It’s as if the past eight years never happened. In the wake of the Russia collusion hysteria engulfing the Democratic Party and the liberal media, the Left is becoming obsessed with this notion that Donald Trump committed treason. It reached a boiling point after Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. It was not Trump’s best moment. There could have been legitimate criticism lobbed his way. Instead, we got a meltdown of epic proportions. The outrage machine was set to 11. So, as Russia-Trump-Treason Theater reached its 90th Act, in which not a shred of solid evidence to corroborate collusion has been found, CNN decided to ask “what happened the last time a President chose America's enemies over its friends?” The piece discusses Reconstruction and Andrew Johnson, as if we have to go that far to find what this person thinks is an example of an American president chose our enemies over our allies. Uh, do you remember Barack Obama and the Iran deal? Yeah, that seems like a prime example:
Answer: He attended a Havana baseball game, traded away the Taliban Dream Team, and got hostages freed with a pallet of cash. https://t.co/PvkGT9vMWE
— Razor (@hale_razor) July 26, 2018
The Iran Deal? https://t.co/neDYcdRyTL
— neontaster ?????? (@neontaster) July 26, 2018
CNN comes out in favor of ditching the Iran deal https://t.co/8DysXCg5pT
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) July 26, 2018
Yeah, that’s another stepping of the rake right there, but let’s go into this piece for a little bit. It’s quite…entertaining:
Donald Trump likes to compare himself to Andrew Jackson, but the Andrew he really resembles is Andrew Johnson. What they have in common are delusions of personal grandeur and a tainted ascent to the presidency. Trump was elected by a minority of the American electorate, with help from the vagaries of the Electoral College system and from considerable Russian interference.
Johnson became president thanks to an assassin's bullet. While Johnson immodestly compared himself to Jesus and Moses, Trump claims he is the best at everything, even boasting recently on Twitter that his popularity among Republicans exceeds that of Abraham Lincoln.
Indeed, pundits have likened today's partisan divisions to those of the Civil War era. But they more closely resemble the politics of Reconstruction, the period after the war when for the first time in history, an American president, Johnson, was impeached by the House of Representatives.
But the resemblance between the two men goes deeper. Johnson's white-supremacist views were blatant and his policies precipitated a constitutional crisis that put the President at loggerheads with Congress and his own party, the Republicans.
(Remember that everything you know about Republicans and Democrats today should simply be flipped for the 19th century. The Republican Party then was the liberal party of anti-slavery, big government and Lincoln. The Democrats were the party of white supremacy, Southern slaveholders and states' rights. In the 20th century, after the New Deal and civil rights movement, the parties exchanged ideological roles.)
When Johnson became president in 1865, he jeopardized the Union victory and the Republican platform by issuing wholesale pardons to former Confederates and recognizing Southern state governments with repressive "black codes" that pushed African-Americans close to a renewed state of slavery.
First, let’s kill this narrative right here. Did Hillary Clinton win more popular votes than Trump? Yes, around three million more thanks to the insufferable legions of progressive voters in California. Did she win the popular vote? No. Unless 48 percent is greater than 50 percent, Clinton didn’t win the popular vote. In our entire history, we’ve had five elections where the winner of the race won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. It's a system that favors those who can win all over, and just the coast and cities; Trump had that, not Hillary. He also won more states than she did. That’s how our Constitution works. This process has worked. And this nation will continue under that system so far, though there have been debates about reforming the Electoral College. We’re still here; that’s the point. We’re not in a crisis every time liberals lose at the ballot box.
Second, Russian interference did not help get Trump elected. No vote tallies were altered, and there was no hack by the Russians in this area. You can’t really hack an American election. Sorry, it’s virtually impossible. And the so-called hacking attack on John Podesta’s email, he was the chair of the Clinton campaign, was hardly that; he fell for a fake password reset phishing operation.
I don’t see how slavery and the Civil War have anything to do with this, especially since the Iran Deal is a much more relevant and applicatory example of when a president sides with America’s enemies, but this closing passage is a good chuckle:
The Republican Party, like Southern slaveholders of yore, is rapidly becoming an anti-democratic force willing to sacrifice the country, democratic institutions and the sanctity of the electoral process to protect its political power and enact its reactionary political and economic agenda. We can only hope that it, like John C. Calhoun, the philosopher of slaveholders and champion of minority rule, will be consigned to the dustbin of American history.
Yeah, the horrible economic agenda that’s created three million new jobs, increased wages, yielded the lowest unemployment rate in nearly two decades, and produced the best consumer and small business confidence numbers in years. Yeah, his agenda is really, really bad…for those who can’t see the forest through the trees. The notion that the GOP is anti-democratic because Hillary Clinton lost is hilarious. Liberals have no sense of history and this CNN is Exhibit A in that regard.
Also, let's not forget that the Electoral College allowed us to abolish slavery.