“The judge’s job is to interpret the law, not to make the law or make policy.  So read the words of the statute as written.  Read the text of the Constitution as written, mindful of history and tradition.  Don’t make up new constitutional rights that are not in the text of the Constitution.  Don’t shy away from enforcing constitutional rights that are in the text of the Constitution.” 

--Judge Brett Kavanaugh, June 2, 2016

President Trump’s selection of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court last night (7/09) culminates a three-decade project unparalleled in American history to install a reliable conservative majority on the nation’s highest tribunal, one that could shape the direction of the law for years to come.

All of the years of vetting and grooming and lobbying and list-making by conservative legal figures frustrated by Republican appointees who drifted to the left arguably has come down to this moment, when they stand on the precipice of appointing a fifth justice who, they hope, will at last establish a bench firmly committed to their principles.

“They’ve been pushing back for 30 years, and, obviously, the announcement tonight is a big step in the right direction,” said Curt Levey, the president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative activist group, who has been working toward this goal full time since 2005. “It’ll be the first time we can really say we have a conservative court, really the first time since the 1930s.”

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When Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light to Russian aerial bombing of rebel-held positions in southwestern Syria two weeks ago, he knew he was asking for trouble.

And he appears to be getting plenty of it.

Since the Russia-led operation against Deraa began, Israeli commentators have assessed that Putin wished to wrap up the offensive ahead of his July 16 summit with President Donald Trump in Helsinki so that he could present Trump with a fait accompli.

A Russian triumph would convince Trump that U.S. operations in Syria are futile, and he would have accept Russia’s predominance, with Iran in the war-torn country.

Yet, just within the past few days Trump has turned the tables on Putin.  Here’s what’s happening.

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[This Forum post by Joe Katzman responding to The Brittleness of the Left needs to be read by all TTPers. You are encouraged to share your thoughts]

The impulses of the Left you will always have with you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t raze the treasonous infrastructure and personalities that make up its modern variants, and makes them effective:

• Arrest and jail the leftists who have abused their position with rampant illegality. Time for Justice.

• RICO against the Antifa/ BLM/ Occupy types, their funders, and those that provided material aid.

• Break the pedophile and human trafficking networks that stretch from Hollywood and beyond, and publicly hang them around the Left’s neck.

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How delicious is it that the face of the Democrat Party is that lovely duo, Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi?  They are the gift that keeps on giving.

So deluded as to why Trump won, they seem to think their particular brand of madness that includes the public shaming of anyone and everyone in the Trump administration is going to win back the House and Senate for their party.

It is by now undeniable that the Hate-Trump Left has gone stark-raving mad.  Its members have lost all semblance of sanity, decorum, and class.

It can be lost on no one that the Democrats care not one bit for American citizens.  Thousands of them have been murdered by criminal illegals, who are most often given a pass by the courts for numerous DUIs, drug crimes, and gun crimes for which Americans would be imprisoned.

The crimes of members of MS13 are not at all different from those of ISIS – vicious beyond imagination.  And yet the Democrats defend them, seeks to embrace their arrival here.  How is it possible for them to think this is a winning electoral strategy?

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This Sunday, July 1st, Mexico could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States.

Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Facts are stubborn, however, and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts.

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[Note – this is Sidney’s follow up to her The FBI, DOJ, and Hillary Clinton’s Huge Weiner Problem last week (6/20)]

The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Hillary Clinton have a huge problem that is even bigger than we first realized.

Massive evidence is accumulating that James Comey, with Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and others at the Obama FBI and DOJ covered up the motherlode of Clinton criminal culpability.  Here’s what we know so far.

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Does someone from the Trump family, the Trump Cabinet, or even the Trump administration have to be assaulted or worse, killed, before we accept the fact that a growing number from the far-left have put a rhetorical bounty on their heads?

If has-been actor Peter Fonda suggesting Barron Trump be "ripped from his mother's arms and put in a cage with pedophiles" does not horrify you with the obscene brutality of its message, nothing ever will.

From this cauldron of bubbling and putrid hate filled from the twisted minds of enraged liberal politicians, "journalists," entertainers, and academics, spews forth the dangerously deranged like Fonda who have proven there is no line they will not cross to inflict "punishment" and harm upon anyone connected with President Trump.

Beyond the terrifyingly rhetorical, is the real.

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Remember Anthony Weiner, also known as “Carlos Danger” — the former congressman who kept texting people pictures of well, umm, that part of his name? It all made quite the splash because he is married to Hillary Clinton’s consigliere and constant sidekick, Huma Abedin.

