THE PATRIOT POST - ALEXANDER'S COLUMN 10/09/2019

The Demo Double Standard When Digging for Dirt on Trump

Democrats embrace hypocrisy as if it was the highest of political character traits.

Mark Alexander

"In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend." —Alexander Hamilton (1788) I have often observed, "If it weren't for double standards, Democrats wouldn't have any." I'm not sure who said it first, but it frequently bears repeating. Case in point would be the discovery of the 2018 Durbin-Leahy-Menendez letter to Ukrainian officials, which I mentioned two weeks ago in "Democrat Obstruction 2.0." That column was a rebuttal to Demo Speaker Nancy Pelosi's announcement of the Democrat Party's 2020 campaign platform — a coup d'etat masquerading as an impeachment to overthrow the American people's lawful election of Donald Trump — or at least to prevent his reelection. After the colossal failure of their first coup attempt orchestrated by leftist deep-state operatives in the FBI and CIA, in August of this year, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff used intermediaries to collude with a new group of CIA "whistleblowers" to set Trump up again. Schiff and his shills claim that last July, Trump requested that Ukrainian officials investigate the activities of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in a quid-pro-quo exchange for the release of $391 million in American aid. Apparently, young Hunter collected significant "cash benefits," both from Ukraine and China, when the old man was Barack Obama's vice president, and Democrats are crying foul that our nation's current chief executive had the audacity to ask then-newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into that and other corruption matters. (We now know that five months before the call from Trump, Ukrainian prosecutors were already investigating Hunter Biden's Burisma outfit.) The most amusing correspondence in this latest Demo charade is a letter from Pelosi to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, in which she laughably cites her "solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Pelosi also insisted, "Our Founders were specifically intent on ensuring that foreign entities did not undermine the integrity of our elections." As if her reference "to support and defend" our Constitution weren't enough of an eye-roller, she concludes, "We hope you and other Republicans share our commitment to following the facts, upholding the Constitution, protecting our national security, and defending the integrity of our elections at such a serious moment in our nation's history." Ah, yes, Democrats "upholding the Constitution." But the letter of reference exemplifying the Demos' double standard in this dustup is a correspondence composed on official U.S. Senate letterhead, addressed to then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and signed by Demo Sens. Richard Durbin (IL), Patrick Leahy (VT), and Robert Menendez (NJ). As political analyst Marc A. Thiessen pointedly asks, "It's okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it's not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?" This Demo trio made clear that they were "strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine" before strong-arming Lutsenko to do as they said. In regard to their fake Russian-collusion delusion to take down President Trump, the Demos complained, "We ... are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump." They then demanded that Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important [Mueller] investigation." In other words, these three senior Democrat senators were demanding that the Ukrainian government help find some shred of evidence to back up their "Russian collusion with Trump" investigation or risk the loss of U.S. support for Ukraine. Or, in still other words, a "quid pro quo"! Sound familiar? After that reference, I heard from an erstwhile Patriot reader that one of their colleagues had "investigated" my claim about the Demo letter and found it "FALSE." And the source of that fact-check finding? You guessed it — Snopes.com. Snopes, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is one of the earliest self-appointed "fact checkers" on the Web. It began life as the "Urban Legends" website and, frankly, 20 years ago, was an amusing stop for confirming or debunking folklore. But commercial ad-supported sites like Snopes are always at risk of becoming politicized and failing their own standards of objective assessment. The assessors aren't machines and are therefore subject to the same human biases as the rest of us. In its later iteration as Snopes, founders David and Barbara Mikkelson (before they divorced) teamed up to spin a lot of leftist yarn when pretending to fact-check hot-button political issues. D. Mikkelson and his "team" of checkers have ramped up their partisan advocacy since Trump's election, riding the wake of leftist protagonists and their Leftmedia propaganda machines. Most of what the Leftmedia outlets run as "news" is steeped in leftist brew, and the same can be said for the Mikkelson crew. So, who checks the checkers? Snopers are so intent in their quest to take on any and all things conservative that they recently went so far as to fact-check The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire website. That's right — the Snopers are not only the self-appointed arbiters of truth on matters of great import, but now even matters of great humor. The interesting thing about Snopes is that its leftist spin inadvertently exposes how Democrats spin reality into their own alternate universe. As a case in point, let's go back to that arm-twisting Demo senatorial letter to Ukraine. According to Mikkelson, the assertion that this letter constituted a quid pro quo is FALSE because the most leftist media source in the nation, The New York Times, says so. But when reviewing the NYT's own fact checkers regarding the clear double standard that it's fair for Democrats to pressure Ukraine for dirt on Trump, but foul for Trump to ask questions about corruption, including that involving the Bidens, there's an interesting revelation. Here's how the Times spun it: "The three Democratic senators did write a letter to Yuriy Lutsenko, then Ukraine's prosecutor general, in May 2018. Mr. Trump's claim of an implied ultimatum is a matter of interpretation but the letter does not include an overt threat of withholding foreign aid." But the Times does concede that "direct mention of foreign aid was in relation to ... cooperation with Mr. Mueller's investigation." Which is the very definition of a quid pro quo! Again, to be clear, The New York Times concluded that the "implied ultimatum" was "a matter of interpretation," and that the Demos' letter did mention foreign aid "in relation to" Mueller's investigation, but that did not constitute an "overt threat of withholding aid." Got that? This does not make the assertions about the Democrat letter "FALSE," as Snopes declared. At best, it makes them inconclusive. As for Trump's communication with his Ukrainian counterpart, there is no "overt threat" of withholding aid, and any "implied ultimatum" is "a matter of interpretation." Thus, no quid pro quo. But Democrats are using their "interpretation" of an "implied ultimatum" as the basis for impeaching Trump and, with the help of their MSM publicists, are rallying considerable public support. A double standard? Not if you're a Democrat! Democrats embrace hypocrisy as if it was the highest of political character traits. Finally, while the Durbin-Leahy-Menendez letter is an interesting study in how leftists spin the truth, there is no dispute about another double standard — Joe Biden's 2016 threat to cut $1 billion in U.S. Ukrainian loan guarantees if they did not fire Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor whose investigations were getting dangerously close to Hunter Biden's affairs. I say no dispute because, in Joe Biden's own words, "I looked at [the Ukrainian leaders] and said, 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a b—. He got fired." As it stands today, President Trump has appropriately "declined" the Democrats' invitation to participate in their impeachment hoax. Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776