Injustice Wins Bigly in Verdict

Yesterday, I commented on how badly the Democrats' desperate and ill-conceived plan to convict Trump on questionable grounds would backfire on them.

Today, we move on to the bigger picture: How that ridiculous move is going to injure America.

Teaser: The damage is greater than before, and while a few are pointing out one important part of it, nobody that I can tell is even aware of the other, more important part.

In The Hill, a piece titled "Trump Verdict Brings GOP Skeptics Into the Fold," Alexander Bolton leads by noting that the verdict has rallied the Republicans:

Cropped from image by Jack Skinner, via Unsplash, license.

"This decision has the same dramatic effect across the country like President Clinton's impeachment. They are very different scenarios, but both caused a massive rally effect. With Clinton it was Democrats, and now with Trump it's Republicans who believe there is judicial overreach," said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior Senate and House leadership aide.

Bonjean said McConnell's surprise defense of Trump is a signal to the other traditional, mainstream Republicans to rally behind the former president.

He qualifies this a little bit when he cites a Republican strategist as saying (much as I have) that, "You can do two things simultaneously, say, 'Hey, I'm not a big fan of Trump, but at the same time, this is completely wrong.'" He also notes that Mike Pence, who hasn't endorsed Trump called the verdict an "outrage and disservice to the nation."

So far, we're still talking about the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, but the article hints at something else, which usually escapes today's perceptual-level, chase the next shiny object mainstream journalists:

[Senator Lisa] Murkowski [(R-AK)] said it was a "shame" the presidential election has "focused on personalities and legal problems rather than a debate about policies that would lift up Americans."

"These distractions have given the Biden campaign a free pass as the focus has shifted from Biden's indefensible record and the damage his policies have done to Alaska and our nation's economy to Trump's legal drama," she lamented.

Biden's not the only one getting a pass, here, and the trial really has only highlighted the issue of such distractions displacing what little discussion of policy there might otherwise have been. Or, perhaps in this case, we are being kept from discovering how similar the two main candidates are on policy (e.g., economics), save for how atrocious Biden is on energy and labor, and how horrible Trump is on abortion and immigration.

I would add that the cause of justice has been injured far more than is apparent. Yes, this trial was an abuse of the legal system, but its outcome has made Donald Trump -- a petty, vindictive, person of low moral character and microscopic soul -- look like a persecuted victim, and nobody is better-equipped at playing the victim game than he.

The value of a good legal system and the importance of good moral character are now playing second fiddle to ... the plight of a politician in an election whose outcome is arguably irrelevant, given how poor the two choices are.

I remember learning as a child about what great men George Washington and the other Founding Fathers were. This was a time that little boys dreaming of being President one day was a common form of hero-worship and an early form of patriotism, of beginning to see America as a land of opportunity.

There is nothing to admire about either of Trump or Biden, and the injustice of the first and power-hungriness of the second are poor examples, and unbefitting of the country our Founders created, but would increasingly have trouble recognizing today.

Both of these base men have eroded the sense that America is land of justice, and I trust neither of them to do the job of keeping her that way. It is a shame that one of these will be President next term, and that one made it possible for the other to profit from the visceral indignation that injustice provokes -- or at least will provoke unless we permit ourselves to bedome acustomed to the unjust society each of them seems to want.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected postal abbreviation for Alaska and a typo.