The week that wasn’t for anti-Trumpers
By Cal Thomas
Tribune Content Agency
Last week was not a good one for anti-Trumpers, who include virtually all Democrats and most establishment Republicans.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein picked last Friday, just three days before President Trump was scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to announce the indictment of a dozen Russian intelligence agents for their alleged involvement in the hacking of Democratic National Committee records.
The timing seems more than coincidental. The real headline in Rosenstein’s announcement was that the special counsel has found no evidence any votes were changed in the 2016 election as a result of Russian meddling. That won’t stop Trump haters, however, whose goal continues to be to see him impeached, or quit, or indicted, or not run for re-election, because like someone who can’t give up on an old flame, they seem unable to get over the fact that Hillary Clinton isn’t president.
President Trump tweeted from Scotland before heading to his meeting with Putin: “The stories you heard about the 12 Russians … took place during the Obama Administration, not the Trump Administration. Why didn’t they do something about it, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September, before the Election?”
President Obama ridiculed Donald Trump in 2016 for suggesting a U.S. election could be influenced by a foreign power. “No serious person out there … would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama said. Nevertheless, he did “something” by expelling 35 Russian officials as part of a larger set of sanctions after acknowledging that Russia did, in fact, try to influence the election’s outcome.
American hands are not completely clean when it comes to meddling in the elections of other countries. In a Dec. 22, 2016, interview on National Public Radio, Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov Levin told host Ari Shapiro the U.S. has meddled in the elections of other nations more than 80 times between 1946 and 2000. Levin didn’t include the Israeli parliamentary election in 2015. A congressional committee was told that the State Department, then run by Secretary John Kerry, who succeeded Hillary Clinton, “paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Washington Times reported.
Democrats also found themselves in the position last week of defending FBI agent Peter Strzok, who claimed the animus he and his mistress and fellow agent, Lisa Page, exchanged in emails about their hatred for Trump as well as Strzok’s promise Trump would not be elected because “we will stop him” had no influence on their ability to perform their jobs. That Strzok smirked in response to many of the questions from Republican committee members did not help his credibility.
Trump haters will not give up no matter how many times they fail. Republicans are increasingly positive they will maintain their House and Senate majorities in the November election. That’s because consumer confidence is high due to strong economic growth and an unemployment rate that is at a 16-year low.
Hate is not a policy, and the Democrats are so devoid of policies that they have run out of even bad ones. This once-great party used to have at least some leaders with integrity. Now they are only about destroying the president and grabbing power once again. What would they do with power if they got it? Just think President Hillary Clinton and imagine how everything good that is happening would never have occurred if she occupied the White House and was naming justices to the Supreme Court.
(Readers may email Cal Thomas at [email protected].)
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