Introduction
We should begin our musings on our current situation by reflecting on something that Napoleon once said.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon
And this observation will be a great encouragement for us as we attempt to answer the question posed by the title. Should we take the bait now? The answer is no, never. Under no circumstances should you ever take the bait.
However, comma . . .
There are certain other things we should do because we saw the bait. Of course. But we do not take the bait. We laugh at the prospect of taking the bait. We spit in the general direction of the bait. We swim straight at the boat, looking at the fisherman with his tricksy ways concerning bait, and then we say ha ha!
A Pig’s Breakfast: A Legal Review
In this fallen world, every justice system is going to have instances of various miscarriages of justice. There are people at the margins who can’t afford lawyers. There have always been people who have had the legal system used on them to settle personal scores. There are others, like the widow in the Lord’s parable (Luke 18:1-8), who have nothing going for them but their own persistence.
So why isn’t this conviction of Trump just another instance of that sort of thing? Sometimes things happen that are a bit untoward. Why is everybody acting like this is such a huge deal? It is a huge deal for three basic reasons.
First, in order to stay out of banana republic stuff, it is really important to do everything you can to avoid jailing your political opponents—whether it is to hobble them in the run-up to the election, or to punish them after the election for the effrontery of running against you in the first place. Of course, if the alleged crime were truly egregious, and there was no doubt about it, and it was a slam dunk case, there could be some circumstances where your hand was forced, and you had to prosecute an active politician. Say that a president shot and killed a member of his Secret Service detail. Okay, do what you gotta do.
But when you are prosecuting your chief political rival on the basis of arcane oppo research stuff, you are not cleaning up elections but rather are guaranteeing that they will become increasingly dirty. If every election is turned into a death match, then none of the participants are likely to be too fastidious about keeping things clean and above board.
Because I believe this to be true across the board, here is what I said in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s surprising victory over Clinton in 2016.
“Outside the realm of overblown campaign rhetoric, Hillary really is a corrupt and mendacious politician who richly deserves to spend some time in jail. On the one hand, you don’t want a system where some people are above the law, “too big to jail,” and on the other you don’t want a system where the loser of an election goes to jail. In my view, in our situation, the latter outcome would be far worse, far more dangerous. So I think that one of the things Donald Trump needs to do is to let it be known that he will not interfere with any ongoing investigation of Hillary, but that if she is indicted and convicted of anything, he will pardon her. The price of the pardon would be that she would have to retire from public life—no memoirs, no Clinton Foundation, no nothing.”
Second, if ever your hand were forced such that you had to prosecute a political opponent, it would be an absolute necessity to make it obvious to the whole world that the trial was just, even-handed, fair-minded, balanced, honest, impartial, equitable, righteous, and all the rest of it. You should try to do something to keep your prosecution team from looking like the tag-team mud-wrestling girls from a seedier part of Tijuana. This was something Alvin Bragg failed to do.
If you do not do this, and you secure a conviction, then what you have actually done is condemned the entire legal system in the eyes of the populace. You got your man, which gave you and your hack partisans a pretty thrilling ten minutes. But at the end of the day, your satisfaction parallels the satisfaction of Haman as he stood gazing at the gallows he had ordered to be built for Mordecai.
“He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.”Psalm 7:15 (KJV)
In this trial, all those greasy smells from the dumpster fire are demonstrataing the very reverse of this. The selection of the judge was shady—supposedly random, but not at all. The prosecutor cobbled together a felony charge by attaching a New York misdemeanor to a federal campaign finance law, a move he had no standing to make. The judge banned the defense from bringing in an expert witness who was going to testify about federal campaign finance law. The specific crime was not specified throughout the course of the trial. And at the end, the judge instructed the jury that they didn’t all have to agree on what the crime actually was. They just needed to vote unanimously to convict him of something or other. In short, this was not a pig’s breakfast. This was pig’s breakfast leftovers.
If you prosecute a political opponent, the case should be like a steel cable, the kind that holds up a suspension bridge. It should not look like a gossamer thread, hanging from the ceiling in a corner of your spare bedroom. You don’t get in there to clean as often anymore, and so this is how we obtained our gossamer thread illustration. You shouldn’t try to hang anything from that, not even a defendant that you hate as much as you hate this one.
And then third, because of the high neglect of these first two principles, this situation is a huge deal because the people calling these shots, making all these decisions, have decided for some reason to push all their chips to the center of the table, and then to talk on MSNBC as though they had four aces. But they don’t. They have two Jokers and two cards from an Uno deck. When they roll their cards, with a smug look in their eyes, everybody is going to just stare at them. Put another way, they are pulling these monkeyshines in the broad light of day, with everybody watching, with the cameras running, and they are acting as though their criminal behavior is invisible. But—and I would ask you to follow me closely here—it can’t be considered invisible if everybody sees it.
A Potpourri of Concluding Observations
Given how unhinged everything has gotten, I believe that Donald Trump should have only one criterion for his veep selection. Who could he pick as his vice-president that would make him assassination proof?
If you think I am spiraling out of control with talk of assassination, it is clear to me that Trump’s enemies will stop at nothing to keep him from returning to the White House. They are already talking about jail time without Secret Service protection—which would be simply a “legal” assassination attempt with all the principals known and running around free, and granting chin-stroking interviews to CNN. “We had to jail him in order to preserve our democratic freedom to vote for approved and respectable candidates.”
If you are an evangelical citizen who is not interested in living out your days in Demento Town, but you have never before even considered the prospect of voting for Trump, you have two and only two options. I commend one of them to you, and can live with the other one. The commended option is to vote for Trump, and to do it with a clean conscience and a glint in your eye. The stakes are now configured in a way such that you can consider such a vote for Trump as simply the most effective way of registering a protest against this kind of unconscionable lawfare. You might be muttering under your breath that you still don’t like Trump, so go right ahead. Keep on muttering. But if the progressives were pulling this stunt with someone who had the character of Nietzsche’s dog, you would not be out of line voting for someone with the character of Nietzsche’s dog.
“Please,” you might be saying, “Isn’t there anything I can do to fight this madness without voting for Trump?” Sure, I will say. If you want to keep your virtue-signalling abilities intact, but you do see the problems I am talking about, then vote for RFK, Jr. Get as many of your friends to join you in draining off Biden votes. It would be kind of fun if Trump carried New York.
I am sure to have more to say as events continue to unfold. I continue to be amazed at how many clowns come out of that little car. I keep thinking we are done, but I have come to realize that we are probably not done.