Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, March 30, 2019

B3

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, March 30, 2019 


HAIL HAMILTON

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Hail Hamilton


HERE WE GO AGAIN… ONE MORE TIME!

 I feel personally assaulted. I mean badly beaten up—Kicked, 
stomped, truncheoned—over and over again with the biggest lie 
yet of the Trump Presidency: That Robert Mueller’s report somehow, 
in some twisted way, concluded that repeatedly with biker 
boots made for stomping; truncheoned over every inch of my 
body with a leaded nightstick; and struck over and over again 
with brass knuckles with all the might a large man can muster. 

 I say all this because, not even 72 hours after Bob Mueller 
submitted his report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr about what he and his 
Special Investigation team has been doing the past 22 months, I see Senator Lindsey 
Graham (R—S.C.) repeating, to anyone who will listen, his “paranoid left-wing anti-
Trump conspiracy theories.” 

 Graham apparently also agrees with A.G. Barr’s and the Department of Justice’s 
current (some experts say “twisted”) interpretation of the Constitution: that although 
the Constitution doesn’t state whether a sitting president may be charged with crimes, 
The current interpretation of the DOJ via an opinion in 2000 by its Office of Legal 
Counsel, is “that a president may not be indicted while in office.” 

 This sort of legal logic leads to only one conclusion: the President of the United 
States cannot be charged, indicted or tried for any crime no matter how horrible, egregious, 
and harmful that crime may be. Am I surprised? Not at all. This is exactly the 
argument President Trump has been making since the Special Investigation began. 

 Trump really believes he is above the law while he occupies the White House, and 
when he leaves he will simply pardon himself. Think about it; the most corrupt president 
in U.S. history will leave office with all the perks of any other president—pension, 
protection, and everything else that goes with being a retired president—all paid by the 
American taxpayer! You have to admit, for a deal making crook, this is a deal made in 
heaven co-signed by the devil.

 Perhaps, saddest of all, is an honorable man like Robert Mueller, was forced 
the most important (and difficult) decisions about the fate of the president, Don Jr., 
Ivanka, her husband Jared Kushner, and even Eric in the hands of a proven ideologue, 
William Barr. “While this report does not conclude the president committed a crime, it 
also does not exonerate him” on whether he obstructed justice, Mueller said, according 
to Barr’s four-page summary.

 Because the special counsel did not reach a conclusion on obstruction, Barr 
wrote that the ultimate decision was left to him, adding that he and Deputy Attorney 
General Rod Rosenstein determined that Trump’s conduct did not constitute a crime. 
Trump declared the findings a “complete and total exoneration” of him. All these legal 
decisions and political declarations made within hours of receiving the report, before 
anyone at the DOJ or the White House had even read it.

 If that’s wasn’t enough bad news for one morning, just days later Trump 
gloating is in tweets about how the victory of recent filings would allow his court attack 
on the Affordable Health Care Act will move his battle up the legal food chain and 
eventually scuttle the whole ObamaCare national health care program. 

 What he neglected to explain, however, is how cancelling 21 million Americans 
health insurance will be good news to them or how 133 million Americans will no 
longer be covered for pre-existing health conditions or extended hospitalization. Nor 
did did he even mention the chaos and uncertainty this will create to everybody else’s 
healthcare coverage, whether public or private. 

 Apparently, in Trump Land, predictability, continuity and consequences—like 
outcomes, truth and justice—are no longer important considerations. In Trump Land, 
the ends definitely do justify the means, no matter the cost in national treasure and 
our citizens welfare because of the lack of access to affordable, high quality health care.


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

DICK POLMAN

MICHAEL REAGAN


TRUMP’S BIG, NEW LIE

Sunday is traditionally a day of rest, but not for habitual liars. 
Which is why Donald Trump greeted the news of the Mueller 
report - correction, a report summary prepared and spun by his 
handpicked attorney general - by going on Twitter and spiking the 
ball in the end zone: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete 
and Total EXONERATION.”

If what the attorney general says is accurate - and all we’ve gotten 
so far is the Barr minimum - Robert Mueller has apparently 
found that Trump did not criminally conspire with Russia when 
it attacked the 2016 election. He can now legitimately crow about 
“no collusion.” But the rest of his Sunday tweet was nonsensical. 
Mueller did not say that Trump was innocent of obstructing justice. Barr’s summary 
quotes Mueller directly: “while this report does not conclude that the president 
committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

We’ll need to see the report itself to determine why Mueller left that door ajar, but we 
also need to put the report in perspective and focus on the big picture. Ignore for now 
what we don’t know about the report and bear in mind everything we already know. 
Because it’s all there, hideously so, in plain sight.

A hostile foreign power staged an unprecedented clandestine invasion of our democratic 
system, for the purpose of electing Trump. Trump deliberately or obliviously went along 
for the ride, reaping the benefits, negotiating well into the election season for a Moscow 
Trump Tower and ignoring umpteen pieces of evidence that Russia was hacking on his 
behalf and indeed bragging about Russia’s conduit (“I love WikiLeaks!”), 

Trump also concocted a fake cover story to conceal his son Donald’s quest for Russian 
dirt, publicly asked for Russia’s help against Hillary (“Russia, if you’re listening…”), 
refused to support the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus on Russian interference, 
spilled highly classified western intelligence to the Russians in an Oval Office chat and 
sided with Putin against his own country at the Helsinki summit.

