WASHINGTON — Did you see a particular Wall Street Journal front-page headline on Monday? It read “Profits Soar as Economy Advances.” That headline will probably be the most important headline of the week. It certainly is of colossal importance. Our economy is robust. The rest of the world is not doing so well. Take, for instance, China. Yet our economy is unusually healthy. If we have to engage in a trade war, it is an auspicious time for us to do so. President Donald Trump has deployed an array of policies and appointments that are serving the country very well. Apparently, the prophet Obama was in error when, as president, he said: “Businesses make big profits. But they’ve learned to do more with less. And so they don’t hire. And as a consequence, we keep on seeing growth that is just too slow to bring back the 8 million jobs that were lost.”
You, however, were probably distracted by such headlines as these: from the Washington Post front page, “Trump Defends Son’s ’16 Meeting,” and from The New York Times front page, “Trump Admits Meeting’s Aim: Tarnish Clinton.” Then there were stories about the shopping mania of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, about his sidekick who is a sidekick no more, and, throughout the newspapers, stories about Trump and his family, none of them favorable but none of them as damning as the newspaper editors would have you think.
Of course, in 2016 Donald Trump Jr. and his associates sat down with a Russian source to hear what the source had to say about Hillary Clinton’s recent misdeeds. How could he not? No woman in public life has ever accumulated so many scandals and instances of wrongdoing as Clinton. For that matter, not many men have accumulated a record comparable to Clinton’s without going to jail. There is her relationship with The Clinton Foundation, her fundraising operation and her assorted problems like Benghazi. In the months ahead, there would be her association with old friends and choice funders, such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. When one sits down to talk about Clinton, one is not anticipating a conversation about acts of faith, hope and charity.
Of course, there could also be revelations about former President Bill Clinton. He now seems to have gone underground. There is no talk of his getting out on the campaign trail for the Democrats. My agents tell me he is under the bed in Chappaqua, hoping no new rape victims or would-be Kathleen Willeys materialize. He is especially concerned about girls he met in Arkansas in the ’80s who developed drug dependency problems before heading off to Florida to embark on lives of prostitution. How about if one of those girls develops a #MeToo itch?
There have been three constitutional crises in my lifetime, and two of them revolved around the Clintons. The third revolved around former President Richard Nixon, and he was man enough to resign his office rather than put the country through an impeachment trial, just as he was man enough to leave the outcome of the 1960 election uncontested after the votes from Texas and Illinois looked shady (and still remain dubious to some historians). The Clintons pursued the crisis of Bill Clinton’s impeachment gamely, even though he had obviously lied under oath and obstructed justice. After all, it was, as his supporters said, “only sex” … with a girl less than half his age. Let him trot out that alibi today.
The second constitutional crisis that the Clintons have manufactured for us is the crisis of the Russians’ “phantom” collusion with the president. It involves prosecutors pursuing leads that go nowhere but have taken almost two years to run down before our own Inspector Clouseau takes up another lead. At present, special counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing Trump’s tweets as though the tweets were not uttered in a very public forum but rather whispered in secret. The Russians wanted to meddle in our elections, we are told. So now, Inspector Mueller; the Democrats’ mouthpiece, Fusion GPS; an ex-British intelligence sleuth; and the Clintons are assisting them in just that, meddling in an American presidential election.
How did we arrive at this chaotic place? I thought the source of criminality was Hillary Clinton and her server, not Trump and his son. Well, if you would like to know how we got here, lay your hands on “Shattered: Inside Hillary’s Doomed Campaign.” There on page 395 you will find a hungover Clinton angry as hell the morning after her unexpected defeat. She directed her aides Robby Mook and John Podesta to assemble “her communications team … to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. … Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” This has been the Clintons’ successful game plan ever since, though some of us have blown the whistle on it.
The origin of our present constitutional crisis is a bit more complicated than this passage from “Shattered” makes out, but here is a good starting point to discover how the mob, the prosecutors, the media and the Democratic Party are intent on stealing the last election and saving the Clintons’ hides.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author, most recently, of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson, Inc. To find out more about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