Turns out that Anthony was such a perp — and so enthralled with his own — that he was sexting with a minor. That is a federal offense carrying up to 10 years in prison. So, he got raided by the New York Police Department and the New York office of the FBI.

They seized his laptop computer. It would have been bad enough if it had only had contained all his porn. But it posed a huge problem for the FBI, DOJ and Mrs. Clinton.

Only a few hours after the New York office of the FBI took possession of the Weiner laptop, on September 26, 2016, the FBI computer expert discovered it contained more than 140,000 emails involving Hillary Clinton. They were from multiple domain names: State.gov, Clintonemail.com, ClintonFoundation.org, HillaryClinton.com and Blackberry devices.

Here’s what happened then.

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As FBI Director Christopher Wray started giving his response to the blistering report on the Hillary Clinton investigation, I hoped he would accept the findings as proof that the agency lost its way and must be shaken to its foundation.

By the time he finished talking, I felt ­naive for daring to hope.

Wray’s performance was worse than disappointing. It was infuriating proof that it will take more than one election to change the corrupt culture of Washington.

By circling the wagons, Wray shows he is unprepared to carry out big changes. That makes it three strikes at Justice, as Wray joins Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein as Trump’s biggest whiffs.

They are worse than weak links. They simply don’t see themselves as being part of the same administration.

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What was going on in Donald Trump's head when he tweeted Friday (6/15) in response to the inspector general's devastating report on the FBI that "Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!"?

Perhaps the president thought he had better things to do than face another interminable nomination battle for a new director. Or perhaps he was trying to co-opt Wray. But if the FBI is meant to come back, proudly or otherwise, Christopher Wray is not the man. He is part of the problem.

In fact, Wray's continuance as director signals the government is not serious about significantly reforming the FBI and that what changes will be made will be essentially cosmetic, lipstick on the proverbial pig.  (The inspector general's report can be read that way as well.)

This is not just because Wray worked under James Comey in his first important job as assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division (2003-2005). That would be guilt by association, although in this instance it's some association. What's more important is what Wray himself has done recently or, more specifically, has not.

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Robert De Niro marched onto last Sunday night’s Tony Awards show stage like a man possessed, exuding raw fury and menace from every pore.

If you could morph his most violent, unhinged on-screen characters into one smoldering carcass of molten human hatred and ferocity, then this was that hybrid beast.

And he was intent on unleashing a verbal weapon of mass destruction at the man he despises more than life itself: Donald J. Trump.

The 74-year-old tuxedo-clad thespian stood at the microphone for several long, lingering, intense seconds, driving the Broadway audience to whoops of expectant excitement.

‘I’m gonna say one thing,’ he snarled.

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Nobody knew.  None of us saw it.  Among his biggest supporters, maybe a handful suspected it.

Many of us expected the economic renewal of the U.S. to happen.  Many of us foresaw a significant roll back of Saint Barack's horrid, destructive agenda.   A lot of us hoped for a major push back on the Left.

All of which we have gotten.

None of us expected Donald Trump to be a giant in foreign policy.  No one expected him to reshape the world.  Yet Donald Trump, in a short time, is doing so.  We have not seen a better, more fruitful, and more capable foreign policy than this administration since the great Ronald Reagan.

Here are some of President Trump’s accomplishments – less than half way into his first term.  They are simply astounding – to America’s great benefit, to the great dismay of the Left.

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Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, an Obama Administration appointee, is scheduled to deliver a report this afternoon (6/14) on DOJ and FBI abuses during the 2016 campaign cycle.

Remember: His last investigation of FBI misconduct advised a criminal referral for fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who allegedly lied to federal investigators.

McCabe and at least a half-dozen other FBI employees quit, retired, were fired, or were reassigned as a result of fallout from the politicization of the FBI.

Yet, as Barack Obama left office, his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, strangely boasted that the Obama Administration “has been historically free of scandal.” Obama himself recently concluded of his eight-year tenure, “I didn’t have scandals.”

That’s because the Obama Administration succeeded in covering up its non-stop scandals by waging a veritable war against the watchdog inspectors general of various federal agencies.  Here’s the record.

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When every last Trudeau eyebrow has been scraped off the floor of the Manoir Richelieu, it's worth remembering that the divisions in the G7 are not quite as straightforward as the media would have us believe. For one thing, it's not G6 vs. Trump, for there's another disrupter in town:

And how about this for getting it right?  For the first time since the "humanitarian crisis" began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.

As the London Economist sniffed (6/12):  Italy Refuses to Let a Boat Full of Migrants Land. After all, what could be more heartwarming than an NGO rescue ship named after a song from Hair?

