Part I is here.
King refused to apply his usual ethics alarms to Obama, but continued to be a credible and objective analyst where the D.C. government was involved. He was an instant Donald Trump-hater, however. the second the 2016 results were known. I can understand reaction to the two-time runaway winner of the Ethics Alarms “Asshole of the Year” award. But King concluded Trump was a racist—his embrace of birther accusations against his beloved Obama was enough to guarantee that—and once Trump was elected, King became the Post’s counterpart to Trump-deranged Times columnist Charles M. Blow, except that King at his worst is usually more endurable than Blow at his best.
King’s latest anti-Trump screed, however, shows how far a smart pundit can fall when the cognitive dissonance scale and confirmation bias work in tandem, especially when old age marches on and one is mired in both work and personal bubbles where a single bias dominates.
The column begins with one of my least varieties of fake news, future news, when a journalist sets out to push a negative view of a politician based on what he will do. The headline is “It’s a good bet Trump pardons his felon allies. Here’s when that’s most likely.”
I don’t think it is a good bet, though it is certainly possible. King assumes it is a good bet, as his column makes clear (along with all of his previous columns relating to Trump) because he thinks of the President as a corrupt racketeer. King’s once nimble mind is now incapable of imagining a justification for pardoning the “allies” in question, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and Paul Manafort. I can: arguably all three of them were indicted and convicted because of the “resistance”effort to try to drive Donald Trump from office, and to send a message to anyone who might be of value to his administration that they would instantly be in cross-hairs if they dared to try to support the President. President Trump might feel responsible for their plight, and use his absolute clemency power to relieve their burdens. If so, it would not be an unprecedented political or personal use of the pardon and clemency power. King reallywas just using this question as a pretense to vent about the President, whom he detests, shredding his own credibility in the process. For example,
- “Impeached or not, Trump can still grant pardons without fear of a citizens’ revolt — once the polls close. Even if the voters serve him with an eviction, Trump can still cut his boys loose, provided he acts before turning off the lights in the Oval Office.”
A citizen’s revolt over what happens to Stone, Manafort, and Flynn? Not one in a thousand voters could explain what any of these men did. Not one of them is half as despicable as Marc Rich, the fugitive whom Bill Clinton pardoned on the way out the door in exchange for his ex-wife’s check to the Clinton Library. Obama’s grant of clemency to Chelsea Manning, whose leaks of sensitive data to Wikileaks were traitorous and probably deadly, and Oscar Lopez Rivera, a terrorist who killed Americans, didn’t spark any “revolt.” Neither did King criticize Obama’s gifts to them.
- “The Stone, Manafort and Flynn prediction is offered with confidence because of Trump’s demonstrated disregard for the integrity of the criminal-justice system. That disdain was on display in his recent chiseling of the military judicial process.”
“Chiseling,” as in a criminal act of fraud. Every pardon or grant of clemency overrules the justice system. If King believes that every pardon or commutation shows such disregard, that’s fine (though wrong), but he only believes Trump’s use of his pardoning and clemency powers are an abuse of the power. (He also apparently doesn’t know the difference between pardons and clemency.) King’s hero, Obama, gave out in his final months more commutations—clemency—than the last ten President’s combined. Unlike pardons, commutations are direct vetoes of the criminal justice system’s process and verdict. Obama’s were fine, but Trump’s must be bad.
- “Unlike Trump’s three military honorees, thousands of men and women in uniform have served under equally demanding conditions while abiding by the law and not crossing clearly drawn moral lines. None of which matters to Trump.”
“Clearly drawn moral lines” ? In war? King was never in combat, but my father was. He said, more than once, that it was a myth that American soldiers didn’t frequently find themselves violating Geneva Convention rules, and that such violations in the field were inevitable and a result of the situations soldiers were forced into by their service.
- “Consider the impact of Trump’s refusal to accept congressional oversight on the separation of powers. He orders administration officials to refuse to honor congressional subpoenas — they click their heels, salute and hope to hell they did it fast enough. Think about his relentless, incendiary assaults on a free press. Witness his attack on judges who won’t let him have his way. “Democratic checks and balances”? In Trump’s mind, his presidency is uncheckable, and no other branch of government equals its power.”
What shameless hackery.
1. Calling the Democratic Congress’s abuse of its investigative and impeachment powers “oversight on the separation of powers” is a euphemism for the ages. It is itself an attack on the Separation of Powers, just as the Republican Party’s attempt to remove President Andrew Johnson was. Andrew McCarthy explains, objectively and correctly, here.
