Political Cynic comments.
JUN 16, 2023
I won’t waste The Readers valuable time: I’ll just quote from Mr. Lowry’s essay in Politico of June 15, 2023:
Headline: Opinion | A Trump Pardon Could Drain Poison from the System
Sub-headline: If Trump loses in 2024, sparing him jail time could ease our divided politics.
Here are three remarkable paragraphs:
The most famous example from high politics is, of course, Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for offenses related to Watergate, although that episode dates from a different era when politics was a more serious business for more serious people. Ford didn’t go around bragging that he’d pardon Nixon to garner attention and curry favor with Nixon supporters, while Nixon, for all his desperate flaws, was a man of considerable substance and achievement.
Ford, of course, justified his act of clemency on grounds of moving on from, as he put it in his national address, “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
We are still far away from getting to anything like this place. First, Trump would have to lose the Republican nomination, and he’s currently the strong favorite. Then, some other Republican would have to win the presidency, or President Joe Biden would have to see the wisdom of potentially keeping the vanquished Trump out of jail, either after beating him again or defeating another Republican.
That this sentence fragment deserves loud guffaws… ‘The most famous example from high politics…’
American Politics/Life continues to sink in the mire of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal Swindle, heartily embraced by both New Democrats and Republicans: and that Trump, DeSantis, and even Vivek Ramaswamy, are the toxic political issue, of that historical fact . Inaugurated by New Democrat Bill Clinton, is a reality that is anathema to Lowry, as the flaccid successor to Wm. F. Buckley Jr..
Reader, thank you for your forbearance… Just one more quotation:
The conventional wisdom is that our politics is over-heated. The worry over this is often exaggerated (things have been as or more feverish before), but having a former president stand trial in a federal criminal case, and potentially spend the rest of his life in jail, is only going to make things more intense and the country more divided. A pardon itself would be a flash point, as the Ford pardon of Nixon was, but it would at least take the unprecedented possibility of a former president behind bars off the table.
Political Cynic
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