By Victor Davis Hanson
There are at least 10 reasons why the Dem impeachment “inquiry” is really a coup.
1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.
Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti–Stormy Daniels–Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.
2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.
3) First-term impeachment. The Clinton and Nixon inquiries were directed at second-term presidencies, when there were no more electoral remedies for alleged wrongdoing. By contrast, Trump is up for election in less than a year. Impeachment, then, seems a partisan exercise in either circumventing a referendum election or in damaging a president seeking reelection.
4) No special-counsel finding. In the past, special counsels have found felonious presidential behavior, such as cited in Leon Jaworski’s and Ken Starr’s investigations. By contrast, special counsel Robert Mueller spent 22 months and $35 million, and yet his largely partisan law and investigative team found no “collusion” and no actionable presidential obstruction of that non-crime.
5) No bipartisanship. There was broad bipartisan support for the Nixon impeachment inquiry and even some for the Clinton impeachment. There is none for the Schiff impeachment effort.
full story at https://nypost.com/2019/11/12/10-reasons-why-this-impeachment-inquiry-is-really-a-coup/