The above is the title, verbatim, of an article published in The Intercept on Friday, June, 2, authored by Jon Schwarz. Schwarz manages to put his finger squarely on something rarely acknowledged in our country—“the extraordinarily rightward tilt of our political culture,” as he aptly puts it.
Exhibit “A’ in his convincing argument that a glaring double standard exists in the way Democratic and Republican Administrations in this country are treated-- by the media and by our own elected officials—is the recent revelation of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner’s, attempt to set up a “back channel” to court the Russian government out of the sights of the U.S. Intelligence apparatus:
What we do know for certain is that if the Washington Post and New York Times had run similar stories about the top-level son-in-law aide to a Democratic president, that son-in-law would have been out the White House door before the dead-tree versions of the newspapers hit doorsteps the next morning.
Or not. It’s more than likely that, if a Democratic president attempted to put their son-in-law in a comparable position of power, the intense outcry would have prevented it from happening at all.
There is simply no way on God’s verdant earth that a smarmy, effete (and above all, unelected) silver-spoon wunderkind like Kushner would get a “wait and see“ reprieve from our entire political culture after being caught doing something like this if a Democrat were occupying the Oval Office.
No way.
He not only would have been shouted out the door (preferably the back door with a newspaper shielding his head from thrown tomatoes or worse), but every single major publication in this country would be investigating every tiny nuance of his background, compiling a dossier on everything from his boyhood acquaintances to the subject of his high school term paper to a minutely detailed sexual, financial, and personal history, including but not limited to his preferred brand of toothpaste and condoms and the number of times he urinates in a given evening. No stone would be left unturned. His life would be an open book on Page Six. And he would very likely be under some type of house arrest right now until whatever the hell he was doing was thoroughly and satisfactorily explained to about ten different Senate and House Committees.
After all, this is potential sedition we are talking about. As in Potentially Acting For The Enemy’s Interests for Personal Gain. And in such circumstances our beloved taxpayer-funded intelligence services in the post-Bush era usually detain first and ask questions later.
Nor is there a snowball’s chance in Hell this preppie Dandy would have received the red carpet treatment and fawning adulation Kushner enjoyed from the get-go from such supposedly “liberal leaning” publications as The New York Times, all so eager to point out his so-called “moderating influence.” As Schwarz wryly observes:
Try to imagine Hillary Clinton proposing that Chelsea’s husband Marc Mezvinsky – like Kushner, a rich New Yorker with a convict father and no relevant experience — should be in charge of reinventing government, solving the opioid epidemic, reforming the criminal justice system, and negotiating peace in the Middle East.
Of course we wouldn’t even be engaging in this intellectual exercise at this point if a Democrat were President:
Even speculating about such a thing, however, is irrelevant, because a Democratic president who’d bragged that she’d fired the director of the FBI in order to relieve the “pressure” of a counterintelligence investigation would already have been impeached 37 times.
Schwarz points out that there hasn’t been a Democratic Special Prosecutor appointed since the Nixon Administration. Lawrence Walsh, the Special appointed to investigate Iran-Contra, was a Republican. Republicans verbally crucified him at the time. In the four decades since Nixon, the conventional “wisdom” has decreed that no Democrat may ever investigate a Republican Administration, but only a Republican can possibly investigate a Democratic Administration:
In the end, what’s most remarkable about this phenomenon is that both parties and the journalists who cover them have accepted it as the natural state of American politics. No one in D.C. seems even to perceive anything could be any different. Republicans and their conservative media apparatus are engaged in a continuous war against Democrats — or any Republican who moves an inch out of lock step. Democrats exist in a permanent defensive crouch, willing to throw any part of their coalition to the wolves at a moment’s notice and failing to even articulate this dynamic, let alone fight it. For their part, many Washington journalists allow Republicans to set the agenda by credulously covering even the flimsiest of attacks as legitimate scandals.
The only question is-- why?
Why, indeed.