Learning to Hate

Dov Fischer is a lawyer and a rabbi. He has been active in conservative politics, especially those that involve Jewish issues. In a fascinating article for The American Spectator he explains that today’s American politics have taught him how to hate.

It is nothing to be proud of, but, as Fischer writes, it is not to be precluded. He opens with a text from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes this line:

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Fischer opens his splendid essay by recollecting that throughout the Obama presidency, he never once thought to say that a man who had won office fairly was illegitimate. He saw no one in government try to sabotage the Obama presidency. He and his friends and colleagues all offered Obama the respect that was due the President of the United States.

This did not mean that the Obama years were roses and daffodils. Fischer recounts some of the Obama administration’s greatest failures.

I watched his arrogance, the unctuous way he carried himself literally with his nose up, the way he never held a railing while walking a stairway because he was too cool, the kinds of human dreck he regularly invited as his White House guests, and I accepted it all with the soft whisper, “This, too, shall pass.” I watched the Corrupt Journalist Corps idolize him, crown him a king, admire him as a messiah and a deity, and I accepted the milieu. This, too, in time would pass. It meant living through eight years of the deepest public corruption. Lois Lerner stealing an election by leveraging the awesome power of the Internal Revenue Service to close down legitimate conservative political groups. Eric Holder — the nobleman who urged people to kick enemies — bringing lawlessness and corruption into the Justice Department, even approving the “Fast and Furious” idea of releasing lethal weapons to Mexican drug lords in the cockamamie scheme to find out how they access and move their weapons.

Arrogant and unctuous, the joke was on those who had been duped by Obama and his media enablers. People were so completely blinded by Obama’s holy aura that they completely ignored the corruption and incompetence in his administration.

So ISIS grew from a small terror band to a caliphate. ISIS-inspired terror attacks occurred in our homeland. Western Europe sustained terrible deadly attacks. Our American economy went nowhere. We micturated half a trillion dollars down a toilet with Solyndra while trying to close down our energy sector, attacking the genius of our hydraulic fracturing, obstructing our oil exploration, blocking the construction of new pipelines that offered even more oil and more thousands of jobs. Instead, we got shovel-ready jobs that were not ready but rather were chummy payoffs to union heads and other political insiders. We got windmills suitable for blowhards. We got Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Benghazi as testimonial to her vision. We got Susan Rice, an idiot, raised paradoxically to head of national security after spending a day lying on five television stations about Benghazi and later going on to describe Bowe Bergdahl, a coward and deserter, as a hero who had served with honor and distinction. We got Loretta Lynch, who some thought would clean up Holder’s corruption of Justice, only to find that she ended up in bed with the Clintons at the height of the probe of Hillary’s corruption. We saw the world’s worst murderers freed from Gitmo so that they could rejoin the war against America.

Of course, the Obama presidency was supposed to cure America’s racial divisions.It aggravated them:

— a country that reflected that healing by electing a Black man president despite his manifest lack of personal achievement, close ties with an organized-crime felon, and questionable biography — suddenly erupted into a new era of racial bitterness. Michael Brown and Ferguson aflame amid the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie promoted by Obama and by Eric Holder but shot down by a Missouri grand jury. Freddie Gray and Baltimore aflame followed by a series of outright judicial exonerations handed down by a Black judge who saw that every accused cop had acted properly and lawfully. A lowlife killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, a thug whom Obama told us would have been the likes of his own son if he had had a son. Eight years of racial divide, social division aimed at tearing us up as a color-blind and religion-blind American People, just to promote electoral successes.

But, then, along came Trump. The people who had respected President Obama found that Obama’s supporters were never going to grant President Trump any respect at all. It was a horrifying sight:

Trump and Pence won fair and square. But there was no grace. Rather, there was instant character assassination, instant war, instant denial. Advertisements urging electors to violate their Electoral College oaths. Fabrications of collusion with Putin. Investigations that hamstrung a presidency. Lies and innuendoes leaked and published by the unindicted co-conspirators we called the “mainstream media.” A never-ending hunt to find scandals and Trump accusers: a bimbo who pole-danced at bars, her lawyer who now dances behind bars, another crooked lawyer who tape-recorded his own clients and now is locked up. One cartoon character after another.