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No wonder the President was so upset he tweeted this earlier today (6/07).  He was reminded how bad this scandal is when he saw Luke Rosiak’s latest report on it in The Daily Caller Wednesday (6/05):  Wasserman Schultz Screamed At House Officials To Kill Hacking Probe.

The woman is terrified and for good reason.

The curious case of Imran Awan, which sounds like an international spy thriller, is entering its third act. Awan was a congressional IT aide to Florida Dem Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and he was finally fired just after he was arrested trying to fly to Pakistan last summer.

Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, were charged last summer with bank fraud. They now appear poised to strike a plea deal with the Department of Justice. A plea agreement hearing is set for July 3 before U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Washington, Fox News reported Wednesday.

Theft of congressional equipment, massive data breaches of Congress members’ emails, massive espionage and more are all wrapped up in this case that involves data from 40 or more Democrat members of Congress.  After endless delays, we may have explosive traction.

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Sandra Bullock is Miss Congeniality

New York Times headline yesterday (6/05), “Miss America Ends Swimsuit Competition.”

Gretchen Carlson, chairwoman of the now-swimsuit-free Miss America, would very much like you to know that she isn’t just a pretty face. She also has a degree from Stanford and spent a year studying Virginia Woolf at Oxford.

Even so, let’s pause and ponder for a moment which  elements on her CV got the studio executives most excited when considering her for her jobs on TV.  Choose a) or b).

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Avignon, France—The Rhone River Valley in southern France is a storybook marriage of high technology, traditional vineyards, and ancestral villages. High-speed trains and well-designed toll roads crisscross majestic cathedrals, castles, and chateaus.

Traveling in a Europe at peace these days evokes both historical and literary allusions. As with the infrastructure and engineering of the late Roman Empire right before its erosion, the Continent rests at its pinnacle of technological achievement.

There is a Roman Empire-like sameness throughout Europe in fashion, popular culture and government protocol—a welcome change from the deadly fault lines of 1914 and 1939.

Yet, as in the waning days of Rome, there is a growing uncertainty beneath the European calm.

The present generation has inherited the physical architecture and art of a once-great West—cathedrals, theaters, and museums. But it seems to lack the confidence that it could ever create the conditions to match, much less exceed, such achievement.

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On Sunday, June 3, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a press statement regarding the 29th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre by the Chinese Communist Government on June 4, 1989.   In part it read:

“We join others in the international community in urging the Chinese government to make a full public accounting of those killed, detained or missing; to release those who have been jailed for striving to keep the memory of Tiananmen Square alive; and to end the continued harassment of demonstration participants and their families.”

While this was seriously displeasing to China’s rulers, they are in fact more worried about what is happening in their country right now. It’s being called the “Rice Bunny” movement for women’s rights in Communist China.  The characters for “rice bunny,” you see, are pronounced “me-too.”

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“FBI Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18.

“The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” reads a story in the May 21 Wall Street Journal.

So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparatus have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.

It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives burglarized and wiretapped the Democrat National Committee in June 1972.

Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy (er, secretly collect information?) on a political campaign. Especially a campaign of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA.

Nowadays, they say that anyone questioning those agencies' good faith is unpatriotic.

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The words “Deep State” evoke images of evil geniuses carrying out schemes in hollowed-out mountains with submarine entrances.

What if they’re not that smart, though? Just malicious?

The New York Times earlier this month reported that a joint interagency task force met at CIA headquarters beginning in the spring of 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. The task force attracted a group of acolytes that reads like the cast of characters in a Hollywood script about a ragtag band of rogues turned commandos.

In the top role was their temperamental leader, CIA Director John Brennan, adding a Lee Marvin-esque gravity to the production.

Also starring Peter Strzok, the love-struck FBI agent who bonded with his paramour Lisa Page via virulently anti-Trump text messages.

Add to the mix National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who once perjured himself before the United States Senate.  His skill-set would be particularly helpful to this group of misfits.

For comic relief there was FBI Director James Comey.  In Comey-world, it was never enough to just be a gumshoe detective enforcing mundane things like immigration laws.  He had to be saving the world in an epic battle against Russians.

Can you imagine what Mack Sennett, creator of the Keystone Cops, would have done with these characters?

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The first thing I noticed when I walked into the Trump rally in Nashville last night (5/29) was that Trace Adkins was singing. Not bad! (Hey, it’s Nashville.)

The second thing I noticed was that Jim Acosta wasn’t smiling, virtually the only person in the auditorium who wasn’t. If you don’t like Adkins, either you don’t like music or your Trump Derangement Syndrome is so great you couldn’t even groove to Bach or The Beatles in their heydays. Too bad for Jim.

