Trump and Barr are playing rope-a-dope with Dems on Stone sentencing
Because they are obsessed (and deranged with TDS), Democrats are utterly predictable in their reactions to the statements and actions of President Trump and his key allies like A.G. Barr. Taking to Twitter with his public objection to the harsh sentence recommendation for Roger Stone, handed down by the four prosecutors who obtained a guilty verdict, President Trump knew that Democrats would react hysterically. Sure enough, they have taken the bait.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren called on Wednesday for Attorney General William Barr to "resign or face impeachment" after the Justice Department pushed back on prosecutors' "excessive" sentencing recommendation for President Trump's longtime adviser Roger Stone.
"Congress must act immediately to rein in our lawless Attorney General," the Massachusetts senator wrote in a tweet. "Barr should resign or face impeachment."
House Intelligence Committee chairman and Trump-hater Eric Swalwell is aiming even higher than the attorney general:
Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) Wednesday on CNN revealed that the Justice Department's reversal on Roger Stone's sentence after President Donald Trump's tweet could be an impeachable offense.
Host Jake Tapper asked, "Might you impeachment [sic] him over this, over Roger Stone and the sentencing?"
Swalwell said, "You know, we're not going to take our options off the table. We don't wake up in the morning wanting to impeach him."
Four House Judiciary Committee members, led by Chairman Jerrod Nadler, demanded that A.G. Barr testify to them, and received a commitment to testify on March 31, six and a half weeks from now. Plenty of time for the furor to build, egged on by future presidential tweets, and for embarrassing facts to come to light.
BREAKING: @HouseJudiciary Democrats Announce AG Barr to Testify Before Committeehttps://t.co/6acG7RnOer
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) February 12, 2020
There is a name for the strategy being employed here: "rope-a-dope." It was famously named and employed by Muhammad Ali, who won the world heavyweight boxing championship in 1974 by luring the champ, George Foreman, into fruitlessly expending his energy.
Ali risked destruction by using slackened ropes to lean eccentrically out of reach, back arched, rendering him intermittently safe from the oak-tree arms of the hitherto unbeaten Foreman, draining George's strength and self-belief until he picked the right moment to launch his quicksilver raid on the crude ogre's chin.
Democrats already have warmed up for further humiliation by impeaching the president, only to see their repulsive and unfair tactics heighten public approval of both him and the GOP, while diminishing their own support and credibility. Going after Barr or Trump will have the same outcome. Let them scream their lungs out and watch the Republicans counter with all the ammunition that will act as effectively as Muhammad Ali's right punch that decked the champion.
There are numerous examples of offenses by Democrats far worse than Stone's that have received far lighter sentences — for example, James Wolfe, a top aide of the Senate Special Committee on Intelligence, who leaked classified information to a young female reporter with whom he was having a sexual affair and received a sentence of two months on three counts of lying to federal investigators.
Moreover, Democrats have staked out "criminal justice reform" as a mainstay of the campaign this year, taking positions that contradict the sentence guidance. For instance, there is Joe Biden, who declared in a presidential debate:
Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime. As — when we were in the White House, we released 36,000 people from the federal prison system. Nobody should be in jail for a drug problem. They should be going directly to a rehabilitation. We build more rehabilitation centers, not prisons.
This is a fight that Democrats can't win. As Talleyrand spoke of the Bourbons temporarily restored to the monarchy after Napoleon's abdication, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing."
Caricature by Donkey Hotey (cropped).