How Does the Left Work?

Victor Davis Hanson is far more intelligent than I am, and my mind is always stretched when I read one of his articles. His latest article in The Daily Signal was titled “Biden vs. Trump: 5 Ways the Left Is Way Beyond Double Standards.” The first paragraph illustrates how he uses words that are not used by the lowly common people. 

The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling.

They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite. And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral, and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable.

In case you do not understand what Hanson was stating, here are a few definitions to help you to understand the previous paragraph. Abject means something experienced or present to the maximum degree. Narcissism is a mental health condition where a person has an unreasonably high opinion of their own importance and a lack of the ability to understand or even care about how other people feel. Amnesiac describes a person who has a partial or total loss of memory. Hypocrisy is a claim of moral standards or beliefs that is not shown by one’s own behavior, or pretending to be something one is not. Erudite means to have or show vast knowledge of learning.

Now that we know what Hanson was stating in his first paragraph, we will examine the remainder of his article which shows the hypocrisy of the Left.

Impeachment

The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally investigating President Joe Biden’s role in the family grifting operation is somehow a poor constitutional precedent, if not out of bounds entirely.

So we hear further arguments that it will be unwise to impeach a first-term president when he loses his House majority, that there is no reason to “waste” congressional time and effort when Biden will be automatically acquitted in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and that the impeachment is cynically times to synchronize with the president’s reelection efforts.

All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his reelection campaign began, and immediately after being cleared of the 22-month, $40 million special counsel Russian-collusion hoax). …

There is one difference, though between the Trump impeachment and the Biden impeachment inquiry. Trump was impeached because he accurately accused the members of the Ukrainian government of paying Hunter Biden, with his zero fossil-fuel expertise, an astronomical sum to serve on the Burisma board – as the costly quid that earned the lucrative quo from his dad, then-Vice President Joe Biden.

No one now denies that Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired by threatening to cancel legislatively approved U.S. aid….

In sum, Trump had a perfect right as commander in chief to delay – he did not cancel – aid to Ukraine, to ensure that its government was not still paying off the Bidens for t heir lobbying efforts on its behalf….

Offspring Subpoenas

The Left is now furious that Hunter has been subpoenaed by the House to testify in private about how he earned his multimillion-dollar income, whether he fully paid taxes on it, and to whom he distributed his winnings.

Hunter has refused to testify. He is now being held in contempt of the U.S. Congress….

Ask Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon whether one can simply ignore a House subpoena.

Ask Ivanka Trump whether she was, or was not, subpoenaed to appear before the Jan. 6 committee. Ask the Trump sons whether they could breezily say “no” to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ subpoenas in her farcical real estate valuation suit against Trump.

Whistleblowers

Do we remember when, not long ago, whistleblowers were noble?

The alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella, an Obama holdover who had burrowed inside the Trump administration, had zero firsthand knowledge of the Trump phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Ukrainian expatriate Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was on the call, as a member of the Trump national security team. He broke the law and apparently disclosed the classified call – in outrage that Trump was apparently too hard on his native Ukraine – to Ciaramella, and then hid the latter’s identity. Both met privately with Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., to engineer an impeachment writ.

This impeachment gambit was well-known to the media and the Democratic House. Both Vindman and Ciaramella were canonized as invaluable tools in wearing down Trump in a way that the failed Mueller prosecution had never done.

And whistleblowers now?

IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley and 13-year special IRS agent Joe Ziegler never violated any statue or disclosed classified information. They did not leak a presidential phone call to a foreign leader.

Instead, both came forward as whistleblowers to testify before Congress about how the Biden Justice Department deliberately and carefully ensured that the mountain of evidence for the prosecution of Hunter Biden that they had presented had simply been ignored – at least long enough for the statute of limitations to run out on his most egregious crimes.

When they both made their case that facts proved the Biden family received huge sums for selling access to, or action from, Joe Biden, they were roundly trashed by Democrats in Congress and pilloried as disgruntled politicos by a toady press.

Dictators

Never-Trumpers and leftists vie to predict the most nightmarish consequence of a 2024 Trump election win. Supposedly, he will commit every imaginable sin, from ending habeas corpus to jailing his enemies.

This fearmongering has no basis in fact, especially given that the nation has already experienced a Trump administration for four years. And it saw none of the weaponization of the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and IRS that we have seen under the Biden and earlier Obama administrations….

Burden of Familial Indictments?

Suddenly yet another new narrative emerges: Joe Biden is unduly preoccupied, bearing the enormous burden of Hunter’s indictments. Apparently, we have never appreciated the supposedly unnecessary and cruel encumbrance on a president when his son is indicted.

So, we are told that a son’s legal exposure is an unfair weight on a president.

Have we again forgotten the subpoenaed Trump children, much less the four weaponized indictments of Trump himself? Does anyone wish to compare the drug-addicted, prostitute-hiring, gun-losing, pornographic-photo-taking, shake-down grifting of Huter with the conduct of the five Trump children? …

Hanson concludes his article by admitting that it is “unwise” to “impeach a president in his first term” when the other party controls the House, to “set a bad precedent to subpoena the children of presidents, to demonize whistleblowers, or to compare a president to Hitlerian dictator. He shows that the Left believes that it has a “supposedly morally superior agenda” of the left is so wonderful that “any means necessary are justified to obtain it.” He concludes:

And that alternate reality ensures that impeaching a president, indicting him, subpoenaing his kids, praising or libeling whistleblowers, or smearing a president as a dictator become good or bad things only by determining whether they prove useful to the progressive project.

In other words, the Left believes that it can set rules that will serve its own agenda and then set different rules for the opposing party. They definitely do not believe the oft repeated saying of “What’s good for the gander is good for the goose” or the saying known as the Golden Rule: “Treat other people as you would want to be treated by them.”