which is the textbook case of damning with faint
approbation.
Needless to say, none of this absolves Donald Trump of any wrongdoing. But
impeachment talk this soon and this thick is coming not from a place of
seriousness but pure partisanship and ideology masquerading as disinterested
belief in the public good. When the Republicans moved to impeach Bill
Clinton back in the 1990s, it was the same thing and it didn't exactly work
out that well for many of the main conspirators, or for the country at
large. Among other things, the impeachment push indirectly led to the ouster
of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, which eventuated in an actual
child molester being way high up in the presidential line of succession.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton was one of the major mileposts in the long,
ongoing shift of America from a high-trust to a low-trust country, one in
which faith, trust, and confidence in most of our major public, private, and
civic institutions have taken a massive beating for decades now. Maybe it
was the Warren Commission Report that got the ball rolling, or Lyndon
Johnson's infamous "credibility gap." All the secret wars in Cambodia and
Watergate sure didn't help and the mind-boggling revelations of the Church
Commission might have the final nail in the coffin of trust. The Pinto
disaster sure didn't help, nor did other revelations of private-sector
fakery. You throw in freakazoid oddness such as the People's Temple, United
Way scandals, and rampant Catholic Church buggery, and, well, what do you
expect? Across the board, fewer and fewer of us trust the government, the
media, labor, corporations, etc. to do the right thing given the option of
doing the wrong thing.
And get this: However unpopular Donald Trump is, Congress is even less
trustworthy. Libertarians especially ignore this slide in trust and the rush
to partisan-driven calls to undermine elected officials absent actual
evidence at our peril. Low-trust countries don't actually shrink the size,
scope, and spending of government. Perversely, citizens call for "government
regulation, fully recognizing that such regulation leads to corruption." It
helps to understand that Donald Trump, for all of his obvious bullshitting,
flip-flops, and lies, isn't the cause of anything but the effect. The 21st
century in the United States began with an election that was effectively
settled by a coin toss, which does little to create faith in institutions
(especially as Republicans in Bush v. Gore appealed to the federal
government, while Democrats called for state's rights). Then came the 9/11
attacks, an intelligence failure compounded by a massively mendacious
disinformation campaign that resulted in a Middle East quagmire, ballooning
deficits, and a mind-bending bailout of mega-corporations. President Obama's
stimulus plan failed every measure it proposed as success and was capped by
passage of a health-care law that ultimately spawned the "Lie of the Year"
for 2013. Along the way, we also had a series of national intelligence heads
baldly lie about what sorts of information was being collected (illegally,
legally, does it matter?) on law-abiding Americans? We've learned that
police act poorly in many circumstances, that local and state governments
are awful as often as they are outstanding, and that corporations
(Volkswagen!) will try to get away with lots of chicanery too.
Of course trust in institutions is mostly at all-time lows! That's why
Donald Trump was able to beat Hillary Clinton in one of the weirdest,
most-unpredictable elections ever. Trump is the function of our
disillusionment and that's one of the reasons why he is ultimately an
electoral dead-end. Never a consistent conservative or Republican, he is the
sterile end of 20th-century politics, the last in a long line of
bullies-who-will-tell-us-how-to-live that has no future. Despite some good
deregulatory gestures, he is too mired in 1970s' nostalgia and a world that
ceased to exist even before his first divorce. That was enough to squeak by
Hillary Clinton, who also didn't bother to offer a future-oriented vision
for America, so secure was she in her historic victory.
For the rest of us, though, especially those of us of a libertarian bent, we
need not simply to expect better but to demand better. Regardless of slow
economic growth throughout this century, regardless of the endless wars in
which America is mired, and regardless of the ever-growing wall of petty and
grand regulations and restrictions against new ways of doing business and
living life, we are living in a fundamentally Libertarian Moment, one in
which more and more of us are more able than ever to live where we want,
work where we want, marry whom we want, eat what we want, and travel where
we want. As Matt Welch and I wrote in The Declaration of Independents: How
Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, politics is a
lagging indicator of where America is headed. Outside of the political
realm, our lives are mostly getting better. The challenge—a brutal, one
given current circumstances—is how to drag politics into the 21st century so
that we finally leave behind two major political parties that are so awful
neither of their candidates could win even 50 percent of the popular vote.
One thing is clear: Cleaving to right/left, conservative/liberal,
Republican/Democrat tribes in a world in which more and more people define
themselves as libertarian isn't going to work. Neither will falling for
fake-news narratives about Trump's historical badness. We need a new
politics that is ultimately based on policy, not personalities; policy, not
politics; and policy, not partisanship. We need to demand more of our
elected representatives and we need to start yesterday.
Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and the
co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How
Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (2011/2012). He is
also a columnist for The Daily Beast.
All This Impeachment Talk Is Pure Trump Derangement Syndrome
That man in the White House is vulgar, disrespectul, maybe even dangerous.
