
Prof. Jonathan Turley has two excellent and revealing columns up right now, one dealing with the ongoing assault on Donald Trump from the Axis of Unethical Conduct that Ethics Alarms readers are familiar with (that’s the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance that set out to punish Trump for defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016), and the other, stunningly, advocating a House inquiry into the impeachment of Joe Biden.
I have a special interest in both columns, which I will explain while sending you, I hope, over to Prof. Turley’s site to read both of his essays. I want to begin by, not for the first time, saluting Turley. He has courageously maintained studied objectivity and a lack of partisan bias in his erudite commentary on the political horrors of the past nearly three decades, beginning with his guest appearances on cable and network news shows during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Because the George Washington Law School professor has not disgraced himself like so many of his academic colleagues by submitting to full-blown Trump Derangement and woke-polluter legal analysis, he is now widely derided on the Left (and presumably at GW) as knee-jerk conservative and Republican apologist, which he definitely is not. As a result, Turley, who once was welcome on all of the public affairs shows and had op-eds in the usual leftist-propaganda publications, is now reduced to offering commentary on Fox News and the conservative New York Post, with The Hill being his only remaining non-GOP leaning platform. He also feels required to place an “I’m not biased, I’m an objective and fact-driven analyst” litany in every blog post that points out that an Axis position is unethical or wrong. For example, here is one from yesterday’s column about the Washington Post’s misrepresentation of the Georgia indictment against Trump:
“When the Mar-a-Lago indictment came down, I was one of the first to say that I considered it a strong case. I have since noted that the case seems to be strengthening with time….I have long disagreed with Trump over his claim of systemic voting fraud. I criticized Trump’s Jan. 6 speech while he was giving it. I supported Vice President Mike Pence and his certification of the election of Joe Biden. I have also regularly criticized Trump when I felt that such criticism was warranted. This does not change my view of whether the call is compelling evidence of a crime….”
It’s an indictment of the state of our public discourse that Turley feels compelled to do that—he issues comparable disclaimers several times a week—but that’s what honest pundits they have to in these times of intimidation and cancellation by the totalitarian left. (Last week, I was asked to delete the reference to Ethics Alarms in my CV accompanying my expert opinion in a court case because “the judge is very progressive.”) Here are my brief comments on the two recent columns.
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