Friday, May 26, 2017

Breathe into a Paper Bag

The treatment for hyperventilation is to breathe into a paper bag. Hyperventilation may be the best way to describe the latest news cycles about a possible collusions between Trump and the Russians.

President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey with a report from the Attorney General’s office also describing why he should do so. This led to a response by Harvard Law School professor, Lawrence Tribe:

A top Harvard constitutional law professor is calling for an impeachment investigation into Donald Trump for obstruction of justice, branding the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey as an “obvious effort to interfere with a probe involving national security.”

After a meeting of President Trump with Russian officials the Washington Post reported from an unnamed source that President Trump had disclosed top secret information which may have compromised its source. The only three other US government officials who were present then stated publicly that the Washington Post’s article was false. Nevertheless, this was the response of another Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz:

This is “the most serious charge against an American President in American history.”

The National Democratic Committee, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the intelligence community, and the progressive liberal left all desperately want to focus on some source other than themselves to explain the election of Donald Trump and to impede, discredit, and impeach him as President. Our country is so politically divided that one can literally listen to the adjectives used in only 10 seconds of a newscast to determine what side they represent. What is apparent is that the progressive elites of our universities and our media remain condescending toward the elected President and the “deplorables” who elected him and don’t agree with them.

Never underestimate the propensity of the Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot or Donald Trump’s capacity to implode. The only crime we know of to date, however, is the leaking of the unmasking information on General Flynn. The public also remembers the huge financial connections of the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation to Russia and other foreign entities when Hillary was Secretary of State. The anti-Trump forces thus appear to be overplaying their hand in attempting to not only impede but destroy the Trump presidency. The crisis will occur with the budget negotiations at the end of the Summer.

Based on the current overinflated climate of opinion, it appears that in the budget negotiations that the Democrats will create a crisis by essentially only giving the Republicans the choices of shutting down the government or using the nuclear option of doing away with the filibuster and 60 vote convention as they did with the Supreme Court nominee. If it turns out that there is very little substance to the current allegations, the Republicans are unlikely to submit again to a budget mostly on Democratic terms. It is also unlikely that they will choose to shut down the government. The Democrats may then come to regret a strategy which has been only one of obstruction and attempts to destroy an elected President.

Perhaps the recent appointment of a Special Council will allow us to take a slow deep breath and at least for a while return to the domestic and foreign agendas which need attention.

James H. Rutherford, M.D.