By Mike Huckabee
May 12, 2020
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"THE RULE OF LAW"
I mentioned recently that among Republicans, it’s common wisdom that if you want to know what the Democrats are really doing, just look at what they’re accusing the Republicans of doing. Now, fate has gifted us with the perfect example: that strategically “leaked” phone call in which former President Obama says of the dropping of charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of the rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
Yes, and one of those places where all that happened was the Obama Justice Department.
David Harsanyi at National Review has an excellent article, explaining why Obama’s comments, framed as a warning but actually a desperate message to his followers on how to spin what’s coming, are the opposite of the truth.
For a “Constitutional law professor” (actually, a lecturer), Obama doesn’t even get the charge right: Flynn wasn’t charged with perjury. But Obama’s own party let Bill Clinton commit perjury and get off scot-free, so that’s hardly “unprecedented.” Plus, we’re not talking about letting a convicted person go scot-free but dropping the charges after it became clear there was prosecutorial misconduct, which is common and a perfect example of the “rule of law.” And if Obama would like a prior example of a military general who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI getting an actual pardon from a President, then how about that time he pardoned Gen. James E. Cartwright?
BEWARE OF DROPPING SHOES
The shoes in the Obama DOJ targeting of Trump scandal are suddenly dropping so fast, it’s almost like Fred Astaire tap-dancing. The latest revelation: Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has decided to declassify the information about the Obama officials who illegally “unmasked” Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. “Unmasking” is when the government reveals the identities of people who had conversations with surveillance targets, even if they did nothing wrong. It’s also a good way to covertly smear political opponents by tarring their reputations from behind a wall of government secrecy.
The next shoe to drop will come when those names are made public. I look forward to hearing all the howls of wounded indignation from Obama officials about how outrageous it is that the Trump administration publicly revealed that they illegally publicly revealed information about other people. Talk about an entertaining tap dance!
OUT OF CONTEXT
The White House is complaining that on Sunday, one of the major broadcast network news shows took comments of a top Administration official out of context and aired misleadingly-edited footage designed to deceive viewers and make the President look bad.
Oh, to be clear: I’m not talking about the way NBC’s “Meet the Press” misleadingly edited Attorney General Bill Barr’s comments about the Flynn case. No, this time, I’m talking about how CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” misleadingly edited Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s comments about the origins of the coronavirus. Boy, you can’t keep the fake news straight without a TV Guide!
I think it’s safe to say that we’ve now reached a point where the more mainstream political news you watch, the less you actually know.
SPECIAL ELECTION
Today, there’s a special election in California’s 25th Congressional District (Northern L.A. and Ventura Counties), and the Trump campaign is accusing Democrats of trying the steal it. Republican Stephen Knight lost the seat in 2018 to Democrat Katie Hill, amid charges that the new “vote by mail” law allowed widespread cheating by ballot harvesting. But Hill was quickly forced to resign amid an unsavory “throuple” ethics scandal involving a female aide.
With early mail returns showing a wide lead for Republican Mike Garcia, a former Navy fighter pilot and combat veteran, on Friday afternoon, the state allowed an in-person voting center to open in a heavily-minority/Democrat area, while the district is still under a stay-at-home lockdown order. Republicans say it’s an obvious attempt to unfairly boost Democratic turnout while suppressing the Republican vote.
The L.A. Democratic Party responded, “We’re sorry the [NRCC] & [Mike Garcia] don’t believe voters, especially voters of color, in Lancaster should have adequate access to voting centers in their city to vote. We & [Democratic candidate Christy Smith] believe everyone should be able to vote safely in their communities.”
I’ve heard of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but claiming that African-Americans and Hispanics are incapable of finding a mailbox sounds to me like hardcore bigotry. Or to put the best possible spin on it, “insulting rationalization.” But the solution to is for Republicans who haven’t voted by mail to show up at the small number of in-person polling places and vote.
To be contrarian, wouldn’t it be great if this backfired and the vote in the heavily minority area went mostly to the Republican? I like to think those hard-working, religious minority voters might prefer the Party that knows how to rebuild a faltering economy and create jobs over the one that shuts down businesses, tramples on people’s rights, and actually gave us the first Congressional ethics scandal that forced us to learn the word "throuple."
MISINFORMATION
Twitter is joining Facebook and Google/YouTube in flagging tweets that they claim include “misinformation,” about the coronavirus. The tweets will be tagged with a warning that "some or all of the content shared in this tweet conflicts with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19."
Here’s my question: will they go back in the archives a few weeks or months and flag tweets from “public health experts” that conflict with the guidance they’re giving us now?
I don’t want people circulating damaging misinformation, but the so-called “experts” haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory lately. Instead of admitting that this is a new disease we know very little about, and we are learning new things all the time that contradict previous assumptions, some government health “experts” keep saying things with absolute certainty that they later contradict -- with absolute certainty.
For instance, I’ve heard that masks do nothing to protect you from the disease and wearing them takes them away from health workers who need them; then that everyone should wear a mask and squeal to the cops if you see someone not wearing one; and then that only people giving care to virus patients should wear them…and all of those advisories came from “public health experts.”
But if President Trump quoted a “health expert” saying something that was later reversed, that was just Trump being a “LYING LIAR!!”
The fact is, this is a new and unconventional disease, and while we don’t want to encourage quackery, we should also be open to a little thinking outside the box, preferably untainted with political biases. For instance, William Sullivan at The American Thinker recounts some theories from people who are medical experts but who contradict the media-approved “experts.” Like why are 66% of new hospitalizations in New York among people who followed the experts’ advice to shelter at home? One doctor believes it’s because it was a terrible mistake to send healthy young people who are resistant to the virus home from college to breathe the same air as their older parents and grandparents.
Why have the same reporters who demand reams of peer-reviewed studies of hydroxychloroquine not asked to see any large-scale studies of whether “social distancing” actually works? Even if they had, sorry: there aren’t any.
And why did the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which was basically a “floating petri dish,” end up with only a 23% infection rate of the crew and a 0.09% fatality rate?
We’re all supposed to just shut up, stay home and go without paychecks because the “experts” say so, yet those same experts have repeatedly been wrong and can’t seem to answer a number of basic questions about the disease. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “We’re learning more as we go, but we just don’t know enough yet.” But you can’t expect Americans to go along with the destruction of their lives, businesses and Constitutional rights on the argument, “Because I say so, and I’m an expert!”
Obama may be a master at spinning current events, but history is written in stone, and that’s very hard to spin.
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.
James 1:22 (KJV)
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