Goodwin: Trickster Adam Schiff conjuring ‘guilt’ out of thin air
Goodwin: Trickster Adam Schiff conjuring ‘guilt’ out of thin air
By Michael Goodwin
November 12, 2019 | 7:31pm
The dictionary defines a conjurer as someone who “practices magic arts” and “performs feats of sleight of hand and illusion.”
Someone like Adam Schiff.
The California Democrat takes his magic act public Wednesday as the impeachment hearings burst out of a Capitol Hill dungeon and onto television. Donald Trump’s presidency and the 2020 election likely hang on whether Schiff’s sleight of hand can survive the bright lights of public exposure and cross-examination.
Operating in darkness, where he controlled the witness list and leaked snippets of testimony that the Dems’ media echo chamber turned into proof of Trump’s guilt, Schiff has been a first-rate illusionist.
Even his exterior calmness is deceptive; he burns with a zeal to kill the king.
Scorned by the president as “Liddle Adam Schiff,” and “pencil neck” and “shifty Schiff,” he can taste revenge. To impeach Trump, even if it goes nowhere in the Senate, will make him a man of history and a hero to the millions of 2016 deniers.
But on what grounds will this great deed be consummated? While Schiff and his fellow travelers loudly declare Trump guilty, they’ve yet to settle on a charge that makes sense to the many millions of Americans who live outside a political hot house.
Take the talking point that the president engaged in an improper quid pro quo by promising arms to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s $50,000-a-month cushy gig there. It has everything on its side except a clear set of facts.
Ukraine got the arms — arms Barack Obama refused to give — but Trump never got the Biden investigation or one into what role Ukraine played in 2016.
Either the master of the “Art of the Deal” got snookered or there was no deal in the first place. And if there was no deal, was the phone call with Ukraine’s president really improper? Was the temporary hold on the arms really a crime?
Indeed, the worst possible interpretation of the call still lacks the gravitas to bring down a president less than year before an election. If you don’t hate Trump beyond all measure, watching the left’s outrage over this is like watching a TV program in a foreign language you don’t understand. You can pick up an occasional word, but ultimately, the whole thing is baffling.
The one sure thing is that deplorables and bitter clingers understand that the death penalty is not a fair sentence for jaywalking. Democrats who defended Bill Clinton’s perjury and sex in the Oval Office with an intern certainly should be able to relate.
The process is a big part of the problem, as Schiff and his team blatantly mix the allegations of an anonymous “whistleblower” with the worries, concerns and fears of bureaucrats left out of the loop. These officials’ disagreement with Trump isn’t an ordinary event because they, too, apparently view him as an illegitimate president.
Once you cross that bridge in your mind, everything Trump does must be seen in the darkest possible light. If he removes an ambassador, it must be for nefarious reasons. If he changes policy or ignores certain protocols, it is your duty to bring him down.
The challenge of the public hearings, then, is tantamount to proving Trump was guilty of colluding with Russia after Robert Mueller said there was insufficient evidence even to level the charge.
Oops, sorry to mix my wild goose chases, but it is hard to keep them separate because they are essentially interchangeable. The conclusion has always come first — get Trump — then create a justification by weaving a few thin threads together into a noose.
In both cases, the Dems have relied on members of the resistance embedded in the government to serve as the hanging party. Some wear military uniforms while others are in the CIA and FBI.
Thanks to the false charges made by James Comey, John Brennan and others that Trump was a running dog for Vladimir Putin, uniforms and badges are no longer proof of rectitude. Count diminished public trust in those institutions as a lasting legacy of the Obama presidency.
The main problem now is that, three years after Trump’s election, these constant hair-on-fire screams sound and feel like partisan politics pretending to be apolitical. The smell of a continuing dirty trick is hard to ignore.
Schiff, of course, comes by his current role honestly in the sense that he has been a chief proponent of anything and everything that might turn the public against the president. He insisted that Trump was guilty of collusion for two years before Mueller said otherwise and then continued to say it despite Mueller.
But after the special counsel’s public testimony turned out to be the dud of all duds, Russia, Russia, Russia dropped off the earth and Schiff instantly proclaimed Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine the new crime of the century.
In a rational world, where facts matter and credibility counts, Schiff would already be consigned to history’s dustbin alongside Sen. Joe McCarthy. Like the infamous red baiter who saw a commie behind every desk, Schiff sees evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors” every time the president opens his mouth. It’s been that way since before Trump was inaugurated.
McCarthy was not burdened by decency, as Army lawyer Joseph Welch famously noted. Schiff is similarly unburdened and so he, too, willy-nilly ruins lives and trashes reputations without a sense of guilt.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no less culpable. In the early months after she got the gavel, she skillfully pushed back against the tide of radicalism sweeping through her party. Repeatedly, she insisted that impeachment was extremely divisive, should only be a last resort and had to have bipartisan support.
Those were her red lines, and she violated all of them. Her resolution for a formal inquiry got zero GOP votes and the public support for removing Trump is essentially limited to her party’s voters. There is no national emergency that would justify such an extreme action, and yet she gave Schiff the green light.
For those who find the hearings far from riveting but watch out of obligation or amusement, here’s a modest suggestion to pass the hours productively: count the important things your representatives could and should be doing otherwise.
They could seal the border and fix the immigration mess. They could get back to that huge infrastructure program that everybody in Washington said they wanted.
Pelosi could pass the new NAFTA deal, with even the unions blasting Dems for doing nothing. Nearly eight in 10 Americans believe prescription-drug prices are “unreasonable,” according to a recent survey, and both Congress and the White House want action, but there is no agreement on actual legislation.
And heaven forbid that anyone should mention the debt and deficit.
Instead of any of that, the nation gets a hyped-up TV show where Adam Schiff tries to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Make that a dead rabbit.
https://nypost.com/2019/11/12/goodwi...t-of-thin-air/
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