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USE INVESTIGATIONS TO TARGET POLITICAL FOES? Some Senate Democrats are complaining about Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s plan to have the Homeland Security Committee, which he chairs, investigate the ties between Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma. The Hill reports that “Democrats have warned for weeks, both publicly and privately, that GOP senators are using the panel to target President Trump’s political rivals.” Whatever the merits of that accusation, Republicans will say: After the Mueller investigation and the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees’ impeachment investigations, are Democrats really going to warn anyone about using investigations to target political rivals?
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WAS PUBLISHING THE DOSSIER A GOOD THING OR A BAD THING? A number of commentators have weighed in on an article by the New York Times’ Ben Smith criticizing journalist Ronan Farrow as a practitioner of “resistance journalism.” The new style of journalism, Smith said, de-emphasizes old fashioned values like fairness and open-mindedness in favor of woke attacks on people (like President Trump) who are disliked by other woke journalists. In response, a number of writers have observed that Smith is the man who, in January 2017 as editor of Buzzfeed, helped create resistance journalism by publishing the Steele dossier in its entirety, with all of its false and defamatory charges against Trump. How can he criticize anyone?
But here’s the debate: Was publishing the dossier an outrageous act, or a positive development? Commentary’s John Podhoretz argues the former: “The ripple effects from that disgraceful decision have distorted our national politics from that day to this,” he wrote in the New York Post. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway says the latter. “I still argue [Ben Smith] publishing the absurd Steele dossier made him the unintentional hero of the whole story,” she tweeted. “It exposed how ludicrous the whole Russia storyline was (for critical thinkers, at least.)”
Who’s right? For Trump-Russia students, probably Hemingway. Publication of the dossier seemed outrageous at first, but it did expose the bad-faith actions of the FBI and others in government investigating the Trump campaign in 2016-2017. The FBI actually agreed to pay Steele for that stuff? Yes, it did. James Comey actually briefed President-elect Trump on it? Yes, he did. They actually presented it to a court to win a warrant to wiretap Carter Page? Yes, they did. Knowing what was actually in the dossier exposed their game. And think of this: If the dossier had remained unpublished, imagine all the drib-drab, impossible-to-verify leaks that would have come from it throughout the president’s first year in office. It was much better to see the whole thing at one time.
“I WOULD VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN IF HE BOILED BABIES AND ATE THEM.” How far will some on the left go to express their support of the Democratic nominee for president? That quote is from The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, who wants to rescue the country from President Trump and “unchecked rule by kleptocrats, fascists, religious fanatics, gun nuts, and know-nothings.” Finally, a moderate voice speaks out…
