If you were to take it from the liberal media, you would think that not only was Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer unique in terms of the 2016 election but that it was unprecedented in the annals of American politics. A presidential campaign DARING to meet with a representative of a foreign government? Oh, no. We need to bring back the gallows and hang Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner for treason against these United States!
Unfortunately, too many news junkies are beginning to buy into the hype.
And hype is all that it is, let’s be really honest here. No one’s going to prison. How could they? No crime has been committed. This is – and always has been and always will be – a story meant to anchor the Trump agenda in place. And all you have to do is look at President Trump’s latest approval numbers to see that it’s working. Americans aren’t particularly happy with the Democratic Party these days, but there’s no question that the Dems have managed to drag Trump down with them. With their incessant focus on the Russia story, they have stolen from the president the public momentum he needs to get Congress behind him.
Now you have conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro – two men who have been firmly NeverTrump from the beginning – warning Republicans not to engage in “whataboutism” when it comes to the Russia story. Under normal circumstances, it would be a fair critique. After all, merely saying, “What about this thing this other person did?” is no kind of defense against a charge of wrongdoing. Wrong is wrong, even if the other person got away with it.
But these are NOT normal circumstances. The power behind these charges of Russian collusion – which are still vastly overblown by our reckoning – is not in the facts. Not even close. There hardly ARE any facts. No, their power is in the media/Democrats’ ability to tell the American people that this is UNPRECEDENTED. It’s NEVER happened before. We’re in UNCHARTED waters. Things will NEVER be the same if Trump and Company get away with it.
So “whataboutism” is quite appropriate in this case, because the media is telling a lie. It HAS happened before. It happened, in fact, just last year.
Politico reported in January that Trump wasn’t the only candidate who got a little bit of outside help:
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like the exact kind of unprecedented, world-shifting COLLUSION that the Trump campaign was supposedly guilty of with Russia. But you’ll notice that while the Russia story has dominated the media for the last six months, you would have to watch every newscast in the mainstream with your eyes glued open to even catch a HINT of Clinton’s collaboration with the Ukrainians.
So, yeah, “what about” that?
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