By Victor Davis Hanson | American Greatness
What
Are the New Rules?
Will Republican magnanimity suffice to shame the
Democrats to be more professional in the future? Or will tit-for-tat deterrent
reciprocity alone ensure a return to norms? Specifically, will Biden be
impeached Trump-style, after losing the House in November? Say, to give just
one possible example, for deliberately not enforcing and, indeed, undermining
U.S. immigration law?
Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in Pelosi-fashion, start
yanking troublesome radical Democrats off House committees?
Will a conservative Robert Mueller-like “wise man” head a
$40 million, 22 month-long special counsel investigation of the Biden-family
influence-selling syndicate—arrayed with a “dream-team,” “all-star,” and
“hunter-killer” right-wing lawyers to ferret out “Big Guy” and “Mr. Ten
Percent” quid pro quo profiteering?
Would a Republican-led House set up a special committee
to investigate the racketeering and “conspiracies” across state lines that led
to a near “coup” and “insurrection” marked by “the riots of 2020?” Would such
watchdogs offer up criminal referrals for all those responsible for attacking a
federal courthouse and torching a police precinct or for setting an historic
church afire? Or causing $2 billion of damage, over 30 deaths, and 1,500 law
enforcement officer injuries—while carving out illegal no-go zones in major
downtowns?
Given the need for “accountability,” the “threats to
democracy,” and a need for “transparency,” would another congressional
committee investigate the Afghanistan fiasco of summer 2021? Will it learn who
was lying about the disaster—Joe Biden or the Joint Chiefs—and how and why such
a travesty occurred?
Would a rebooted January 6 committee reconvene under new
auspices—with Democratic members limited to those selected by a new Speaker
McCarthy—to revisit the lethal shooting of Ashli Babbitt, to review thousands
of hours of released surveillance video, to subpoena all email communications
between the previous congressional leadership and the Capitol police, to demand
the lists of all the FBI informants in the crowd, and to interrogate the
sadistic jailers and overzealous prosecutors who have created America’s first
class of political prisoners subjected to punishment without trial? Such a
multifaceted legal inquiry would eat up most of Biden’s final two years in
office. As accomplished leakers, Republicans then would also supply
“bombshells” and “walls are closing in” special news alerts on cable TV, the
fuel of supposedly “imminent” and “impending” indictments, based on special
counsel leaks to conservative media.
Following the Democratic cue, should the
Republican-majority Senate consider ending the “disruptive” and
“anti-democratic” filibuster? Should there be a national voting law rammed
through the Congress, overriding state protocols, and demanding that all
national election balloting must require a photo ID?
Will Speaker McCarthy, Pelosi-style, in furor at more of
Joe Biden’s chronic lies, tear up the president’s State of the Union address on
national television?
A Permanently Politicized Bureaucracy?
Will the new Washington apparat likewise adhere to the
Democratic Party’s new precedents?
Perhaps a newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs
can reassure a Republican majority that its primary mission is not battle
readiness—and certainly not climate change or “white rage”— but rather
ferreting out service personnel with known ties to radical groups like BLM or
Antifa or other “subversive” and “racist” organizations?
Will a conservative Lois Lerner emerge from the IRS
shadows to start slow-walking nonprofit-status applications from left-wing
organizations on the eve of a presidential election?
Will the FBI become a Republican retrieval service to
hunt down and keep inert embarrassing lost laptops, diaries, and hard drives of
absent-minded conservative grandees?
In the middle of a campaign, will the CIA Director
believe it is his duty to inform the senior Republican leaders in the Senate
that he has good “information” that leftists are intriguing with foreign
governments to warp the election?
The Lettered Classes
And what of our corporate and professional classes?
Should conservative zillionaires pool their resources
and, Zuckerberg-style, select key precincts in the next general election, hire
armies of activists, and then absorb and supersede the work of state or county
registrars? Only that way, could they ensure the “right” people vote and their
“correct” ballots were accurately counted?
Should conservatives start rounding up “professionals,”
“scientists,” and “scholars” to express their superior morality and erudition
in pursuit of political agendas?
Certainly, a recent trend has been a spate of letters of
“conscience” and “statements of concern” signed by revolving-door government,
academic, and corporate grandees who pose as disinterested experts to mold
public opinion.
When we read such letters of principle—characterized by
shared and collective outrage by assorted professionals, replete with letters
and/or titles after their name—beware!
Do we remember the recent “stellar” cast of Nobel-Prize
winning and near-Nobel laureates who admonished
us that Biden’s massive deficit spending programs would never lead to
inflation?
In circular fashion, Biden solicited and then cited this
“blue-chip” group of experts led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
Stiglitz warned the hoi polloi not to worry about printing
trillions of dollars at the very moment pent-up demand from the COVID lockdowns
was surging, when for millions the government kept issuing checks that made
staying home more lucrative than working, when interest rates were at near
zero, and when the national debt was cresting at $30 trillion.
The distinguished economists promised us that if we just
followed the Biden lead, then inflation would actually decrease.
Or as they put it, “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity
and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in
the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressure.”
[emphasis added].
As inflation nears or exceeds eight percent per
annum, will they write an apology or instead issue yet another letter
assuring us that inflation is easing?
Do we remember the 50
“former intelligence officials” letter writers rounded up by former
National Intelligence and CIA Directors James Clapper and John Brennan? (The
latter two previously had confessed to lying under oath to Congress.) Yet just
two weeks before the 2020 election, these revered “professionals” assured us
that Hunter
Biden’s laptop was not just fake but likely Russian
disinformation.
Or as the shameful 50 put it in their sorta, kinda
conspiratorial style, “. . . our experience makes us deeply suspicious
that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” The
guidance of Brennan and Clapper alone—apart from the clear evidence that the
laptop was Hunter’s—should have made all Americans “deeply suspicious” that the
Biden campaign “played a significant role in this case.”
Do we remember “the over 1,000 health professionals” who
in 2020 signed a
letter of conscience, assuring us that:
. . . we wanted to present a narrative that
prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to public health, including the
epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests
in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name
of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.
So, in “follow the science fashion” we were told not just
that some violations of strict masking, quarantines, and lockdowns were more
equal than others, but that flagrantly ignoring health mandates entirely was,
in Orwellian fashion, actually good for the health of the exempt.
Do we remember the 27 Lancet “scientists”
who signed the now
infamous letter reassuring us the Wuhan lab played no role in the
origins in COVID? Do we also recall that all but one of these progressive
humanitarians failed to disclose that they themselves had connections with
Wuhan?
Leftist professionals in politics, government, and
private enterprise debased themselves for short-term political gain, or in
furor at their bogeyman Trump, or in anger at the unwashed. They have now set
precedents, which if embraced by conservatives and applied to the Left, would
be called unethical at best and fascistic at worst.
In the end, all the warped grandees accomplished was to
further discredit the entire notion that those with high salaries, prestigious
degrees, impressive titles, and insidious influence are somehow less likely to
lie, connive, cheat, and conspire than those whom they libel and attack.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/10/the-debasement-of-our-professional-and-political-classes/
