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Hard-left Democrats screwed themselves into another phony rage yesterday when President Trump rightly called the attempt to impeach him a lynching. And once again, The Donald outsmarted his deranged opponents.
“Lynching,” they fumed, is not a word Trump should utter given its ugly history as a weapon against blacks and his own exploitation of racial resentment. Republicans mooed approval. Everyone who mattered was in rare agreement.
Trump had Twitter-sinned again.
Happily, or unhappily for the Democrats, the record shows that Democrats said the same thing about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998.
But no one thought much of it and or even remembered it. Until The Donald.
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The Lynching Tweet
Trump fired his latest tweet yesterday at 4:52 a.m.
“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights,” Trump wrote. “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!”
Up in the saddle jumped the lynch mob, ready to ride with a short rope for a tall tree.
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, now fighting credible accusations of influence-peddling for his involvement in the Biden-Burisma scandal, offered this level-headed assessment: “Impeachment is not ‘lynching,’ it is part of our Constitution. Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It’s despicable.”
Representative Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who called the police “pigs” and the Fraternal Order of Police the “sworn enemy of black people,” was apoplectic. “You think this impeachment is a LYNCHING?” he tweeted. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you know how many people who look like me have been lynched, since the inception of this country, by people who look like you. Delete this tweet.”
Trump didn’t delete the tweet.
Huffed a Democrat you never heard of, Representative Gregory Meeks of Georgia, “I don’t expect Trump to be sensitive to the weight of that word, or see how insulting and hurtful it is to invoke it here. I do expect Republicans to not even dare defend this language.”
Top Republicans didn’t, but instead joined the Democrats, although not with such colorful commentary. In bad form, Senators Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins agreed. “That’s not the language I would use,” said House Minority chief Kevin McCarthy.
To his credit, Senator Lindsey Graham said Trump was right. “This is a lynching in every sense, this is un-American,” he said.
When Lynching Was a Good Word
To its credit, the leftist media did its job to find out what Democrats said when Republicans impeached Bill Clinton.
USA Today noticed that Biden was among the first in line to liken Clinton’s impeachment to a black man hanging in a tree.
“Even if the president should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard, the very high bar, that was set by the founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense,” Biden told Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
Forced to reckon with that, Biden apologized. And then condemned Trump again: “This wasn’t the right word to use and I’m sorry about that. Trump on the other hand chose his words deliberately today in his use of the word lynching and continues to stoke racial divides in this country daily.”
And “at least five House Democrats talked about a ‘lynching’ or ‘lynch mob’ as pertaining to Clinton,” the Washington Post reported.
Among them was none other than Meeks, who said of Clinton’s impeachment travails, “What we are doing here is not a prosecution, it is a persecution and indeed it is a political lynching.”
Said Representative Jim McDermott of Washington, “this feels today like we’re taking a step down the road to becoming a political lynch mob. Find the rope, find the tree and ask a bunch of questions later.”
Then, the Post reported, there was Representative Jerry Nadler, who, as House Judiciary Committee chairman, is among the leaders of the get-Trump lynch party.
“We shouldn’t participate in a lynch mob against the president,” he said of the Clinton impeachment. The GOP, he said, want to “organize a lynch mob.”
So far, none of the Democrats have said using the word in Clinton’s case was acceptable because he was our “first black president,” as the late black novelist Toni Morrison called him.
Whatever. Thanks to The Donald, we have endless replays of what the Democrats said two decades ago.
Trump wins again.
Photo: AP Images