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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
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Now that's a scary clown.
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Gregg Jarrett: Adam Schiff’s drive to impeach Trump based on opinions, deception and illusions – Not facts
By Gregg Jarrett | Fox News Rep. Adam Schiff is a poor man’s Harry Houdini. He is a cheap illusionist performing amateurish parlor tricks of deception in his quest to convince his audience that he possesses damning evidence of an impeachable offense committed by President Trump. Schiff, D-Calif., has no such evidence, of course. But like most illusionists, Schiff employs misdirection and confusion. He attempts to convince you that opinions are evidence, while facts are not. This is the stuff of rank political magic where perceptions are distorted through clever manipulation of the process. Schiff has become the master manipulator aided, in large part, by the secrecy of his faux magic act. He won’t allow you to peek behind the curtain to see for yourself the witnesses he has called in his “super top secret” impeachment inquisition. You are never permitted to view transcripts of depositions or examine testimony that purports to incriminate the president. That, of course, would ruin all the hocus-pocus. Republicans have spent weeks trying to pierce the veil of secrecy. They have now partially succeeded by pressuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., into a resolution for a full House vote on the heretofore partisan and unjust proceedings that are bereft of due process. At the very least, this new action will establish some fundamental rules of fairness and transparency that are the bane of pretend-illusionists like Schiff. Americans will finally get to see how the House Intelligence Committee chairman rigged his inquisition with hearsay witnesses and others who had nothing meaningful to offer except their own personal interpretations of a July 25 conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. read more |
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Impeachment: Sifting the serious from the silly
By John Podhoretz October 31, 2019 | 7:30pm. NEW YORK POST There are people for whom the very fact that President Trump breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide constitutes an impeachable offense. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who is running the impeachment inquiry that got approved by the House Thursday, is one of these people. Is he going to run a fair inquiry? What are you, crazy? As the “impeach-him-for- breathing” crowd would reply, where in the Constitution does it say Schiff has to be fair? Meanwhile, there are those for whom the only thing that would constitute a high crime and misdemeanor justifying Trump’s removal from office would be if he switched parties and joined the Democrats — if that! The president was on to something when he said he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters. For both of these camps, any factoid that seems to cast White House behavior in a problematic light is now fed through a filter — and either automatically added to the impeach file by the impeachers or to the witch-hunt pile by the defenders. It might be worthwhile to try to tease out what actually belongs where. Here’s how I separate out the two. First, the foreign policy Trump chooses to advance shouldn’t be involved in any discussion of impeachment. He is the president. Executive-branch policy is his and his alone to decide, even if you think it’s just terrible — or if it contradicts decades of ideas on which both Republicans and Democrats have agreed. If he wants to change policy on Ukraine, even though that policy seems set in stone, he is allowed to do so. It’s the job of his rivals and those who disagree to make the case that by doing so he is doing something wrong and should either change his ways or be voted out of office. Ditto for the way in which that policy is made and carried out. The idea that there is something impeachable in using back-channel figures to implement foreign-policy changes is ridiculous. Presidents have used back channels featuring friends and cronies practically since the nation was founded. To describe what is going on as a “shadow foreign policy” is moronic. The president’s foreign policy is the foreign policy. Nothing in the Constitution says the foreign policy of the United States is created by a bureaucracy that stands independently of the president. It seems clear that the president wants there to be a certain level of chaos in the making of his foreign policy, which unnerves the conventional policy makers and implementers. They have every right to be concerned. They also have every right to let the world know about their concerns. But even if you think this is a lousy way to do business, nothing about it justifies even the whispered utterance of the word “impeachment. read more |
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