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‘If True…’: It’s Lucy and the Football, Again and Again
Since the announcement that a whistleblower said Trump had a conversation with the Ukrainian president in which something might have been said about Joe Biden, the punditsphere has been full of speculation about what it would mean “if true.”
Actually, the Dems rarely add that phrase—they just assume the worst is true and keep going—so I’m really talking about the sane Right here.
“If true, impeachment would be warranted.”
“If true, it proves what I’ve said about Trump all along.”
“If Lucy lets me kick the football this time, I’ll kick it through the goal posts.”
It reminds me of the National Review writer who, right after CNN accused the Covington Catholic boys of harassing the “Native American elder,” said, if true, it was like they spit on the Cross. After the rest of the story came out, NR pulled down his article and said, “Uh, never mind.” I was waiting for him to write an article about how he should have known better than to assume CNN was telling the truth without further evidence.
I’m still waiting.
Well, here it comes again. A “whistleblower,” a leaked transcript, an impeachable offense in which the sitting president, if true, did something like what the last sitting vice president bragged about doing in a speech. (It’s cute when Biden does it.)
If Trump called the president of Ukraine and coerced him into disrupting the Democratic primary, that would require one set of actions. If the president of Ukraine called Trump and said, “I’m just giving you a heads-up that I’m going to be investigating the company the former US vice president told us not to investigate,” that would be a different set of actions. More likely something else happened, and the required actions for the whole range of possibilities is infinite.
But starting a sentence about one set of circumstances with “if true” and going into details about what those ramifications should be gives weight and heft to the hypothetical situation the pundit is speculating on.
“If true” disappears on the wind, and the Covington kids looked more guilty because the NR writer said they spit on the Cross.
We’ve been deceived, jerked around, and lied to for the past three years. And the right-leaning pundits still say, “If true….”
Why not speculate on a different hypothetical situation? “The whistleblower says the Ukrainian president gave President Trump his grandmother’s recipe for pierogi. If true, that would be cultural appropriation.” At least it’s creative. Much better than trying to strain bites of truth from the sewage of the Democrat media reports.
When will our pundits stop and say, “Hmm. That’s interesting. I’ll wait for evidence before I jump on this”? (I’ve heard some say that, but not all.) The price will be that they don’t get their half-baked speculation published at the same time the Democrat-media complex do. But is that a problem? Trump is not the Covington Catholic kids (obviously), but is it necessary to pile on assumptions of guilt to his reputation before the facts come out?
If it turns out that he has done whatever he’s accused of this week, there will be time for the pundits to stroke their collective chins and say what should be done.
Much better than finding themselves lying flat on their backs while Lucy takes the football away, laughing.
Update: As I put the final edits into this piece, transcripts of the president’s conversation with the president of Ukraine have hit the Internet. (Hint: there’s nothing about pierogis in it.) Have at it. Make your case for or against impeachment. You don’t need to include the phrase “if true,” because now we know what’s true.
Published in Journalism
It is quite clear it is true.
Yeah. The president talked to the Ukrainian President. And that’s all there is to this.
Yep. Journalism and reporting have died. My policy is to stop reading/listening, when I hear “If true”.
It is probably true that “it” is defined by whichever side your on.
What is undeniable is the (D)/MSM continues to rollout the next production of the TRUMP SCANDAL franchise.
This latest “Ukraine the Musical” is just too contrived and professionally produced to not notice the (D)/MSM culture machine is effing with us again.
Does Trump step in it …. apparently so.
Does it appear there is a well established infrastructure set up to create/point out the poop every time Trump steps in or around it ….. YES.
We have no idea how many times other Presidents stepped in or near the very same poop because it was never considered all that pooppy until Trump became President, and because if it were a pol with whom the MSM is ideologically aligned, the MSM has the amazing super power to some how not see it.
Sez you. Meaningless
Yes. Something is true. Yesterday we didn’t know what that something was. We know more of it today. More information will come in tomorrow.
It was also true that the Covington kid was smiling at the “Native American elder.” It was not clear what it meant until the context was revealed.
I’ve got my opinion about it; you’ve got yours. But let’s talk about what happened. Not sentence anybody for what might have happened.
In the call, Trump went back to the Biden topic multiple times. It is wrong for any president to have foreign leaders start investigations into US citizens. Trump has zero evidence that there was any “corruption” relative to Hunter Biden and Bushima Holdings.
Bushima may have add ethical or legal issues, but not in relation to Biden.
We are talking about what happened. Trump made several requests for the Ukraine to investigate a possible Biden corruption issue. Even if you suppose that Hunter talked about Bushima with his dad and asked for, and was granted a favor, that is not a Ukrainian corruption issue, it would be a US issue. And note that the Obama administration was well aware of this situation and were watching it closely.
And that Trump inserted his personal lawyer into the process, which upset the standard diplomatic channels, also does not help. But a note on this last point: FDR routinely used other people to go around the people he appointed.
Hunter Biden being paid $600K/year by Burisma for quite obviously being the son of the VP Joe Biden who just happened to be Obama’s acting Ukraine czar …….. IS ….. the ethical legal issue.
If you need further convincing substitute Donald Trump Jr. for Hunter Biden and Donald Trump for Joe Biden and see if that changes your point of view.
Your welcome.
Play nice, Franco!
I listened to Jonah’s Remnant rant about this this morning and all the time was thinking “Didn’t I hear they were going to release the transcript? Couldn’t we wait and see what it says?”
I’m a big Jonah fan. I think he’s generally right about Trump’s flaws. And I wouldn’t have been shocked if the transcript had been damning.
But it wasn’t. And Jonah owes me an apology for the 45 minutes of my life I can’t get back.