Which leads me to another Nashville moment. Being here in Music City, isn’t it high time for the right to take back the arts, or at least some decent part of them?

Why is it CBS, NBC, and ABC are all slavish soldiers of the moribund and increasingly boring Left? (Can you watch “Good Morning America” without feeling you are having your brains drilled?)

But enough diversion. Trump’s on.  Time to enjoy the show.

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The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.  And not because Trump wrecked it.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

Historic forces have made post-war thinking obsolete and thereby left many reactionary “experts” wedded to the past and in denial about the often-dangerous reality before their eyes.  This is true everywhere you look – from Turkey to Russia to China to the European Union, not to mention North Korea and Iran.

The “experts” deny the reality while America’s president sees it clearly – which is why they hate and fear him so much.

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The “Deep State” is in a deep state of desperation.

It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

Here’s how that is backfiring.

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On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.

As a dog that chases its tail, the fake “intelligence” was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

James Comey’s FBI and John Brennan’s CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?

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Many liberals and critics are under the mistaken belief that President Trump is violating the rule of law and civil liberties by criticizing the Robert Mueller investigation and by ordering the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not the FBI spied on his 2016 presidential campaign.

In fact, the president is behaving totally lawfully, and it is Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who are acting unconstitutionally and who are violating Trump’s civil liberties.

As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week (5/13), Robert Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional under Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Morrison v. Olson. In this investigation, Mueller is acting like a U.S. attorney, who is a principal officer and who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The unconstitutionality of Mueller’s appointment renders everything he has done since May 17, 2017, unconstitutional as well.

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[Note by JW – When even Karl Rove denounces Trump Derangement Syndrome, of which he was once afflicted, you know the Trump Takeover of the GOP is nearing completion.]

State Rep. Stacey Abrams’s victory in Tuesday’s (5/22) Georgia Democrat primary is historic: She’s the first black woman to win a major party’s nomination for governor in any state.

But it’s also an example of the gamble Democrats are taking this midterm season.

Unlike most Democrat candidates for statewide office in the South, Ms. Abrams shows little interest in appealing to independents or disaffected Republicans. She blames the Georgia Democrats’ poor showing in 2014 on efforts to appeal to what she calls the “very middle of the road.”

Is support from the Democrats’ “Resistance” base enough to carry her to the governor’s mansion?  In a state that has a GOP Governor, both Senators, 10 out of 14 Members of Congress, and which Trump won by 211,000 votes in 2016?

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech Monday (5/21) at the Heritage Foundation marked a pivotal moment in U.S. foreign policy.

Pompeo made several important arguments in the course of his half hour address, in which he set out President Donald Trump’s policy regarding Iran in the wake of his May 8 announcement that he is abandoning Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The key line in his speech was, inarguably, “As President Trump said two weeks ago, he is ready, willing and able to negotiate a new deal [with Iran]. But the deal is not the objective. Our goal is to protect the American people.”

The basic insight that there is no intrinsic value to any agreement – or foreign policy initiative of any sort – that does not advance the interests of the United States or protect the American people is striking, because it has been absent from American foreign policy in relation to rogue regimes and entities for better part of the last generation.

Welcome to the Trump Doctrine.  It is brilliant in its simplicity and straightforwardness.

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From its start, the Trump administration has been plagued by charges of “chaos.”

From the revolving door of senior staffers — including two secretaries of state, three national security advisers and two chiefs of staff — to the president’s brash and sometimes boorish personal style, to his politically incorrect taunt-tweeting, Donald Trump has refused to conform to his political opponents’ conventional notions of what constitutes an effective White House operation.

Yet, because Trump is such a Black Swan, his has been the most effective administration since FDR’s first term.

And it’s being accomplished in the teeth of the so-called “Resistance,” which includes the overt hostility of nearly all the mainstream media, the embedded civil service, the Democrats, the never-Trump Republicans, rogue elements of the intelligence and investigative agencies, and Robert Mueller’s witch hunt regarding charges of “collusion” with the Russians.

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If you want to understand why Donald Trump is President today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats' hysterical response to two of Trump's major foreign policy achievements over the past week.

Last Thursday (5/10), the President traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency.

The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity. So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home.

Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump?  Are they so deranged with hate they can’t see their behavior helps Trump, not hurts him?

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Whatever uproar is occurring from and at Monday's (5/14) opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, that change of venue -- promised by several presidents of both parties and mandated by Congress in 1995 but accomplished only by Donald Trump -- constitutes an extraordinary development in the seemingly endless history of the Middle East.