Yeah, some exoneration.

As one prominent American told Trump on national TV prior to the election, “It’s 
pretty clear you won’t admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the 
United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you 
are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever 
he wants to do and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear 
favorite in this race.” Thank you, Hillary Clinton.

David Frum, the reality-based conservative commentator, wrote that it’s irrelevant 
whether Trump actually “colluded.” The bottom line is, “he received stolen goods, but 
he did not conspire with the thieves in advance…Are Americans comfortable with this 
president in the White House, now that they know he broke no prosecutable criminal 
statutes on the way into higher office?”

Is that, in fact, the new (lower) standard? Just because Trump has not been criminally 
accused, are we supposed to ignore the horrific questions that still demand to be 
answered? 

Why, for instance, did Putin want Trump to win so badly? Why does Trump kowtow 
to Putin at every opportunity and refuse to safeguard our national security from a 
future electoral attack? And Evan McMullin, a conservative and former CIA operations 
officer, tweets another good question: “Is it (now) acceptable for our leaders to secretly 
pursue business deals with hostile foreign nations while encouraging & covering for 
their attacks against us?”

Americans in 2018 voted for accountability, so the House Democrats will have to tackle 
those questions - and multitudes more. The report itself may shed light on those matters, 
assuming we get to see it. And no Republican victory dance can erase the fundamental 
truth that the Trump regime was put in place with Russia’s help, and that Trump aides 
are in jail or heading there because they lied under oath to conceal that truth. 

In the words of conservative attorney George Conway, husband of Kellyanne, 
“Whatever happens this day or the next, or in this investigation or the next or the one 
after that, we should always remember this: We should expect far more from a president 
than merely that he not be provably a criminal beyond a reasonable doubt.” 


Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in 
Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.


THE REELECTION OF DONALD 
TRUMP

Donald Trump won the 2016 election last weekend - 
again. The professional Trump Haters in Washington, 
Manhattan and Hollywood are still in full denial mode, 
though, and they’re refusing to accept Special Counsel 
Robert Mueller’s determination that the president and 
his campaign did not collude with the Russians. It’s sad. 

The anti-Trump zealots in the Democrat Party and liberal 
media have been deluding themselves for two years that 
Mueller and his lawyers were going to nail Trump on collusion, obstruction or 
any number of impeachable crimes.

Journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post swallowed every 
crazy story the Democrats spun about Trump - and then blared them as fact 
on their front pages with little or no skepticism. Meanwhile, MSNBC/CNN’s 
troika of Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Don Lemon piled on nightly. In 
addition to their own left-liberal rants, they paraded out every Trump enemy or 
ex-Obama team member they could find to call the president a liar, a crook, a 
tax cheat, a dictator, a traitor, a puppet of Putin…

But the Trump Haters’ bubble broke with a huge pop last weekend when 
Attorney General William Barr reported that Mueller’s investigation had found 
that the president was telling the truth. “No collusion on Russia” was crushing 
news for the lefties and fake journalists on MSNBC and CNN, the co-flagships 
of the Fake News fleet. Maddow and Lemon almost cried on camera, and 
Matthews was so speechless he couldn’t interrupt anyone. I’d cry too if I were 
one of those guys. 

After two years of being wrong, wrong, wrong about Trump and the Russians, 
their credentials as pundits or commentators are shot - and apparently even 
many of their loyal viewers know it. The large audience of liberals Maddow 
had built up with her tedious nightly “seminars” about Trump’s alleged treason 
dropped by about 20 percent this week - probably because so many distraught 
viewers are visiting grief counselors.

Maddow and her equally deranged MSNBC colleague “Morning Joe” 
Scarborough are in complete denial. They are not apologizing for how they 
and the biased journalists in their political camp got it so wrong about Russian 
collusion. Maddow and Scarborough are imitating my own embarrassing 
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who claims to know stuff about Trump 
that Mueller’s army of lawyers and investigators could not dig up. They are now 
nitpicking Attorney General William Barr’s synopsis of the Mueller report and 
hinting of an even bigger conspiracy.

Meanwhile, President Trump has the last laugh - a big one - and he now has the 
high political ground. He’s already embarked on a “No Collusion” victory tour 
in the Midwest and his chances are looking better than ever for reelection in 
2020. Without collusion and obstruction, the Democrats have no major issues 
left to attack President Trump.

The economy is still doing great. Unemployment among blacks, Latinos and 
women is at all-time lows. Incomes and wages are going up. The Democrats’ 
new socialist ideas - Medicare for all, free college tuition and the silly Green 
New Deal - are impossible dreams that can never be paid for.

So all they really have is collusion, obstruction and impeachment, which is why 
we’ll be seeing Mueller and Barr dragged into the House of Representatives to 
be interrogated by Schiff and his fellow desperate Democrats.

Democrats, like Maddow, Morning Joe and Lemon, have always believed Robert 
Mueller was going to come in and give them the game-winning TD they needed 
to finally defeat Trump.

But thanks to the Mueller report, all they can do now is throw Hail Marys into the 
end zone and pray that Mueller or Bill Barr will be called for pass interference.

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons 
My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” 

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