So what?
Nick Gillespie|May. 17, 2017 5:00 pm
Reason
Reason
Well this didn't take long, did it?
Donald Trump, the most-unlikely and least-liked president in the history of
the United States, had barely celebrated his first 100 days when calls for
his impeachment started flying faster than Andrew Weiner dick pics at a Girl
Scout cookout. For the good of democracy, don't you see, the Republicans
must not only be kicked to the curb in the 2018 midterms, but the president
himself must be thrown into the street, just like he once tried to evict
that old lady from her house in Atlantic City!
In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, whose recent
testimony on Hillary Clinton's emails was so flawed and incompetent that his
underlings immediately issued a clarification to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, virtually every non-Republican #NeverTrumper (plus Sen. John
McCain, who has some good reasons to hate Trump) has called for The Donald's
head on a platter. And this was all before the tantalizing possibility of a
"Comey memo" detailing various attempts by Trump to shut down an
investigation of possible ties between former National Security Adviser Mike
Flynn and Russian operatives.
But let's get real: At this point in the game, all the explainers about how
impeachment works (the 1990s called, they want their sex scandals back!) and
adapting the 25th Amendment's ability to remove the president from
decision-making during colonoscopies to the current crisis are evidence-free
exercises in ideological masturbation. If we are going to survive not just
the Trump years but eventually get around to kick-starting the 21st century,
we're going to have become smarter media consumers and demand more from both
our politicians and the press. "The New York Times has not viewed a copy of
the memo," explains the Paper of Record, "but one of Mr. Comey's associates
read parts of it to a Times reporter." As Reason's Scott Shackford has
noted, that's what Joe Biden would call a "big fucking deal" if it turns out
to exist and to be accurate. It's also a pretty big if at this point.
But even before Comey's possible "paper trail" documenting President Trump's
demands (which may or may not actually rise to the level of impeachable
offense) came to light, his enemies were out in force. For god's sake, they
wanted him impeached even before he was the Republican nominee.
"An attempt to obstruct justice is an impeachable offense," huffed Andrew
Sullivan in New York magazine last week. "And Trump has just openly admitted
to such a thing" because "sources close to Comey" said the president-elect
asked the FBI director for his "personal loyalty." What unemotional
analysis. Remember that a year ago, Sullivan called the possibility of a
Trump presidency an "extinction-level threat" to mom, apple pie, and
Chevrolet. Elsewhere in New York, Jonathan Chait, who is as doggedly a
Democratic partisan that exists in print, put out an article under the
headline, "The Law Can't Stop Trump. Only Impeachment Can." Trump's high
crime for Chait was the completely opaque charge that Trump shared
classified intel with Russian officials visiting the White House, a charge
flatly rebutted by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who said the
shared info was "wholly appropriate" and that "the president in no way
compromised any sources or methods." For Chait though, and so many more
either openly in "the Resistance" or just fellow-traveling, the real problem
is that America never anticipated peckerwoods being in the Oval Office. "The
system is set up with the unstated presumption that the president is a
responsible person who will act in a broadly legitimate, competent fashion,"
writes Chait. "The system is designed so that the only remedy for a
president who cannot faithfully act in the public interest is impeachment."
Forget all that Madisonian mumbo-jumbo about "if men were angels, no
government would be necessary." A real-estate developer from Queens with
history's worst comb-over is about the bring the Statue of Liberty to her
knees like an ISIS captive. Indeed, whether or not James Comey's memos
detailing his version of Trump's perfidies against a free-and-independent
FBI—you know, that august institution which has one of the very worst
records among any law-enforcement agency of abusing power —The Atlantic's
James Fallows has already said that the mere firing of Comey is "worse than
Watergate." Think about that for a second. No one disputes the FBI director
serves at the pleasure of the president and he can fire him whenever he
wants. What "Watergate" revealed was not simply Richard Nixon's willingness
to lie and cover up criminal activity committed on his behalf, but an entire
apparatus to spy on, pervert, and undermine elected government.
Assuming the worst about Trump at this point, his behavior doesn't come
close to rising to that level or the actions undertaken by, say, Ronald
Reagan during Iran-Contra. If anything, Trump is such an idiot that he is
sealing his own fate by forcing congressional Republicans, most of whom
don't particularly care for him anyway, to call for bigger and better
investigations about Russian influence in the 2016 election. Short-termers
such as Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz are already subpoenaing whatever memories
James Comey jotted down during his generally mediocre-to-awful tenure as
head of the FBI. Comey is the guy, we should recall, who tried to strong-arm
Apple into undermining its phone encryption even though it was able to crack
the San Bernadino's phone just fine, who gave Hillary Clinton aides immunity
and allowed them to destroy their laptops, and recently attacked the First
Amendment because it gave Wikileaks space to publish authentic-if-purloined
documents. The best thing you can say about Comey is that he's no Louis
Freeh or J. Edgar Hoover, which is the textbook case of damning with faint
approbation.
