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Day One of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump was hardly a success for the Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked multiple attempts by Democrat impeachment managers to call witnesses who are not germane to the articles of impeachment, and so, late last night, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler accused the GOP majority of a “coverup.”
It’s hardly necessary to say Nadler is channeling the leftist, hate-Trump media. They, too, want “witnesses.” They, too, want to remove Trump from office.
And that truth occasions reprising what that same media said in 1999 when the man on trial was President William Jefferson Clinton.
Anti-Clinton Coup
“It’s embarrassing,” Nadler said yesterday of the GOP’s defeat of 11 Democrat amendments. The same man who once said “there must never be a narrowly-voted impeachment or an impeachment substantially supported by one of our major political parties and largely opposed by the other,” offered this, too:
Will you vote to allow all the relevant evidence to be presented here? Or will you betray your pledge to be an impartial juror?… Will you permit us to present you with the entire record of the president’s misconduct? Or will you instead choose to be complicit in the president’s coverup?… I see a lot of senators voting for a coverup, voting to deny witnesses, an absolutely indefensible vote, obviously a treacherous vote.
The leftist media agree.
Two days ago, Dan Rather tweeted that “McConnell’s rules for whatever you want to call what will take place in the Senate is not a process for determining the merits of the accusations. It’s a process for saying, ‘we don’t care.’”
The Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift tweeted this: “McConnell rules: Theater of the Absurd.”
The pair offered somewhat different opinions when it came to Clinton. “Journalists regularly used terms that today elicit high-pitched shrieks from the news media, like ‘coup’ and ‘witch hunt,” Newsbusters’ Bill D’Agostino wrote in assembling the highlights.
Here’s Rather on January 7, 21 years ago:
Is or is there not some concern of the public perception — concern in some quarters, not all of them Democratic — that this is in fact a kind of effort at a quote ‘coup?’ That is, you have a twice elected, popularly-elected President of the United States and … [Republicans] having been unable to beat him at the polls, have found another way to get him out of office.
On January 9, 1999, D’Agostino reported, Clift claimed that the “herd of [Republican] managers from the House, I mean, frankly, all they were missing was white sheets. They were like night riders going over.”
Nazi Analogy, of Course
Yet coups and Klansmen weren’t the only two images media leftists conjured in 1999.
On January 25, D’Agostino wrote, Ginger Thompson of the New York Times offered this idiocy: “As she watches Republicans in Congress push ahead with impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Ellen Mendel of Manhattan says she feels the same despair that she did as a girl in Nazi Germany when the efforts of a stubborn group of leaders snowballed, crushing the will of the people.”
On January 28, MSNBC’s John Hockenberry said that “‘uniquely stupid’ is not the word I would describe this process. It’s Stalinist.”
And for witnesses, what the media are concerned about now, D’Agostino reported, “during Clinton’s impeachment, the prevailing wisdom on TV news was that witnesses and depositions were pointless time-wasters” mean to “embarrass President Clinton with sound bites from the likes of Monica Lewinsky.”
Here was ABC’s Charlie Gibson, speaking to Republican Senator Bob Dole, on January 18:
But, Senator, if there’s no way that this is going to turn around, if the votes aren’t there, why is your party dragging this thing out?… Why go through all this business about witnesses? Why not just get it done?… But if you have witnesses, it’s going to add months to this thing and tie up the Senate, isn’t it?
Now, back to Dan Rather on Twitter yesterday:
We have a cover up. The senators who are voting against documents, those who wish to hide witnesses, those who are content whistling past the truth they surely know, have made their bargain with their conscience. The question is where the conscience of the nation will fall.
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
