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.
› Impeachment: The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally investigating 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 Democratically controlled Senate, and that the impeachment is cynically timed to synchronize with president’s re-election efforts.
All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his re-election 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, Vice President Joe Biden.
No one now denies that Joe Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired by threatening to cancel legislatively approved U.S. aid. Shokin knew about the skulduggery through which the Biden family eventually received $6.5 million from Ukraine — and so Biden ensured his firing, and publicly bragged about it in performance-art fashion.
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 their lobbying efforts on its behalf.
› 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 Zelensky. 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-California, to engineer an impeachment writ.
And whistleblowers now?
IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and 13-year Special IRS Agent Joe Ziegler never violated any statute 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.
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 fear-mongering 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, DOJ and IRS that we have seen under the Biden and earlier Obama administrations. There was no concerted effort to destroy the 2020 Biden campaign in the manner of the 2016 Russian-collusion caper, no FBI suppression of evidence as we saw in the case of the Hunter laptop, no warping of a FISA court, no paying social media corporations FBI money to suppress news unfavorable to Trump. And so on.
It may well be unwise to impeach a president in his first term when he loses his House majority. It may certainly set a bad precedent to subpoena the children of presidents. It may be regrettable that whistleblowers are either unduly demonized or sanctified. And it is of course wrong to smear a president as a veritable Hitlerian dictator.
But the left does not see such absolutes. Instead, once a supposedly morally superior agenda is enunciated, then any means necessary are justified to obtain it.
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 only by determining whether they prove useful to the progressive project.
Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.