After Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago had the FBI visit and look for alleged classified documents in his possession, the Left had a field day. Between jokes at the former President’s expense, memes recounting times when Trump made statements that now applied to him, and hoping this would finally be the thing that landed Trump in prison, Leftists were full of more hope than a Barack Obama rally.
There was also a common theme among the talking heads in the media and politics: no one is above the law. Although I’m happy to see Leftists embracing law and order for a change, let’s just say I’m not convinced they’re genuine and/or consistent in that sentiment.
Leftists being hypocrites? Heaven forbid!
Now, what I’m about to go over will likely get dismissed as “whataboutism” and there’s certainly an element of that in play. Having said that, these examples are necessary to lay out the groundwork for my argument.
For as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as I can get, we need to go back to May 2002 when former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger took classified documents out of the National Archive in his pants. (And I wish I were kidding about that last part.) After calling it an “honest mistake,” he eventually plead guilty in 2005. His punishment? Two years of probation, surrendering his law license, a loss of his security clearance for 3 years, and a promise to cooperate with investigators.
No FBI raids on his home. No wall-to-wall media coverage detailing every sorted detail of his crimes on a 25/8 continuous loop (because 24/7 isn’t enough, or because Common Core math took over telling time). Just an acknowledgement of the sentence, a hand-wave of the severity of the crime, and glowing obituaries upon the event of his passing.
Granted, Donald Trump hasn’t gone to the Great Mar-a-Lago in the Sky yet, but there is a decided difference in how the Berger and Trump document situations are being handled. Aside from a handful of balanced analyses from pundits like Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley, the rule has been to assume Trump is guilty and deserves the treatment he’s gotten. Some even point to the Berger situation as precedent in the court of public opinion as a means to condemn Trump.
But there’s a bit more at play here outside of the “whataboutism.” Leftists believe in their superiority (just ask them), and try to shape the world to affirm it. When someone on the Left violates the law or acts inappropriately, it’s circle the wagons time! Only after it’s a done deal will Leftists acknowledge the actual crime, and usually as a means to dismiss it as old news.
That is if Leftists admit there was wrong-doing in the first place. Anyone remember Lois Lerner? If not, she was one of the people behind the IRS targeting political groups with connections to the TEA Party. After blaming the scandal on “low level employees,” the Department of Justice closed their investigation without Lerner being charged. Oh, sure, the DOJ report references mismanagement at all levels, but they allegedly didn’t find any laws being broken.
Unfortunately for them, there were. Lerner admitted to singling out applications for tax exempt status with the words “TEA Party” or “Patriot,” but argued those actions weren’t politically motivated. Yeah, and I’m the first Lutheran Pope. Where the legal violations come into play is when she turned over tax documents from the aforementioned groups to the DOJ.
Yeah. That’s illegal, not to mention unconstitutional. Remember, kids, Leftists say Roe v. Wade was based on a Constitutional right to privacy (that really isn’t in the Constitution, but play along with me here for a minute). That means the IRS violated the right to privacy of TEA Party groups. Oops.
But did the Leftists cheering the raid on Mar-a-Lago say much of anything about Lerner’s criminal and Constitutional missteps? Nope. They went along with the “low level employees” line, which was bullshit from the word go.
With Berger, Lerner, and any number of other Leftists (I’m looking at you, Eric Swalwell), no crime is too grave to excuse, or in most cases ignore, because they’re on the right side. And by “right side” I mean Left side. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, and the whole Hee Haw Gang on the Left are a handful of examples of people who get to be above the law by virtue of being Leftists and having media Leftists (a redundancy, I know) cover for them by not covering them committing crimes.
Republicans, conservatives, and anyone else who falls outside the Leftist hivemind don’t get that treatment. If anything, they’re more heavily scrutinized to find every micron of dirt they can find to make the target of scorn look even more like Al Capone, only less honest. Speaking personally, I’m afraid opposition research will find I had an overdue library book in elementary school, which would certainly derail any hopes I had of becoming President. Or even County Supervisor of Creating Busy Work for Government Employees So They Don’t Actually Try to Do Real Work.
Why…it’s almost as if the Left’s version of law and order only goes one way!
Which, of course, to them it does. Since they are superior to us plebs, they write their own rules and excuse their own mistakes. But that’s not really justice; it’s rigging the system to one’s own benefit. Leftists will argue (without irony) this has been going on for quite some time and only through their efforts will everyone get a fair shake in the legal system. Yet, their efforts to give everyone a fair shake only reinforce the existing power structure where some people are treated better than others.
That’s called a self-own, kids.
Regardless of how you feel about Donald Trump, he was absolutely right about ideology trumping (see what I did there) justice. As more details come about about the Mar-a-Lago raid, I think we’ll see the former President proven right yet again.
And without having to lie to the FISA court, no less!