Good luck with that
@catorand, I took Jonah at his word when he said it would be an anti-Trump rant and if you didn’t want to hear it you may as well turn it off, so I did. I thank him for the heads up.
Does he have any other type of commentary on Trump?
Hunter Biden got placed on the board of directors of Burisma in 2014 when daddy was made lead for the Obama admin on Ukrainian energy and corruption. Foe 50k month. With no expertise in energy or Ukraine. Funny that.
The company was founded in 2002 by Mykola Zlochevsky, an ally of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — the pro-Russia leader who was ousted in 2014 and has lived in exile in Russia ever since.
Over a 16-month period, Burisma paid $3.1 million to a bank account associated with Hunter’s business.
Joe Biden led the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine when he served as vice president. Biden helped shape Ukraine’s energy and anti-corruption policies, issues that directly impact Burisma. Got that? Sonny gets a nice fat paycheck and daddy is shaping US policy.
Burisma sought to capitalize Hunter Biden’s name and relationships. According to The New York Times, Hunter Biden helped assemble the company’s legal team, which consisted of American attorneys and consulting firms, including a former Obama Justice Department official. But nothing to see here.
Burisma was under legal scrutiny. Shortly before Hunter Biden was appointed to Burisma’s board, British authorities froze $23 million of Zlochevsky’s assets as part of a corruption investigation. Ukraine opened its own probe later that year.
Financial records from Morgan Stanley show numerous lines of money going into the account of “Robert H. Biden.” The funds originated from oligarchs and anonymous LLCs in Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan and elsewhere.
The former vice president denied any knowledge of his son’s business dealings in the Ukraine when he spoke to Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on Saturday.
“How many times have you spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings,” Doocy said to the Democrat presidential candidate.
“I have never spoken to my son about those,” Biden said before starting his rant in which he had a meltdown.
“So the former vice president says they never talked; his son told the New Yorker a couple of months before this really blew up they did talk once,” he said.
“Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do,’” Hunter Biden said in the interview which show that they, at minimum, talked about it one time.
That’s what is able to be proven in his own words, but the only people that know how often they talked about it are the Biden’s and the media is not going to push them for more answers.
This stinks to high heaven, and Trump has every right to ask the Ukrainian government to look into this further.
After all the “footballs” this year, I am amazed that people are still swinging before facts are revealed. I was walking around with my phone in my hand the day that Covington broke because I was waiting for facts to be revealed from some other nonsense. That was the third swing and a miss from the press in 2019 – and it was only January 20.
(I’m sure of the date, as it’s my grand daughter’s birthday. She and Trump: MAGA on January 20, 2017! I am not sure of the specific fake news stories; I was in a FB tussle with an overseas cousins and he’s since deleted the post)
That said, I have no illusion that we know the full story on anything that’s going on these days. I think we’re being fed crumbs and everyone spends their time chasing them.
Squirrel!
Nonsense.
Yes, he does. And I’m not in opposed to anti-Trump rants in principle. I’d just prefer they were grounded in reality.
If everyone follows the simple yet glorious path of your wisdom, Rachel Maddow is going to be minus her job and minus her $ 30K a day of income.
Thanks @kozak. K Strassel is one of the few I listen to and give credence to what she has to say. She’s a national treasure.
Do I think Trump asked the Urkrainians to investigate Biden? Yes.
Do I think it was both wrong and unseemly ? Yes.
Do I think it was unusually wrong for a politician ? No, unfortunately.
D0 I think it was more wrong than Biden using his VP slot to enrich his family by directing foreign business his son’s way? Eh, not even in the same league.
Trump shouldn’t have done this. However, it is minor league, innocent in fact, compared to how most of the members of congress & members of presidential administrations use their positions to enrich themselves while in office.
Bill, I have pointed out to you the fact that Joe Biden boasted to the Foreign Affairs Council about shaking down a prior Ukrainian president to fire the prosecutor looking into his influence peddling thru drug addict sone Robert. Another Ricochetto posted the video for you to see. Your ignoring this is dishonest. If you are not a liar, what other alternative is there?
The thing about the left’s double standards is that it leads to some delicious ironies. (Well, they’re delicious if you ignore the fact that the left is hell-bent on the destruction of America and of Western Civilization, but it you set that aside…)
Here, Trump is accused of calling for an investigation for political reasons. No one on the left seems to notice that all the Dems are doing, all day, every day, is calling for investigations for political reasons. That’s all they are doing now. It’s all they have been doing for the last two years. Every Dem – all day, every day.
If they want to be consistent they can impeach Trump (the Senate wouldn’t convict) and then expel every Democratic member of Congress. That’d be okay with me.
I think the MSM has “if true” as a macro on their computers . . .
How much you want to bet this “whistleblower” works for a Democrat running for President?
I’ve been making a similar point:
Actions for which Trump is being crucified, in a seemingly highly choreographed manner, are acts which have been glossed over by the MSM when the politician committing said act is a pol with whom the MSM is ideologically aligned.
Case in point, the acts of the Obama FBI/DOJ/IC as they relate to the entire Russia collusion debacle are undeniably egregious in their malfeasance, yet the MSM has zero interest in getting to the bottom of the scandal of the century and continue to cover for the perpetrators, even going as far as making some paid contributors(ie: McCabe, Clapper).
My larger point is, yes Trump may have done acts which are questionable, yet the reaction of the (D)/MSM culture machine is so contrived and professionally produced that I would hope most discerning human beings would grasp they are being asked to play the part of the dupe in the (D)/MSM propaganda campaign because the (D)/MSM are betting the voters are will buy their BS.