Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Unhealthy Obsession

President Donald Trump has been cleared of the charge of colluding with Russia to fix the 2016 election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have, after two years of searching and spending $25 million of taxpayers' money, found no evidence to support the charge that had seemed to many in the media as a matter of course: That Mr. Trump was guilty.

So certain were they of the president's culpability that they were willing to forfeit their professional credibility by uttering numerous very intemperate asseverations as a video at Grabien.com documents.

One wonders what evidence that the special prosecutor did not have that these people did have which convinced them that Mr. Trump would surely be found guilty of crimes, some of which (treason) carry the death penalty.

And if they had no evidence but were simply engaging in wishful thinking their irresponsibility in perpetuating what amounts to a slander on the president and further divides an already divided country.

Not only have they been complicit in setting Americans more sharply against each other, but they've made it very difficult for Mr. Trump to succeed on the foreign policy stage since most of our adversaries, like China and North Korea, have probably assumed that the president would soon be politically crippled and that there was no point in truckling to him in whatever negotiations were taking place.

So far from rejoicing that the president is not a traitor many of his domestic enemies are, like those ISIS holdouts in Syria, refusing to give up and admit their error and are instead pinning their desperate hopes on Mueller's claim that although there was insufficient evidence to support the allegation that the president also obstructed justice, there was also insufficient reason to conclude that he did not.

This rather ambiguous loose end has been seized upon by the Democrats in Congress and the media as justification for pressing on in their pursuit of Mr. Trump. Like Captain Ahab obsessed with wreaking vengeance on Moby Dick they're determined to politically and legally harpoon the president, even if their monomania destroys their party's electoral chances in 2020.

Their hatred for Donald Trump is beginning to appear even to some of their allies as all-consuming, and their failure to defeat him in 2016 and their subsequent failures to rid the White House of him seems, like Chief Inspector Dreyfus' failure to rid himself of the inept Inspector Clouseau in the old Pink Panther movies, to be driving them toward madness.

The progressive media has destroyed whatever credibility they may have had in their reporting and commentary of the "Russian Collusion" story, as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi observes, so maybe it's time for all these folks to take a deep breath or two and just let it go before they wind up like Chief Inspector Dreyfus.