By Edwin Cooney
Lunkhead's cigar was in full flame and he kept rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other as I took a seat between him and Dunderhead the other night at our favorite watering hole's new outside seating capacity.
As I approached, Dunderhead had just remarked to Lunkhead, "I thought you conservatives were “law and order” folks and here you go blaming the police. You never blame them when a woman or an ethnic minority is involved in a demonstration.”
"Look," shouted Lunkhead, “Presidents invariably break the law when the Constitution is in danger. After all, “Honest Abe” clearly broke the law in 1861 when he suspended habeas corpus at the outset of the Civil War. In addition, Franklin Delano Roosevelt clearly violated the Constitution when he imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II. And, back in 1977, Nixon was right back when he told David Frost that when the president directs that something be done, it is automatically lawful. Finally, Thomas Jefferson violated the Constitution, thus breaking the law, when he purchased Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803. Nothing in the Constitution gives the president the right to purchase property from a foreign land! All of those presidents broke the law by violating the Constitution and no one ever dared to suggest that they go to jail!”
“Okay, big fellow," shot back Dunderhead. "Had Barack Obama lost the 2013 election to your hero Trump and gotten a whole bunch of gays, lesbians, welfare mothers, and deadbeat dads to put pressure on Joe Biden to alter electoral votes, you wouldn't have complained, right?
"Of course, I'd have complained!” said Lunkhead. ”What you lefties don't get is that someone like Donald Trump is an exceptional person who comes up only once in two or three generations. His strength is that he dares to dare while at the same time recognizing that only on rare occasions should extraordinary actions be taken."
“Nuts!" cried Dunderhead. "I can see where you're coming from now! After all, the killers of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy — to say nothing of Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinckley, and others — also dared to dare, didn't they, Lunkhead? Almost as bad, you insist that if people are Southern enough, rich, white, straight, and Protestant enough, the sky's the limit regarding their attitudes and behavior."
“Again, you just don't get it, Dunderhead," said Lunkhead. "As ‘The Donald’ exclaimed a few days ago, he is America's justice, its biggest backer, it's savior. When his time is done, the work will be done and we will go back to our normal ways of doing things.”
Then I asked the big question: should Donald Trump be subject to indictment for any crimes he may have committed while in office?
"Why not?” asked Dunderhead. “He's an American citizen like you or me."
"Absurd," insisted Lunkhead, “He’s established an expectation of decisiveness that no one has demonstrated since perhaps Harry Truman.
"I will stipulate," asserted Dunderhead, "that while it should never be easy for the government to prove its case, every living person ought to be vulnerable to punishment if they violate the law.”
"Let's get it straight," growled Lunkhead as he took the first sip of his new glass of scotch. “”Lefty leaders like Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael, George Jackson and Malcolm X all insisted they were the victims of political rather than of legal transgressions. So, why shouldn't President Trump make the same claim?”
"Wake up, Lunkhead!” said Dunderhead. “No one has said that President Trump is guilty of anything! He still has his money, his property, his big shot lawyers that he's finagling his supporters to pay for, and even his freedom! How much would you or I have by comparison if we were indicted by a grand jury? How much has he gotten out of you, Lunkhead?” Dunderhead asked as he took a sip of his beer and loaded his face with peanuts.
"Let's get it straight," I said. “There's a distinction between a deliberate constitutional violation and criminal behavior. Lunkhead is right that a number of former presidents violated the letter of the Constitution, but we shouldn't institutionalize such behavior for future presidents by letting Mr. Trump successfully intimidate professional prosecutors.
"It's always difficult to draw distinctions between types of attitude and types of behavior in a free society. Certainly, politics reaches practically everywhere today. Fifty years ago, most Americans would have been sorry to see Richard Nixon go to jail because he was our president. If Jerry Ford had let former President Nixon go to trial and then pardoned him, Ford would likely have been elected to a full term in 1976. Can either of you imagine how different the United States, Central America, and the Middle East would have been had Ford, not Jimmy Carter, been elected?
“Jerry Ford's error is what we have to keep in mind. That error is why we have an obligation to discover what lay at the heart of January 6th, 2021!
I think it was sedition! What say you?"
Then I beat it. It's just plain justice that for a change Lunkhead and Dunderhead paid for my drinks! Might there even be a way to manipulate them (as Mr. Trump surely would) to permanently pay for my libations?
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
No comments:
Post a Comment