By DEXTER DUGGAN
Are pending national political developments poised to demonstrate the difference between vengeance and justice?
The former means inflicting excessive or unreasonable punishment, while the latter means administering what’s fair or decent.
When one hears of lex talionis, that’s the principle of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. That may sound harsh, and devoid of mercy, but it was intended to forbid wild retribution. Or, as one definition puts it, according to lex talionis, the punishment should correspond in degree and kind to the offense.
To give one example, if a man poked out your eye, you may poke out his eye. But you may not avenge your eye by collectively murdering him, all his family, burning down his house, poisoning his crops, and taking all his possessions.
This should put an end to raging tribal warfare over a limited offense. This may not sound rich in Christian mercy, but it’s a big step forward from laying a nation waste if a rotten apple from your tree accidentally drops onto your neighbor’s property.
Democrats were bitterly disappointed when their very corrupt, very pro-abortion Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential race to multibillionaire Manhattan Republican Donald Trump. Desperate for explanations, they quickly tossed together a theory that Trump won by colluding with Russian government manipulators.
Trump’s supporters correctly recognized this assertion as highly unlikely if not outright nonsense. But, being the tough political players that Dems are, before long special counsel Robert Mueller officially was tasked with investigating the shocking claim that the new president was a traitor.
After a wide-ranging probe lasting nearly two years, the Justice Department announced on March 22 that Mueller had finished looking. And Mueller’s report finished off the collusion nonsense.
One reaction came from Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) on March 25: “After 22 months and 2,800 subpoenas, Mr. Mueller and his team of 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and declined to prosecute anyone for obstruction of justice. It’s time to move on.”
Badly embarrassed Democrats hoped everyone would just forget their shrieking over a phony scandal for almost as long as it takes a newborn baby to grow into pre-kindergarten age. (If you’ll pardon my mentioning live babies and Democrats in the same sentence.) Some news reports said the Dems wanted to pivot to other issues.
But is it merely Christian forgiveness to let Dems duck away from a bleeding mess that they and their media allies had promised for many months would lead to Trump being frog-marched in chains from the White House?
Or does it disarm Trump’s conservatives if gut-punching Dems are simply allowed to skate on to energizing their next assault, whether against babies, religious believers, Israel, or other Dem-despised targets?
For many months of investigation, the president behaved in typical blustery Trump fashion. His foes took this as further evidence of his guilt. But how about Trump just showing he actually had a conscience, and it was outraged by this onslaught?
After the exoneration, conservative pundit Rich Lowry commented: “It’s very easy to be relaxed about someone else’s reputation. We saw this during the Kavanaugh controversy when progressives were outraged that Brett Kavanaugh got emotional about being falsely accused of gang rape. Trump, apparently, was supposed to be cool and nonplussed about being accused of treason.”
Liberally inclined British columnist Piers Morgan remarked at the Daily Mail website that while he was pleased that Trump “was finally exonerated of a high crime I never thought he could possibly have committed, my overwhelming feeling today is one of fury that he had to endure such a disgraceful, deceitful, and concerted attack on his presidency based on nothing but a fervent desire to destroy him and his family. . . .
“What is far worse is the way so many mainstream U.S. media networks, newspapers, and individual journalists fueled the fake frenzy,” Morgan added.
Veteran national conservative columnist Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer: “Robert Mueller always has been a superb public servant who acts, as the saying goes, ‘by the book.’ He did exactly that in this case. All of the smears aimed his way for two years, including from Donald Trump, were wrong. He went where the facts led him.
“Donald Trump has behaved badly throughout, but it always was doubtful that he personally committed impeachable offenses in this case. Now let’s move on,” Hillyer added.
Even conservatives who routinely had regarded the nation’s capital as a swamp of influence-peddling and back-scratching probably were surprised to learn of the plotting against Trump at the highest levels of a supposedly impartial agency like the FBI.
Restoring Integrity
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer that going forward to ensure integrity isn’t revenge.
“There is no question it was somewhere between a hoax and an outright conspiracy to unseat the president of the United States,” Querard said.
“Because of the danger to the country of anything that remotely touches on a conspiracy, the entire origin of the matter and the players involved should be investigated and prosecuted if they are guilty of breaking the law.
“It isn’t a question of revenge, which would itself be abusive of the process, but a question of restoring integrity to a system that has seen elected officials, the news media, institutions like the FBI itself, and others terribly compromised by the actions of a relative few. We need those institutions strong and reliable again,” Querard said.
Longtime Trump supporter Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer: “I believe it was not Mueller’s intent to end the two-year investigation of the Clinton-paid-for-lying-dossier by reporting no collusion. Rather, his intent was to allow the nightmare to continue by reporting he could not make a determination on obstruction of justice.
“Mueller thus gave his co-conspirators of the left a green light to continue the rot of lies in order to drive President Trump from office and prevent an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s record of corruption,” he said.
“The Democrat Party’s native tongue is the language of lies. What they practice is not political debate but political deceit,” Haney said. “Trump must realize by this time that he cannot seek an honest compromise with them. That would be like Israel giving up Gaza for a guarantee of peace with the PLO.
“The Democrats do not want peace. They want to obliterate the Republican Party through a bombing campaign of media-supported lies, voter fraud, and the continued invasion of illegal immigrants,” he said.
“Trump is in a battle of good vs. evil, life vs. death, integrity vs. corruption. I would urge him to now launch a full-scale assault on the establishment liars residing in the D.C. political swamp,” Haney said.
Independent pundit Glenn Greenwald tweeted to anti-Trump partisans: “I’m genuinely sorry if you spent the last three years believing a blatantly stupid partisan fairy tale ripped out of the pages of a primitive Tom Clancy novel & made it central to your worldview. I get that it’s upsetting & disorienting when it got revealed as a hoax. Look inward.”
National radio talker Sean Hannity, a firm Trump defender, told his listeners on March 26, “This is the day we begin to hold them accountable….We are not gonna let this go.”
Breitbart News reported that Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) told it on March 26 that Trump, during a lunch with GOP senators, reinforced his call to investigate the origins of the collusion hoax.
The news service quoted Paul saying that the president “feels that it’s damaging to the country, damaging to the ability to lead the country, that we basically — somebody within the Obama administration, within the DOJ and the FBI, basically concocted an investigation, trumped it up to be something that it wasn’t, and then we’ve gone through two years of the country being stalled because of this fake investigation.”
Fox News quoted Trump as saying, “Hopefully somebody is going to look at the other side. This was an illegal takedown that failed, and hopefully somebody is going to be looking at the other side.”
Fox said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, elaborated: “There has to be a full and complete investigation, with at least as much enthusiasm as this one, to figure out where did this charge emanate, who started it, who paid for it.”
Although Democrats had grown fond of claiming Trump’s alleged collusion was comparable to President Nixon’s Watergate scandal, revealing the reality of who was behind cooking up this hoax portended an actual scandal far worse than Watergate. And it had D.C. swamp-dwellers’ fingerprints all over it.
Expect little interest in this dirty mess by dominant left-wing media unless Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and their chums actually are fitted for orange suits.
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