Tit for tat

"The FBI has a duty to 'We the People' to investigate any appearance of impropriety."

         Fox's Bill O'Reilly, as regards Hillary Clinton, 2016.

We have a failure to communicate.

Comedy Central played a mash-up of prominent Republicans demanding that the FBI investigate Hillary Clinton. How dare she possess government documents! The Republicans seem so righteous. So adamant. So supportive of law enforcement. Watch.  It's about a minute:

Maybe we can just simply chalk it up to hypocrisy and whose ox is being gored. No need to overthink this. They are fighting for their team. When the target was Hillary, they demanded the FBI go at her hard. Now, with Trump the target, they switched. The FBI isn't honest and professional. Now it is thoroughly corrupt and political. It isn't a "search." It's a "raid." Moreover, they likely planted any documents they will claim to find. 

The pole star is that Trump is an innocent victim and their teammate. Their posturing follows from that premise. That means a superstructure of GOP brand attributes needed to be abandoned. The GOP isn't the "support the blue" party, after all. It is now the civil liberties party. It is the innocent-until-proven-guilty party. It is the Fifth Amendment party. It is the party that presumes that the police are picking on the suspect out of prejudice and profiling. Defund the FBI! And IRS enforcement, too! They sound like leftist critics of racial profiling and prejudice, except that now the victim of police injustice is a powerful, wealthy, White, male ex-president.

Of course, Republicans don't mean it. The posturing is entirely a matter of Trump being their ox. Republicans are treating this as a game of tit for tat. They did what they could to smear Hillary, who deserved some of it, and now they presume Democrats are doing what they can to smear Trump, who also deserves some of it. As soon as the GOP gets control of a chamber of government they are already promising to hold hearings to smear Merrick Garland ('clear your calendar") who maybe deserves something, but at least he can be badgered. Hunter Biden surely deserves some smears, and Antony Fauci made some enemies, as did the January 6 committee. They are great targets. This is pay-back, and it is the GOP's turn.

I look at it very differently. I perceive Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election as uniquely wrong and illegal. It was dangerous. It was a greater threat to our republic than was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no realistic way that Japan could have invaded and occupied the U.S. and gotten troops to the Capitol to replace our president with one Americans did not choose. There would be ugly fighting and tens of thousands of American deaths, yes, but the continuity of legitimate government in the United States was never in question. We now realize that Trump nearly succeeded, and did so with the enthusiastic support of a significant block of people in positions of power in the federal and state governments. They are still there.

Prominent Republican leaders--Senators, Governors, Members of Congress, media spokespeople--are treating Trump's insurrection as a tit for tat game, as if there are good guardrails in place to protect our republic.  As such they can make statements they will forget or recant soon. It is just harmless posturing, right?.

It is not harmless. Trump lit a fire of delegitimization of government. Prominent GOP leaders continue to feed the fire. Trump really did urge Georgia's Raffensperger to "find" 11.000 votes. He really did--as Mitch McConnell said immediately after January 6--instigate a riot to overturn an election. He really did possess government documents at Mar-a-Lago that he denied having. The FBI wasn't playing tit for tat on behalf of Democrats. It was doing its job, investigating crimes, real crimes. As Bill O'Reilly said, that is the FBI's duty.