OPINION

Really Bad Things the Media Is Ignoring Because of Impeachment

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Have you heard that the president has been impeached? Seriously, the trial is happening right now in the U.S. Senate.

I’m kidding. Of course, you can’t escape the news because it’s the only thing the “news” is talking about. We’re in the middle of the most choreographed foregone conclusion in history and the media is treating it like a whodunit. But the suspense is akin to a murder mystery where there are two people in a room and one of them ends up dead. We know the outcome. It’s time to move on.

But while the press is single-minded in their attempt to smear the president and help Democrats in this year’s election, there are other things happening, more important things, that aren’t getting the attention they should. In some cases, the timing is fortuitous – a distracted media means blunders and whatnot fly under the radar. In other cases, maybe the timing is deliberate, used for cover for things that otherwise would have been opposed were they to happen in a sane time because they would be known.

That’s why I thought it was worth taking a look around the rest of the world while the media world is stuck in impeachment mode. These stories are just as important, if not more so, than what the liberal industrial media complex is fixating on.

Elizabeth Warren is running for president. You know this, or at least knew this. She’s been tanking of late because she’s an awful candidate who spent nearly two months dodging questions about raising taxes on the middle class (spoiler alert: she’s going to). Voters took note, drew the accurate (and obvious) conclusion, and have started to leave her. Even Democratic primary voters don’t want to pay more in taxes. They just want others to.

With the desperation that comes with watching what you want slip through your fingers, Warren is scrambling to stop the hemorrhaging. But she’s not doing so by injecting some much-needed sanity into her campaign, she’s going the other way. In an attempt to out-crazy her fellow Democrats, she’s now pledging to set up a unit in the Justice Department to investigate the Trump administration, anyone associated with it, and anyone named Trump to see if they’ve broken any laws over the president’s tenure. This is straight out of the Third World.

At a time when House Managers are calling the President of the United States a “dictator” on the floor of the Senate, one of their leading politicians is promising to be one if she’s elected. How is this normal?

If there’s evidence of a crime, by all means, investigate it. I want corruption rooted out no matter who does it. But to launch an investigative unit to specifically target your political opponent is fascistic. Yet, she’s proposing it because she knows there’s a constituency for that in the Democratic Party. That’s very telling, which is why it’s not getting the coverage it deserves.

The funding of Planned Parenthood has long been a political hot potato. Republicans oppose it because they’re pro-life, Democrats support it because they support abortion and because they get a piece of the action. By sending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to the abortion mill, Democrats get tens of millions of it back in campaign contributions. It was recently announced that the group, which pleads poverty every time the idea of cutting their federal funding is discussed, will spend $45 million in 2020 to elect Democrats.

Planned Parenthood received more than $500 million in our money this year, which means Democrats are getting a nearly 10 percent return on that money to directly benefit them. In the private sector, that would be called a kickback. In liberal politics, it barely rates a mention. The mafia isn’t that effective.

But it’s not just Democrats hoping to sneak bad ideas past the American people while they aren’t looking. While the Trump administration has been excellent, perhaps the best ever, when it comes to cutting regulations and removing the boot of government from the throat of the economy, it hasn’t been perfect. When you try to drain the swamp, the swamp has a way of bouncing back.

The Department of Health and Human Services is pushing forward with a scheme to implement foreign price controls on prescription drugs in Medicare Part B. Rather than focus on opening up markets overseas, these regulators want to bring Europe’s horrible policies here. The idea is Medicare should only pay the average of what other countries pay for prescription drugs. Importing price controls will only import the stifling of innovation and shortages price controls create. The focus should be on removing restrictions abroad, not bringing them here.

I’ve written about this a lot because, in a former life, I was a health policy analyst (before escaping in a hot air balloon before losing my sanity) and I recognize the importance of innovative health care. My mother lived almost 30 years longer than doctors initially said she would because of the innovations in medicine, particularly prescription drugs, from her first diagnosis. Those advancements were made possible because the companies that made them were able to make enough money to be able to afford to research and develop them. The solution to lower-priced medicine is more innovation, not less, and the way to get there is to apply pressure on “free rider” nations using price controls to lift those restrictions, not bring them here.

All of these things are happening now, none are getting the attention they deserve because all focus is on the Democrats’ 2020 campaign strategy masquerading as a Constitutional crisis on the Senate floor. If you weren’t outraged already, now would be a good time.

Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the massesFollow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.