11/9/2018 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com
The war in Washington
will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense
that now.
This is a fight to the
finish.
A postelection truce
that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi --
"I give her a great deal of credit for what she's done and what she's
accomplished" -- was ancient history by nightfall.
With the forced
resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his replacement by his chief
of staff, Matthew Whitaker, the long-anticipated confrontation with Robert
Mueller appears at hand.
Sessions had recused
himself from the oversight role of the special counsel's investigation into
Russiagate. Whitaker has definitely not.
Before joining Justice,
he said that the Mueller probe was overreaching, going places it had no
authority to go, and that it could be leashed by a new attorney general and
starved of funds until it passes away.
Whitaker was not chosen
to be merely a place holder until a new AG is confirmed. He was picked so he
can get the job done.
And about time.
For two years, Trump
has been under a cloud of unproven allegations and suspicion that he and top
campaign officials colluded with Vladimir Putin's Russia to thieve and publish
the emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It is past time for
Mueller to prove these charges or concede he has a busted flush, wrap up his
investigation and go home.
And now, in T.S.
Eliot's words, Trump appears to have found "the strength to force the
moment to its crisis."
His attitude toward
Mueller's probe is taking on the aspect of Andrew Jackson's attitude toward
Nicholas Biddle's Second Bank of the United States: It's "trying to kill
me, but I will kill it."
Trump has been warned
by congressional Democrats that if he in any way impedes the work of Mueller's
office, he risks impeachment.
Well, let's find out.
If the House Judiciary
Committee of incoming chairman Jerrold Nadler wishes to impeach Trump for
forcing Mueller to fish or cut bait, Trump's allies should broaden the debate to
the real motivation here of the defeated establishment: It detests the man the
American people chose to lead their country and thus wants to use its political
and cultural power to effect his removal.
Even before news of
Sessions' departure hit Wednesday, Trump was subjected to an Antifa-style
hassling by the White House press corps.
One reporter berated
the president and refused to surrender the microphone. Others shouted support
for his antics. A third demanded to know whether Trump's admission that he's a
"nationalist" would give aid and comfort to "white
nationalists."
By picking up the
credentials of CNN's Jim Acosta and booting him out of the White House, Trump
has set a good precedent.
Freedom of the press
does not mean guaranteed immunity of the press from the same kind of abuse the
press directs at the president.
John F. Kennedy was
beloved by the media elite. Yet JFK canceled all White House subscriptions to
the New York Herald Tribune and called the publisher of The New York Times to
get him to pull reporter David Halberstam out of Vietnam for undermining U.S.
morale in a war in which Green Berets were dying.
Some journalists have
become Trump haters with press passes. And Trump is right to speak truth to
mainstream media power and to accord to the chronically hostile press the same
access to the White House to which Robert De Niro is entitled. Since the days
of John Adams, the White House has been the president's house, not the press's
house.
Pelosi appears the
favorite to return as speaker of the House. But she may find her coming days in
the post she loves to be less-than-happy times.
Some of her incoming
committee chairs -- namely, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings --
seem less interested in legislative compromises than in rummaging through White
House files for documents to damage the president, starting with his tax
returns.
To a world watching
with fascination this death struggle convulsing our capital, one wonders how
attractive American democracy appears.
And just how much division
can this democracy stand?
We know what the left
thinks of Trump's "base."
Hillary Clinton told
us. Half his supporters, she said, are a "basket of deplorables" who
are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- you name
it." Lately, America's populist right has been called fascist and
neo-Nazi.
How can the left
"unite" with people like that? Why should the left not try to drive
such "racists" out of power by any means necessary?
This is the thinking
that bred Antifa.
As for those on the right
-- as they watch the left disparage the old heroes, tear down their monuments,
purge Christianity from their public schools -- they have come to conclude that
their enemies are at root anti-Christian and anti-American.
How do we unify a
nation where the opposing camps believe this?
What the
Trump-establishment war is about is the soul of America, a war in which a
compromise on principle can be seen as a betrayal.
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