By Thom Duda
On social media feeds from The Hill, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was cited as blaming the Democrats for the very recent debacle involving Jeff Sessions, the current attorney general in the menagerie of fools with whom Trump has sequestered himself.
Republicans denying evidence of Russian interference and stating that Democrats were lighting their “hair on fire” over Jeff Sessions, I wonder if some – or all – of the Republican leadership live in some delusional void where things just don’t work like they are expecting to.
The issue we have right here is really a simple matter of Sessions basically lying on the Senate floor while under oath. He was asked by one of his fellow senators, Al Franken of Minnesota, during his committee hearing about what he would should it be found that anyone of Trump team had communication with the Russian government during the 2016 election race.
Sessions didn’t flat out answer, saying that he wasn’t aware of it, but pointed out he had been called a surrogate of the campaign and hadn’t had communications with the Russians. Following the latest breakthrough Thursday morning, we’ve found out that’s not true and that he had spoken with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. So, there’s a strike right there – right on Session’s forehead in fluorescent neon.
No matter in what capacity Sessions spoke to the Russian ambassador, he has lied under oath and essentially committed the same crime he condemned Bill Clinton for years ago. Of course, there are Democrats calling for his resignation, as well as many Republicans calling for his recusing himself from cases (which he did), but the calls for his resignation from the right are non-existent right now.
We have the Speaker of the House pointing fingers at the other side like a petulant brat, trying to play it off as semantics, when we had a United States senator meet with a Russian diplomat during a political campaign that we know they meddled in.
This is maddening and silly as had this been Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat in office, it can be assured that the Republicans in Congress would largely be chomping at the bit for a resignation.
There should be no issue with condemning the acts of people in government that border on treason, but it’s not clear cut in our country anymore whereas before this would have received bipartisan condemnation. Instead, we have a group of those in charge essentially unwilling to police themselves accordingly and cut off members who have erred and put our country at a potential risk – not to mention breaking the bloody law that is supposedly sacrosanct!
Hypocrisy exists on both sides, but right now, it is bubbling up in the “swamp” that was supposedly drained, like the red maggots feeding on a slowly dying animal.