Anyone paying attention must've noticed that the first line of defense among Democrats is to claim that there's "no evidence" of the crimes for which their guilt is frequently evident.  We must confess that the assertion's a solid one on this level: because it's typically deployed before the start of any investigation from which evidence might be uncovered, the evidence, therefore, cannot exist.

Not yet, anyway.

As has been the case with Hunter Biden's apparent malfeasance, the logical absurdity of this argument is something that never seems worth exposing.  Perhaps it's too obvious to be seen.  It's the same thing as saying that, because we haven't looked for a gibbous moon (and neither have those whose job it is to do so), we, therefore, see none.  This enables us to confidently state that there's "no evidence" of the coy little lunar phase.  From there, we can logically leap to asserting that no gibbous moon exists and freely ridicule anyone so delusional, McCarthyite, and altogether "dumbass" as to claim that one does.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Democrat crimes, the perp often retains, hides, and destroys the real evidence, allowing the claimed absence of evidence of the otherwise evident crime to be indefinitely maintained.  (Hell!  Thanks to this standard, there's certainly "no evidence" of Hillary Clinton having done anything wrong with her computer, the one she wiped.)  The canard is given further life by a shamefully disinterested press, which, by failing to do its job of investigating such dirt as the Democrats are in the habit of wallowing in, enables it to gleefully deploy the "no evidence" get-outta-jail mendacity until such time that its sister imperative, the injunction to "move on," can be issued and shove all involved down the memory hole.

Worse, as a consequence of our having passed through the looking glass as a culture, the "no evidence" claim can be issued directly in the face of massive evidence of fraud, as was recently seen in the Georgia poll video and read in accompanying reams of sworn testimony by Peach State poll-watchers.  Should this dodge fail to fully shut down inquiry, purveyors of the Potemkin "no evidence" defense may yield to a fallback position, in which evidence is characterized as being merely "circumstantial" — another weasel term that's somehow come to mean inconsequential — if not actually exculpatory.  It should be pointed out that circumstantial evidence is an actual form of evidence that may or may not serve to convict, but nevertheless exists to prompt investigation.

Last, the "no evidence" defense often seems to be deployed mindlessly — as if the words constituting the term have forsaken their meaning in the cause of a higher lie that says, ipso facto, there's "no crime" involved.  Almost without exception, the former phrase seems to have become the equivalent of the latter, so that the reflexive, uninvestigated "no evidence" plea has become ironic "evidence" of the guilty party's innocence.

As a monthly gibbous moon will attest, it takes lunatics like the ones who daily beset us to claim that neither the moon nor the evidence exists at all.

Alan Wellikoff is the producer of the forthcoming cable series History on the Road.

Image: Alice upsetting the jury box in Alice in Wonderland by John Tenniel.  Public domain.