Remember the Russian Judge?

Yesterday a dear and long-time friend sent the following email to a group of college fraternity brothers who, I’m happy to say, remain close and in touch on a regular basis – his email follows:

“Butch recently accused me of being an uber liberal, what ever that means. I’m not….I’m a moderate like most people in this country, but I sense you all have become very conservatives Republicans so I’d like to ask you all a question.

What did you think of the 2 hour Jan 6 hearings last Thursday night. Did you watch it? If not, why not? Your take a ways if you did.

With 1000 people interviewed, several hundred hours of videos watched, and millions of text and email messages amongst the protagonists reviewed, I felt they laid our a pretty completing argument that trump knew he lost the election, yet continued to conspire with his feckless minions to ignore the constitution and seditiously try to overturn a presidential election for the first time in our history.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts my brothers”

The following was my reply:

I know you’re serious so I’m going to answer seriously even though I’ll use a bit of tongue in cheek humor to illustrate my point.  Do you remember the “old days” (prior to 1986) when professionals were excluded from competing in the Olympics?  Those were the days of the Cold War and when the infamous “Russian judge,” would play favorites under the pretense of objectivity.   The most egregious example that I recall occurred during the ’80 Olympics when ‘the Russian judge’ awarded a female skater from Belarus a “10″ after she fell to the ice during her triple-axel.

It seemed that at every Olympics we shook our heads collectively whenever we saw that type of bias and the American lose; but it did no good to complain because the International Olympic Committee was (and remains) every bit as political as both the Democrat and Republican parties; but the IOC had the authority, so there was little anyone could do about it.

Today, the leader of the Democrat Party, Nancy Pelosi controls the House agenda, so what we effectively witnessed (for those who watched) was a “hearing” overseen by a panel of “Russian judges.”  In case you’re not aware, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and Nancy Pelosi alone decided who would be on that committee.  So, allow me to ask, would you be interested in watching the Olympics if every judge was a proverbial ‘Russian judge’?  Would you watch the Superbowl if you knew the officials were in the bag for one team or the other?

No, I did not watch the hearings, which can be considered many things including a Soviet style show trial, a comedy, or a circus, but certainly not serious fact-finding committee.  Yes, it had all the trappings of legitimacy (it was held in the House chamber, serious expressions were the order of the day, and of course it was professionally produced) but the democrats misplayed their hand because the people who primarily watched were those whose minds were already made up on the matter and who had the long knives out for the former president.

To be clear, the riot at the Capitol was egregiously wrong and anyone who violated the law should be prosecuted vigorously and punished with severity.  But it was a sideshow.  Its real purpose was to find for a way to charge Trump with a prosecutable crime, something the democrats have been trying to do since before he took office.  Having said that, if Donald Trump committed a prosecutable crime, he should be indicted and subject to a fair trial, if that’s even politically possible in this country.

Meanwhile, the Republicans maintain the Democrats are using these hearings to deflect the nation’s attention from the Biden administration’s failures (both foreign and domestic), record gas prices, supply chain issues, the lack of baby food and most of all, rising inflation.  The Republicans also believe, and with a degree of justification that the Democrats don’t really care about political violence evinced by the BLM riots that left 37 dead, 2,000 injured police officers and $2 billion in property damage or the fact that the NY Times relegated a plot to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice to page A20.

If Nancy Pelosi hadn’t taken the position of “packing the court” with Russian judges, I would eagerly have watched the ‘hearings,’ but conducted the way it was/is I’d just as soon watch a UFC match, which while not fake per se, is certainly scripted