Needless to say, none of this absolves Donald Trump of any wrongdoing. But
impeachment talk this soon and this thick is coming not from a place of
seriousness but pure partisanship and ideology masquerading as disinterested
belief in the public good. When the Republicans moved to impeach Bill
Clinton back in the 1990s, it was the same thing and it didn't exactly work
out that well for many of the main conspirators, or for the country at
large. Among other things, the impeachment push indirectly led to the ouster
of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, which eventuated in an actual
child molester being way high up in the presidential line of succession.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton was one of the major mileposts in the long,
ongoing shift of America from a high-trust to a low-trust country, one in
which faith, trust, and confidence in most of our major public, private, and
civic institutions have taken a massive beating for decades now. Maybe it
was the Warren Commission Report that got the ball rolling, or Lyndon
Johnson's infamous "credibility gap." All the secret wars in Cambodia and
Watergate sure didn't help and the mind-boggling revelations of the Church
Commission might have the final nail in the coffin of trust. The Pinto
disaster sure didn't help, nor did other revelations of private-sector
fakery. You throw in freakazoid oddness such as the People's Temple, United
Way scandals, and rampant Catholic Church buggery, and, well, what do you
expect? Across the board, fewer and fewer of us trust the government, the
media, labor, corporations, etc. to do the right thing given the option of
doing the wrong thing.
And get this: However unpopular Donald Trump is, Congress is even less
trustworthy. Libertarians especially ignore this slide in trust and the rush
to partisan-driven calls to undermine elected officials absent actual
evidence at our peril. Low-trust countries don't actually shrink the size,
scope, and spending of government. Perversely, citizens call for "government
regulation, fully recognizing that such regulation leads to corruption." It
helps to understand that Donald Trump, for all of his obvious bullshitting,
flip-flops, and lies, isn't the cause of anything but the effect. The 21st
century in the United States began with an election that was effectively
settled by a coin toss, which does little to create faith in institutions
(especially as Republicans in Bush v. Gore appealed to the federal
government, while Democrats called for state's rights). Then came the 9/11
attacks, an intelligence failure compounded by a massively mendacious
disinformation campaign that resulted in a Middle East quagmire, ballooning
deficits, and a mind-bending bailout of mega-corporations. President Obama's
stimulus plan failed every measure it proposed as success and was capped by
passage of a health-care law that ultimately spawned the "Lie of the Year"
for 2013. Along the way, we also had a series of national intelligence heads
baldly lie about what sorts of information was being collected (illegally,
legally, does it matter?) on law-abiding Americans? We've learned that
police act poorly in many circumstances, that local and state governments
are awful as often as they are outstanding, and that corporations
(Volkswagen!) will try to get away with lots of chicanery too.
Of course trust in institutions is mostly at all-time lows! That's why
Donald Trump was able to beat Hillary Clinton in one of the weirdest,
most-unpredictable elections ever. Trump is the function of our
disillusionment and that's one of the reasons why he is ultimately an
electoral dead-end. Never a consistent conservative or Republican, he is the
sterile end of 20th-century politics, the last in a long line of
bullies-who-will-tell-us-how-to-live that has no future. Despite some good
deregulatory gestures, he is too mired in 1970s' nostalgia and a world that
ceased to exist even before his first divorce. That was enough to squeak by
Hillary Clinton, who also didn't bother to offer a future-oriented vision
for America, so secure was she in her historic victory.
For the rest of us, though, especially those of us of a libertarian bent, we
need not simply to expect better but to demand better. Regardless of slow
economic growth throughout this century, regardless of the endless wars in
which America is mired, and regardless of the ever-growing wall of petty and
grand regulations and restrictions against new ways of doing business and
living life, we are living in a fundamentally Libertarian Moment, one in
which more and more of us are more able than ever to live where we want,
work where we want, marry whom we want, eat what we want, and travel where
we want. As Matt Welch and I wrote in The Declaration of Independents: How
Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, politics is a
lagging indicator of where America is headed. Outside of the political
realm, our lives are mostly getting better. The challenge—a brutal, one
given current circumstances—is how to drag politics into the 21st century so
that we finally leave behind two major political parties that are so awful
neither of their candidates could win even 50 percent of the popular vote.
One thing is clear: Cleaving to right/left, conservative/liberal,
Republican/Democrat tribes in a world in which more and more people define
themselves as libertarian isn't going to work. Neither will falling for
fake-news narratives about Trump's historical badness. We need a new
politics that is ultimately based on policy, not personalities; policy, not
politics; and policy, not partisanship. We need to demand more of our
elected representatives and we need to start yesterday.
Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and the
co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How
Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (2011/2012). He is
also a columnist for The Daily Beast.
