Four Scandals

I agree with Michael Goodwin’s claim in his New York Post column that we aren’t simply coping with one major scandal but with four. I disagree with his identification of one of them. Here are his four scandals:

• “The first scandalizing event is Donald Trump — his candidacy, his election and his presidency. And, on some days to some people, his existence.”
• “First is the conduct of the mainstream media, which has abandoned all standards of fairness and continues to embarrass itself with overt bias against the president.”
• “Another scandalizing event is the behavior of some federal agencies. The Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA took liberties that were morally offensive, and possibly illegal, because they didn’t want Trump to be president.”
• “The fourth scandalizing event is the reaction of Democrats to Trump.

  Led by Hillary Clinton, the party has thrashed about like wounded animals caught in a steel trap. The grief does not seem limited to three, five, seven or 10 stages. It’s endless.”

He gets in at least one good zinger:

Instead of making Trump look good, CNN would rather make itself look bad and confirm Trump’s assertion that it promotes fake news. How crazy is that?

Where I disagree with him is in his characterization of the last scandal. I don’t believe it can be attributed to “Democrats”. I think that what he’s seeing are the desperate attempts by an incompetent and despicable Democratic leadership to save their own positions and power by blaming everyone but themselves for the first scandal. Trump’s victory can’t be blamed on Russians, voter suppression, or any of the other 1,001 excuses they’ve been making since 2016. They foisted a very bad candidate on the party, using every dirty trick in the book. When that very bad candidate was defeated by another very bad candidate they began looking for directions in which to point fingers.

That doesn’t exonerate all of the toadies and crooks with whom Trump has surrounded himself or even, possibly, Trump himself. But their guilt or innocence doesn’t exonerate the Democratic leadership, either.

That Mr. Goodwin does not recognize the real source of the problem shows just how effective the Democratic leadership’s campaign of misdirection has been.