Democratic party politicians and their satraps in the media have taught Rabbi Fischer to hate:

I have come deeply to hate. I hate that Donald Trump never was given a chance to be president of the United States for even one day’s honeymoon. I hate that, long before he won the presidency — fair and square — corrupt crooks and criminals in the United States Department of Justice, its Federal Bureau of Investigation, were actively plotting to take him down. I hate that there are so few outlets in the media that give voice to condemn the criminality and corruption that broke every accepted societal norm by which we play the game. I hate that Obama was in on it, yet continues to pontificate on what is just and on what threatens freedom.

I hate that they all keep getting away with it. Every single one of them gets away with it. There is absolutely no price to be paid on the left for perjury, for conspiracy to overturn a legitimate election, for treason.

And then there is the case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, someone that the FBI plainly and simply set out to destroy. FBI leader Comey was proud of it. He bragged openly about it. But, it was not just the way Flynn was treated. It was the fact that those who treated him that way have not been held to account:

I have come deeply to hate. I hate that Donald Trump never was given a chance to be president of the United States for even one day’s honeymoon. I hate that, long before he won the presidency — fair and square — corrupt crooks and criminals in the United States Department of Justice, its Federal Bureau of Investigation, were actively plotting to take him down. I hate that there are so few outlets in the media that give voice to condemn the criminality and corruption that broke every accepted societal norm by which we play the game. I hate that Obama was in on it, yet continues to pontificate on what is just and on what threatens freedom.

I hate that they all keep getting away with it. Every single one of them gets away with it. There is absolutely no price to be paid on the left for perjury, for conspiracy to overturn a legitimate election, for treason.

Fischer bemoans the fact that President Trump has not been able to clean up the swamp-- not yet, at least:

There is something so evil in a society that tolerates a dual standard of justice, dual standards of everything. On the one hand, we political conservatives harbor profoundly deep feelings, but we do not destroy people’s lives based on abstract politics. Yes, we oppose them and expose them, and we hope that contemporary society and history judge them for the evil they represent. But we do not destroy them in their lives. They get away with everything. Hillary Clinton spoliated 33,000 emails amid a federal probe, a federal crime that always ends up with prison time — but not for her. It is a federal crime to lie under oath to Congress. Comey, Clapper, Brennan — how have they all avoided prison time? Strzok, Page, the whole bunch of them? Adam Schiff. The outliers on the Mueller team. Not one single slime among them in the swamp has been brought to justice.

And, part of the problem is that Republicans let them get away with it:

These animals destroyed the life of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. They drove him into such financial ruin that he had to sell his home to pay his legal bills. They went after a good boy, Nick Sandmann, and they cruelly made him into the face of racism. His own Catholic diocese in eastern Kentucky sold him out and sold out all the boys who stood with him that fateful day in Washington, D.C., when he was harassed by a messed-up Indian with a drum. And they did everything they could to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, a good man, a family man, a man who has devoted time throughout his life to his church and to the need. They endeavored through outright perjury to destroy him. The perjurers all got away with it. Name one single perjurer against Justice Kavanaugh who ever was brought to justice by Charles Grassley or Lindsey Graham of the Senate Judicial Committee.

Surely, it is good to call out Congressional Republicans for failing to deal with the problem. They have talked tough but have not acted tough:

The liars destroy with impunity because they know they always will get away with it. Republicans watch the character assassination and then go on Sean Hannity to sound brave for five minutes. “These people will pay a steep price, Sean.” “I won’t let them get away with it, Sean.” “Let not your heart be troubled, Sean.” “We will investigate every crime and every perjury, Sean.” Three years of hearing this from Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, Trey Gowdy, Charles Grassley, Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani, Jason Chaffetz, Kevin McCarthy. Well, Fox News Alert: They all got away with it. Comey. Brennan. Clapper. Blasey Ford. Schiff. Hillary. Strzok. Page. McCabe.

And now the media is attacking Trump for mismanaging the pandemic while bowing down in total obeisance to the incompetent fraud called Andrew Cuomo, a man who is responsible for mass death:

Cuomo ordered nursing homes in his state to admit coronavirus-infected seniors into facilities that were woefully unprepared to handle the medical ramifications, and that order singularly caused mass death. And yet the same media that seek any and every angle to blame Trump for not wearing a mask lionize Cuomo, who not only should wear a mask but also should change his fingerprints, undergo plastic surgery to reconfigure his appearance, and hide for dear life in some El Chapo cave from the children and grandchildren left behind by the more than 5,000 defenseless seniors whom he has martyred so far.

Double standards, anyone.