Mark This Day

There was a time when most societies in the world depended on oral traditions to mark their history. To our modern ears, that sounds like a terribly inaccurate way to measure time and record events. In reality it was the opposite, and it is why we take so seriously the eyewitness testimony in historical investigations. When writing was not the way of the world, word of mouth was sacred, and treated as such.

Historical orators apprenticed for decades before they were given license to educate and speak independently. Precision in memory and execution was imperative to the truth. The result was to create long memories and deep connections to past events.

We no longer live in such intellectual luxury. The age of the printing press, and now the digital age, brought with it conveniences in learning and education that have made strides for oppressed people everywhere, and that’s wonderful. However, they have brought with them short memories. No need to precisely memorize every detail of a historical event down to the lineage. It’s written somewhere. We’ll look it up when we need it.

All this to say…we have short memories here in America, and our political class has depended on it, as has our corporate media. They depend on us not remembering the beginning of things, so that there will never be an end.

So today, I feel it prudent to point out that this day marks the beginning of something. A new norm. The genesis of a political tit-for-tat that can now have no ending. The seedy nature of which will now pollenate a landscape of ongoing political retribution. The result will be an endless supply of tainted honey.

The indictment of Donald Trump is going to bring some temporary satisfaction to the same crowd that skipped work and crowded into New York City bars at 7 a.m. to hear James Comey finally stick it to the Bad Orange Man. In the moment it seemed as though all their childish dreams might come true, and Comey would be THE ONE, the long-awaited force to correct the horrible mistake made in 2016. Then the inevitable happened. What Comey had to say turned out to be anything but the fantasy they’d built so big in their small minds.

This will be the same. The incurious minds on the left don’t really know what Trump’s indictments entail. A lot of them believe he’s heading to court to be tried as a Russian traitor. They don’t understand the charges are for fraudulent campaign reporting, and they are thin. As Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar puts it:

When the indictment was published, it was immediately clear that they kept it under wraps because it’s so flimsy and utterly laughable. As our Nick Arama predicted, Bragg’s engaging in “charge stacking,” a practice that is frowned-upon as an abusive tactic, the “second charge” that would possibly make the offense a felony is unclear, and the actions Bragg’s saying constitute the falsifying took place so long ago that the statute of limitations has expired.

There is no THERE there.

What is happening to Trump is purely motivated out of political revenge and a desire for career advancement. I suspect that Alvin Bragg’s legacy here won’t be as celebrated as he hopes. Regardless of what happens to Trump’s criminal record as a result of these charges, what Bragg has done today has changed a long-held norm in presidential politics. We do not drag former Presidents through the mud, legally speaking. We do not accept political vengeance for former Presidents who no longer hold office. If we did accept that, we’d be indicting every single former President on all manner of things in order to inflict electoral damage to current political opponents. It’s dirty and creates an atmosphere of chaos.

Trump spent months screaming “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, but in the end he conceded it wasn’t much more than a rallying cry. He understood that prosecuting a former first lady post-White House would only destabilize the dignity of an office that requires a lot of undignified planning to get to. He said it would be “divisive,” and he was right.

It’s the same principle as stacking the Supreme Court. Nine justices are not required by law, but it is a “norm” and if one party breaks that norm, the gloves come off. Every administration would simply be dooming America to four years of expanding and retracting the court, pushing blocks around to get the right shape for that particular administration. It would be a never-ending cavalcade of appointments. Americans would soon lose all faith in the judicial branch, and the justices would lose any semblance of credibility. It would be incredibly destabilizing. That is such an undeniable truth that even Democrats, despite their bloviating, have refused to pull the trigger on a SCOTUS arms race. They need Americans to believe the authority of SCOTUS.

It is the same thing with the executive office. We need to believe there is some basic value of respect we offer that position. It’s why it is accepted practice to accept an invitation to the White House to celebrate a sports victory or a personal accomplishment when asked, even if you despise the person currently occupying the Oval Office (some have not, and we have decried it as against the norm each time). You smile and wave, and shake the President’s hand because that’s what decorum demands. We must respect the President as an authority even when he’s a terrible authority, because the next good leader will need that tradition to govern effectively.

Donald Trump has been the impetus for the destruction of norms in so many ways. His very presidency was a departure from the norm.

Democrats and their sycophants forget that it was they who began normalizing cries of election interference and fraud. It was they who normalized questioning the integrity of our elections. They broke from a norm, and now the new norm is bound to be an endless merry-go-ground of losers accusing winners of cheating…yet another divisive game that will have Americans questioning what they can believe in. We cannot function as a strong nation, if we cannot trust our own electoral system.

There will be a Republican cycle in the executive office. That is inevitable. Now the gloves are off, and all the weird and shady things a candidate learns about others when they are elected will now be on the table. Political vengeance for ex-presidents is now a new norm, and there is no doubt a future Republican president will not be as kind to the Clintons or the Obamas or any other political royalty as Trump was to those figures. They will be exacting revenge. The gang war has been ignited.

So I wanted to mark this day, so you can bookmark this page and refer back to it when the Democrats try to memory-hole the start of this new norm. When a Republican president decides to make a spectacle of a former president, and signs on for vengeful prosecutions with questionable evidence, Democrat voters will scream, “This sets a terrible precedent! This is outside the norm for respect of this office!” and you can remind them that they started it.

It’s right here, on the record.