How will second Trump impeachment impact the future of the GOP?
FOX News contributor Deroy Murdock discusses how Republican support of Trump impeachment could affect political landscape.
It would be bad enough if President-elect Joe Biden were a sore loser. Even worse: He’s a sore winner.
Biden pledged something completely different.
"With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation," Biden said on November 7. "It’s time for America to unite. And to heal."
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On December 27, he wrote via Twitter: "After a year of pain and loss, it’s time to unite, heal, and rebuild."
"Here’s my promise to you: I’ll be a president for all Americans," Biden proclaimed on January 3.
Biden’s inaugural theme: "America United."
Alas, those warm words T-boned into Biden’s frosty speech last Thursday in Wilmington.
Biden could have said:
"Let me thank Vice President Mike Pence for his grace under pressure as he presided over yesterday’s Electoral College certification ceremony. What a contrast to the deadly rampage by some of the president’s extremist supporters. As good people on both sides agree, they should be prosecuted. I will see to that.
"Ultimately, these lethal zealots failed to derail the people’s work. Last night, at 3:40 a.m., Vice President Pence announced that Kamala Harris and I will become your next vice president and president on January 20. We cannot wait to serve every American, including the 80 million who voted for us and the 75 million who did not. Together, in just 13 days, we will continue to build a more perfect union."
Rather than such conciliatory comments — with appropriate opprobrium for the toxic U.S. Capitol vandals — Biden slammed Trump and kicked gravel in his supporters’ faces.
Angry, and often screaming, Biden complained: "The past four years, we’ve had a president who’s…unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of our democracy from the outset."
Biden ignored the Obama-Biden administration’s espionage against the opposition party’s presidential nominee and the Democrats’ deployment of a Russian-disinformation dossier to torpedo Trump’s campaign.
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After Trump won, Democrats abused their offices to sabotage the peaceful transition of power, sandbag incoming national security advisor Michael Flynn with imaginary Russian-collusion charges, and saddle President Donald J. Trump with the Russiagate hoax for three years.
This seems rather anti-democratic.
As for the relentlessly parroted Democrat lie that Trump and Vladimir Putin plotted to win the White House, former FBI chief Robert Mueller and 14 liberal-Democrat prosecutors concluded: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities."
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In another act of psychological projection, Biden further thundered about Trump: "He’s attacked the free press who dared to question his power, repeatedly calling the free press ‘the enemy of the people.’"
The president has used this debatable term to describe the left-wing media. But he has been transparent, probably to a fault, and has done nothing to hinder press freedom.
Conversely, Biden must have forgotten that the Obama-Biden administration treated journalists like enemies of the people. Obama’s press conferences were rare, unlike Trump’s nearly continuous media access.
And Obama-Biden spied on the Associated Press in May 2012. In a putative leak probe, DOJ seized the records for 21 phones used by some 100 AP news people.
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Biden accused Trump of "Treating the attorney general as his personal lawyer and the department as his personal law firm." Biden somehow forgot Obama-Biden’s first attorney general, Eric Holder. While running the Justice Department, Holder said: "I’m still the President’s wing-man, so I’m there with my boy."
Holder actively concealed from Congress subpoenaed documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal. Consequently, in June 2012, he became the first sitting Cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress. At Obama’s direction, Holder investigated himself in the aforementioned journalist-surveillance outrage. Holder’s inquest concluded that Holder did nothing wrong. Now a left-wing activist, Holder notoriously said of Republicans: "When they go low, we kick them."
Biden devolved from convenient omissions to bald-faced lies.
Trump "deployed the United States military, tear-gassing peaceful protesters in pursuit of a photo opportunity," Biden claimed.
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These were not "peaceful protesters" near the White House in June. As U.S. Park Police Acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan said June 2: "Violent protestors on H Street NW began throwing projectiles including bricks, frozen water bottles, and caustic liquids."
He added: "Intelligence had revealed calls for violence against the police, and officers found caches of glass bottles, baseball bats, and metal poles hidden along the street."
When protesters were told to evacuate and allow a security perimeter, they refused. So, the USPP and Secret Service — not the U.S. military — cleared Lafayette Park. They did so with smoke canisters and pepper spray, but "did not use tear gas."
Biden claimed that Trump’s June 1 "photo-op" showed him "holding the Bible upside down."
Every Google Images picture that I found of Trump at St. John’s Episcopal Church — where every president since James Madison has worshipped — showed the Bible right side up. I saw zero photos of inverted Scripture. If Trump held the Bible upside down, even briefly, he quickly set it right — as everyone swiftly does in such situations.
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Also, Biden failed to note in June and last week that Trump’s "photo op" expressed solidarity with a historic church whose adjacent parish house was set ablaze the previous night during the left’s George Floyd riots.
There was nothing wrong, and everything right, with the president of the United States standing before that legendary shrine and, in essence, throwing his institutional asbestos blanket over it.
Biden then argued that the Capitol Police virtually welcomed the marauders. "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,"
Biden growled. Kamala Harris grumbled: "We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer."
BLM co-founder Alicia Garza told MSNBC: "Vanilla ISIS was almost literally given milk and cookies."
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The Capitol Police did not wave in the pro-Trump hooligans. As news footage confirms, they fought the rabble, but were overwhelmed. As rioters swamped barricades, outmanned cops had few options but to fall back. That said, they did tear gas the invaders. And one officer allegedly shot and killed Ashli Babbit, a 14-year Air Force veteran.
So, the notion that so-called "white nationalists" were ushered into the Capitol is yet another ugly, fractious lie.
And, besides, Democrats who wish that police had acted more assertively violate Black Lives Matter’s agenda: cops must de-escalate, use non-fatal force, and, generally, stand down. The same Democrats who screamed to declaw and defund the police now demand Super Cops.
Which is it?
For her part, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., further racialized this ugliness. "There are people in our country, led by this president, for the moment, who have chosen their whiteness over democracy."
The Capitol riot was hideous. But there was nothing white, Black, Hispanic, or Asian about it. Why throw racial butane on a fire already roaring with anti-democratic gasoline?
Meanwhile, remember some of what brings Americans together: Independence Day parades, the World Series, impeachment. That’s right: Pelosi and her House Democrats plan to impeach President Trump, for the second time, today.
This would require the Senate to suspend important work, such as confirming Biden’s Cabinet secretaries and instead try Trump, with no guarantee that all 50 Democrats and at least 17 Republicans would convict him. This would enrage the 47 percent of voters who backed Trump.
With one call, Biden could tell Pelosi to stand down. Instead, he has dodged this pivotal question. "We’re going to do our job and Congress can decide how to proceed with theirs," Biden said.
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So, Biden will let Pelosi tear the country in two, like the ripped pages of her copy of Trump’s last State of the Union address.
All of this should surprise only the gullible. Joe Biden — lovable Grandpa Lunchbucket from Scranton — turns out to be a divider, not a uniter.
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