2. Ah, the mandatory talking point from a journalist who refuses to admit (or see) how the free press has allowed itself to corrode into a party organ uninterested in what the free press is protected for. If once honest truth-tellers like King won’t hold the news media to its ethical standards or remind the public of the harm it is doing, the President of the United States is a legitimate and necessary alternative.
3. Again, King never criticized the previous President for his attacks on the Supreme Court when it threatened not to let him have “his way,” nor was the previous President so routinely vexed by judges who opposed policies based on which party’s POTUS was advancing them. Resorting to double standards is a symptom of ethical corruption.
I don’t think Presidents should attack the judiciary, but this is one more area where Trump is being held to standards Obama was not.
- “He gets caught bribing a foreign country to interfere in a U.S. election — specifically by offering desperately needed military assistance in exchange for that country pledging publicly to dig up dirt on an opponent. A blatant abuse of presidential power. Yet no broad bipartisan coalition in Congress exists to rein him in.”
Finally, Colbert King descends to off-the-shelf “resistance” talking points: a definition of “bribery” that would encompass most domestic politics and foreign affairs since the 18th Century; the contrived assertion that investigating corrupt practices by a former Vice President to benefit his son relates to an election in which the nominees have yet to be determined, rather than the importance of not turning a blind eye to official misconduct. And, saddest and most damning of all, “dirt,” the intentionally misleading word for “evidence of serious malfeasance” when it applies to Joe Biden.
The rest of the column is no different. It is true that blind fury that Donald Trump, whom many of the political and pundit class consider beneath them as well as national ideals, has shattered the integrity and logic of many once respectable voices: George Will, Bill Kristol, Jeff Flake, and others. After all these years of admiring his objectivity, I thought Colbert King’s integrity could handle the challenge. Apparently spending eight years wearing rose-colored glass regarding one President doomed him to being stuck with jaundiced eyes with which to assess his successor.
What a shame.
Ethics Alarms 
Love is blind, after all.
And, in this case, hate is certainly more blind.
“sensitive data to Wikileaks were traitorous and probably dedaly”
Thought you might want to move that last “d”.
You aren’t familiar with the word dedaly?
Why has no one asked why Joe Biden is above the law and why do Democrats believe that he is?
Chris, as lawyers are fond of saying of certain clients, “He may be an asshole, but he’s OUR asshole.”
There are entire articles devoted to the single topic that claims of malfeasance by Biden and his son is entirely a conspiracy theory by the right wing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/trump-pushing-baseless-conspiracy-about-bidens-china-here-s-what-n1062551
This is Bagdad Bob level of ignoring reality. They believe their own lies.
I can’t help offering a possible explanation for such an obvious change in personal convictions. As with many of my previously sane and logical friends, perhaps Mr. King is swayed by a favorite grandchild who has been inculcated with the leftist propaganda of our once open-minded universities. Love is a perplexing emotion and sways many a thoughtful person to doing and saying the unthinkable . . .
The explanation may be very simple. Being objective and calling out corrupt politicians when the pool of candidates and elected officials are predominantly of your own race is without much risk. However, when evaluating a President, especially an historical one of your own race, one may be inclined to be protective of that candidate.
It is understandable when we speak of special interest groups organized around race or gender that choose not to air their “dirty laundry” publically. Juan Williams on Fox is no different than King. Both seem to feel an obligation to protect something larger than the individual politician: the idea that African Americans are equal to or better than others to serve as our nation’s top leader. Obama had to be seen as a superior leader and his legacy a positive one or the liklihood of another minority candidate winning the White House would be wishful thinking.
“…likelihood of another minority candidate winning the White House would be wishful thinking.”
I think the Democrats are afraid that any such candidacy is already doomed, for the next few cycles at least.
They KNOW Obama failed in general, and specifically for his demographic. They know President Trump has done more -despite their lies and baseless accusations of ‘racist!’- for that demographic than any Democrat president ever. They see they are losing those they would keep on the plantation, in lock step for the sake of Democrat power, and are scrambling to install the next classes of mindless, single issue, low information voters, all to protect their personal power.
Note who is running (and is being boosted by their agitprop allies in the media) for the Democratic nomination of POTUS: mostly old guard white people. Who are the top candidates? Old guard white people.
The minorities are being… ignored.