Pelosi's 'impeach' plan: 'Slow-motion, sustained hysteria '

FPI / October 16, 2019

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Oct. 15 announced that she has no plans to hold a vote to formally approve an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

“The impeachment ‘Inquiry’ can do as much damage as a formal vote without the downside of endangering Democrats in purple congressional districts, at least for a while,” historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson wrote for American Greatness on Oct. 13.

“The aim is to create slow-motion, sustained hysteria, throw out leaks, whistleblowers’ accusations, transcripts, emails, hearsay, and what not, and see what sticks — without House members going on record until there is enough chaos created to ensure positive polls.”

The behind-closed-doors impeachment inquiry is chugging along full-steam-ahead as Rep. Adam Schiff continues to demand that anyone related in any way to Trump be dragged before the House Intelligence Committee Schiff chairs.

“The Democrats can wheel Schiff out daily to his media platform to grimace, and in pained expressions suggest that the flabbergasting things he just heard, read, and saw behind closed doors are bombshells, turning points, nails-in-the-coffin, walls-are-closing-in disasters for Trump that he unfortunately cannot divulge in full detail, given the classified nature of his proceedings. If Schiff gets the required poll numbers, the House can vote to proceed,” Hanson wrote.

“The point is just to drag everything out under the vague premise that some sort of de facto ‘impeachment is impending’ in sword of Damocles fashion.”

Democrats, Hanson noted, have convinced themselves they don’t need a reason or evidence.

“Democrats loathe Trump. That is enough.”

The Democrats, Hanson wrote, would have impeached Trump “on day one of his presidency before he set foot in the White House but they did not have control of the House. Now they do, so they can. Who cares whether he is convicted in the Senate? House members just want to go on record that they impeached him and put an asterisk on his presidency at worst, and at best drive his polls down to prevent his re-election.”

“The point, in MSNBC/CNN style, is to vent, to rage, to scream without needing a strategy at all. Blind furor at this late date is okay. Who cares about polls, pundits, and conventional wisdom, given the exhilaration of just impeaching the SOB?”

Hanson continued: “Would Democrats prefer to introduce in the House legislation to enact the Green New Deal? The wealth tax? Reparations? Health care for illegal aliens? Open borders? Abolish $1.6 trillion in student debt? Or sit back and see whether Andrew McCabe, James Comey, or James Clapper might get indicted in a month or so?

“Compared to those alternatives, daily venting and screaming without doing anything at all about the ogre Trump under the guise of exhaustively pondering impeachment inquiries, impeachment voting, impeachment hearings, and impeachment verdicts seem smart.”

With control of the House, Democrats, Hanson wrote, “know they can impeach Trump. And they believe they can easily peel off at least a few Republican votes in the Senate to join them. Yet once the circus is on, who knows what will turn up — the impeachment equivalent of a Christine Blasey Ford, a hot-rodder like Michael Avenatti, victims like Nathan Philipps, or Jussie Smollett?

“Don’t laugh, such theatrics will air all sorts of anti-Trump professional hysterias as a parade of witnesses from Stormy Daniels, to tax lawyers, to psychiatrists, to Anthony Scaramucci/Omarosa performance artists, to legal talking heads like Jeffery Toobin, to wizened ‘sages’ such as Colin Powell and Andrew Card can all be wheeled in to provide both low farce and sanctimonious establishment pieties.”

Hanson added that “sanity means nothing these days, given the hatred of Trump, the volatility of the electorate, and the furious bias of the media.

“After all, we are planning to impeach a president on the basis of a ‘whistleblower’ who will not come forward, who is a Democratic partisan, who worked for a current Democratic presidential candidate, who contrary to the whistleblower statutes went first to the Democratic Chairman of what is now the impeachment inquiry committee, Adam Schiff, also chair of the Intelligence Committee, and whose formal complaint was prepped by Democrat-affiliated lawyers. The whistleblower claims second-hand knowledge from leaking White House Staffers who heard a confidential Trump conversation — a conversation whose transcript was immediately released and was at odds in key places with the whistleblower’s second- and third-hand versions.”

Hanson continued: “We are headed for a train wreck. No one knows for certain which outcome is most likely. Will Trump be so beaten down by the ordeal that he will say and do things that will add to the momentum to convict him? Will there be such chaos and disruption that Trump ‘fatigue’ will ensue, and he and those who support him will be blamed for the mess? Will the voter go into a fetal position and just scream, ‘I can’t take this anymore! Make it all just go away!’?

“Or more likely will impeachment backfire? Will the jump-the-shark travesty finally confirm that the last three years have been an unhinged, evidence-free Democratic effort to destroy the elected president? Will there be hell to pay for the Democrats for their bias and partisanship that took the country through yet another miasma? They may well earn a Trump landslide and 2020 losses in the Senate and House.”

Free Press International