Conrad Black
The Democrats are not going to be able to hide much longer behind their Trump hatred. But it’s really all they’ve got.
"These are among the darkest days of American democracy. With nearly airtight totalitarian uniformity, the American media robotically repeat that there is no possible argument to be made that the 2020 presidential election produced an unjust result. In the same magical spirit of post-electoral unanimity, President Trump has been condemned for his remarks to hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Washington on January 6, and it is now a political commandment that he is responsible for the ensuing illegal forced entry and fatal violence at the United States Capitol.
"He actually told his supporters that they should “peacefully and patriotically make your voices be heard” when they proceeded on to the Capitol; this is a minor inconvenience to the confected consensus that the president shouldn’t serve out the last week of his term.
"There remains no conclusive evidence that Richard Nixon broke any laws in the Watergate affair, though some members of his entourage did. But it was not hard to foresee that driving him from office (a very capable president who had been reelected by what remains the greatest plurality in U.S. history) would addict the American political system to the criminalization of policy differences."
"As the patriotic traditionalist he was, Nixon resigned rather than put the country through the humiliation of an impeachment trial, an extremity that had only occurred once in U.S. presidential history, a silly and unsuccessful action against Andrew Johnson in 1868. President Clinton was impeached in 1998-1999 over a dishonest answer to a grand jury about his extramarital sex life, tawdry but inadequate grounds for removing a president from office. The impeachment of President Trump last year over an innocuous telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine was fatuous: the charges were not impeachable offenses and there was no evidence that they actually occurred.
"No honest and informed person can doubt there is room for skepticism about the accuracy of the presidential vote in five or six states in the November presidential election. As with the elections of 1876 (Rutherford Hayes), 1960 (John F. Kennedy), and 2000 (George W. Bush), we will never know who really won, but once the system has produced a result, it doesn’t matter, except to the individuals involved." . . .
