Nancy Pelosi is a savvy politician. She does not want to bog down the House of Representatives in a fruitless impeachment trial when it will not get confirmed by the Senate.
She repeatedly said that she would not pursue impeachment unless Mueller's report contained strong evidence of collusion. It didn't. This is good news for her. She can now take the issue off the agenda.
Meanwhile, the New York Post ran a clever image of a fake NCAA March Madness pairings chart. Instead of colleges, it names pundits who staked their reputations on the existence of a smoking gun in Mueller's report. There was no smoking gun. There was a squirt gun. You can see the chart here.
The pundits will not let this go. They will whine, wail, and complain until the flatulent cows come home. But the lefties in the House of Representatives now know that there will be no impeachment hearings. There will be lots of hearings on peripheral matters, but they will spawn another pile of nothing burgers.
It is ironic that the man who identified the whole Russiagate affair as a nothing burger was the far-Left activist and now CNN celebrity Van Jones. He mentioned it in a brief video that went viral. The phrase goes back to the 1950's. It was first used by gossip columnist Louella Parsons. But it has achieved a new life because of Van Jones' comments.
I think the whole issue is delightful. It is what we used to call a red herring: a bluff, blind, ruse, feint, deception, subterfuge, hoax, trick, ploy, device, wile, sham, pretense, artifice, cover, smokescreen, distraction, expedient, contrivance, machination. It will absorb lots of scarce resources from House committees run by Democrats. They will hold hearings. They will investigate. They will try to get something of political value out of this nothing burger. They will fail.
Time is a scarce resource. There is just so much time to spend on hearings and by congressional staffers in researching issues that might become political capital in 2020. Every minute spent on researching Trump's connection with Russiagate is going to be wasted time.
The public allowed itself to be whooped up by endless speculations about what Mueller's investigation would reveal. It turned out to be exactly what we should have expected: a cautious report by a cautious bureaucrat who was supervising dozens of high-paid lawyers whose salaries were paid by the government. There were peripheral cheerleaders for Trump who have had their careers destroyed. Some of them are going to jail. But nobody cares, other than the victims and their immediate families. They were mostly a crew of hustlers, political activists, and Trump's lawyer. Nobody has any sympathy for any of them. Their careers are finished, but that is no sweat off of Donald Trump's brow.
NOISE
American politics today does not focus on issues of substance. The biggest issue of substance is the federal debt, but nobody bothers about this. Another major issue is Federal Reserve policy, and nobody ever focuses on this, either. The issue of Obamacare is going to be settled by the federal court system, not Congress. There is no real concern about the remaining troops in Afghanistan and Syria. Nobody talks about Iraq. The state of Israel is out of the headlines except for the possible indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu. Nobody talks about NATO.
Politics today is about noise. Most of it is background noise. The public neither knows nor cares. Most of Congress neither knows nor cares.
President Trump keeps issuing tweets. The tweets are noise.
Congressional hearings are mostly background noise.
There was endless noise about Mueller's report. I think that, within a month, that will turn into background noise. When Matt Drudge stops posting links to articles on Mueller's report, that will be the end of the topic. Drudge has a good sense of what the public wants to read about.
The one issue that can get front-page coverage is a bad economy. From a political standpoint, that's where the action will be. Trump is already blaming Federal Reserve policy, but that has gained no traction. The public does not know what the Federal Reserve System is, what it does, or how it does it. Neither does Congress.
The Democrats in Congress have a major problem: noise generated by far left characters, mainly Bernie Sanders and AOC. But there are others. They cannot shut up. Their ideas are truly crackpot. The public is not going to get behind any of these ideas, other than taxing the rich, and that idea has been high on the public's agenda since 1914. The rich always beat the system. The system is rigged in favor of the rich, and this is true whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.
The motley crew of Democrats no one has ever heard of who now claim that they are serious candidates to be elected president of the United States is just one more example of just how noisy, and just how irrelevant the Democrats are. They may get elected in 2020, depending on the economy, but their ability to do anything except increase payments to unemployed workers is minimal. They can make a lot of noise, but they cannot alter the budgets of the United States government. Nobody can.
Democrats in power will raise corporate taxes, but the recession is going to eliminate the profits that might otherwise have been taxed. Also, new taxes tend to work against economic recovery. So, if the left-wingers really do get into power, they are going to take steps that will make the recession worse. They will do this in the name of social justice. That will create a bad name for social justice.
Politics today is dependent upon the state of the economy. The state of the economy has almost nothing to do with politics. This is why political solutions to the state of the economy are ineffectual. This is why national politics is peripheral to the crucial issue that does drive modern life: the economy.
The one political voting bloc that is untouchable is the bloc represented by the American Association of Retired People. The old rule is true: if you can identify the topic or group that is beyond criticizing, you have identified the power in a nation. These are easy to identify in the United States: AIPAC and AARP. These two groups control American foreign policy and American domestic spending policy, respectively. They are inherently bipartisan organizations. This is another reason why they are beyond criticism.
Despite the rhetoric, American politics from decade to decade does not change much. Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress for over 30 years. Presidents come and go, but she remains.
The federal bureaucracy is impervious to political tampering. It is entirely background noise. I would call it white noise. It puts people to sleep.
If you want to talk about politics that changed things, I think Richard Nixon is the source of the three single biggest changes of the last 50 years. He unilaterally abolished the gold exchange standard in 1971, thereby freeing up the government to run massive deficits. Second, he recognized red China in 1972. Third, he abolished the military draft in 1973. Yet he was elected as a conservative. He betrayed his constituents. (The best book on this is the long-ignored Catch the Falling Flag [1972].) We could argue that his resignation in 1974 shaped American politics for the next generation. Certainly, it gave the Democrats control of the House of Representatives for 30 years. There have been wars since then. They have amounted to noise. We have had tax reforms. They have been mostly noise.
Compared to Nixon, Ford was a footnote. Carter achieved some success in deregulating the airlines, transportation, oil, and beer. Few people noticed at the time. Reagan was great with rhetoric. He persuaded Congress to lower top marginal income tax brackets. But he gave us massive peacetime deficits. Bush I was a disaster for rhetoric, and he left no legacy. Clinton is remembered for Monica Lewinsky. Bush II gave us meaningless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he signed the Patriot Act. Obama gave us ObamaCare. When you look over the sweep of politics since 1972, it has been mostly noise.
CONCLUSION
If you keep your eyes on national politics, you will be like the bull who keeps his eyes on the red cape. The cape is no threat to the bull. Partisan politics is no threat to the country. That's because federal budgets are already fixed in political cement.
There is an enormous amount of paper and ink devoted to national politics. This is always the case. But the paper and ink do not change anything of substance.
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