And the suspicion is that, after not too long, it will be seen as a hugely positive one.

This isn't happening because of Trump alone, obviously.  But the man, possibly because of his lack of foreign policy preconceptions, has a unique knack for seizing the moment and moving forward as he is doing in Korea.

He allows his gut to prevail over the advice of a legion of experts.  Thanks to that, and believe it or not, Donald Trump may actually bring peace to the Middle East.

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[We all know how desperate Democrats are to rig elections with voter fraud.  Often, it’s the only way they can win.  It’s why they hysterically oppose Voter ID.  Yet as Joseph Stalin said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”  Today, the “who” is computers.  Here, computer security expert Bruce Schneier explains what to do about this. –JW]

Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers.

We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale.

Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is.

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Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.

After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.

Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops. But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators.

In truth, it’s not just Washington apparat.  The entire multiplex world of the establishment is crumbling in a variety of arenas, from entertainment to Silicon Valley to the workplace.

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It would probably give Robert Mueller a nervous breakdown, not to mention James Comey, Andrew McCabe and the rest of the FBI cabal, past and present, but at this point the special counsel seems to be actually causing the reelection of Donald Trump.

Most of the country, other than the greed heads in the media and extreme Democrat Party operatives, no longer gives a hoot in Hades about the "Russia Probe."  They're frustrated and sick of it.

There's a dawning national consensus of "enough already" reflected by Judge Ellis when he demanded to know exactly what Paul Manafort's possible money laundering schemes of years ago had to do with Trump colluding with Russia in the 2016 election. The same might be said of Stormy Daniels, whose Russia connection is even more remote.

But let's skip past the subplots of the moment to the greatest of all unintended consequences of this endless investigation -- the decline and fall of the Democrat Party.

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“What did they know and when did they know it?” and “It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up” are two of the biggest journalistic clichés of our time.

But clichés or not, sometimes they are true and they both apply (and then some) to the astonishing Eric Schneiderman situation.

This appalling scandal  should be nothing less than a spiritual crisis for the Democrat Party and so-called liberals and progressives everywhere.

It should.  But it probably won't be, even though the level of hypocrisy is stratospheric.  And that is the essence of the problem.

But the initial question immediately arises.  Since now six women (the NY Post has the latest per the cover story above) have reported near identical pathologies on the part of Schneiderman.

Didn't anyone know about this?

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When President Trump presided over a business roundtable in Cleveland last weekend, it was one of several events he has hosted in the Midwest since Election Day.

Trump held a raucous victory rally in Ohio just a few weeks after he won the presidency, and has since made frequent trips to Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan: He will visit Elkhart, Indiana today (5/10)

Trump skipped the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month and instead campaigned in central Michigan. The president’s courting of voters in the Heartland is a shrewd political calculation by Team Trump.  The POTUS has this figured out:

Democrats have been counting on the Great Lakes to deliver a Big Blue Wave this November to help win back control of Congress, but with no compelling message aside from impeachment, no policy agenda for the economy or national security, and no tactical strategy to lure swing voters back, Democrats might reverse the historical trend of the out-of-power party gaining more power in the midterm election.

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Robert Mueller has plenty of questions for President Trump, and maybe he will get to ask them. Most of them are perjury traps rather than real questions for the president.

Surprisingly, they contain very little that wasn’t in the public domain though prior leaks. In other words, the president is not a target because they have nothing implicating him, and so they want to use the interview to create such material.

But the conduct of the investigation by the special counsel and his team has raised a lot of questions as to its foundation, conflicts of interest, fairness and methods.

If you believe the last Harvard Caps-Harris Poll, much of the public supports Robert Mueller going forward with his investigation, although the Washington Post reported yesterday (5/01), “The number of people who say the Mueller investigation should continue is shrinking.’

That shrinking would no doubt continue if Mr. Mueller were required to answer a few questions himself.  In a deposition under oath with threat of perjury.  Such as:

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There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted.

The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.”

The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.

China would be delighted, as would Iran. But most important, there would be no collusion narrative — neither one concerning a defeated Donald Trump nor another implicating a victorious Hillary Clinton.

In triumph, progressives couldn’t have cared less whether Russians supposedly had tried to help a now irrelevant Trump; and they certainly would have prevented any investigation of the winning Clinton 2016 campaign.

In sum, Hillary’s supposedly sure victory, not fear of breaking the law, prompted most of the current 2016 scandals, and her embittering defeat means they are not being addressed as scandals.

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