George Rebane

2024 will be a tumultuous year that will tax all of our ‘goodwill toward men’.  The world is full of wars, incipient wars, and hot spots.  In America we and much of the rest of the world will be focused on our November national election.  And embedded in the run-up to that election will be the indictments and trials of former President Trump and the impeachment and scandals of the Biden administration.  RR commenters of all stripes have circled the ‘sins of Trump’ barn innumerable times over the last couple of years.  Here, for the record, I want to enter my own take on Trump’s sins.

The 2020 national election was unquestionably fraught with irregularities that may well have affected the outcome.  As just one piece of evidence to support that we have the governors and other judicial agents in a number of important Democrat controlled swing states modifying election laws and procedures to favor Democrat candidates’ and therefore Biden’s vote counts.  All of these machinations were unconstitutional since they were done independent of the states’ legislatures or Congress contrary to what is prescribed in our Constitution – Article I, Section 4, Clause 1: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing (sic) Senators.

We need go no further than this to condemn what happened in November 2020 and its aftermath.  America’s now corrupt justice system made it clear that appealing to the violation of this constitutional provision would be futile.  This has given the country’s Democrats and leftwing activists their talking point that no indictments or guilty verdicts resulted from the rightwing efforts to adjudicate the matter.  So, the election stood as confirmed by the Senate’s 6jan21 acceptance of the electoral college’s vote.  The Left’s and their lamestream media’s answer to ‘what happened on 6 January 2021?’ continues to be “The heavily armed, Trump-incited mob attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was an attack not just on the U.S. Capitol building, but also on democracy and the rule of law.”  Today every Democrat believes it was an attempted “insurrection” to overthrow the government and install a rightwing autocracy in its place.

However, the recorded facts indicate otherwise.  First, let’s be clear that the spontaneously assembled mob’s break-in to the Capitol was an unlawful act with more lawlessness by a minority of individuals when they gained access to congressional chambers and offices.  But there is no evidence that these trespassers were armed, let alone “heavily armed”.  Nor were they organized to do anything beyond possibly go to the Capitol and demonstrate their displeasure of the impending electoral college vote confirmation.  Most certainly there is no evidence that then President Trump’s speech that preambled their march down Pennsylvania Avenue contained any directions, let alone exhortations, to actually storm the Capitol and interrupt the proceedings in the Senate chamber.

All Trump asked the assembled crowd to do was to go to the Hill and protest in front of the Capitol and exhort Vice President Pence to return the electors to their respective states and then return a recertified cohort of electors to the Capitol – a perfectly legal process which many scholars maintain that Pence had the constitutional authority to do.  (The interpretation of this is so murky that Congress is now planning to pass additionally clarifying legislation to make clear the VP’s prerogatives in this process.)  There was nothing unlawful or criminal in the President’s asking his supporters for this kind of undertaking.  And again, most certainly there was no inciting the crowd into an insurrection to topple and replace our democratic form of government.  All of that has been successfully fabricated by Democrats as part of their ongoing yearslong effort to undermine Trump’s administration and destroy his political career.

The charge that President Trump criminally interfered in Georgia’s election is specious, plain and simple.  By all the available evidence Trump spoke with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger requesting him to “find 11,780 (additional) votes” that would then make him the winner in Georgia.  This request was after two previous recounts each had already reduced the margin of Biden’s victory.  It is a matter of historical record that no vote count is ever a definitive and perfectly reliable result of the actual number of votes cast for any issue/individual in a large election involving millions of voters and their votes.  The complexity of such elections is such that every recount yields a different number.  The recounts are usually halted by agreement between the contending candidates, if not by a court.  All Trump did was to request that the recount be continued in the hope that the new results would supply him the added number of votes needed to win the state.

There is nothing criminal in issuing such a request, which in this case was denied by Raffensperger and Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp, both of whom certified (by legal fiat) the results of the last recount giving the state to Biden.  Charges against Trump were trumped up later by bundling his request with subsequent criminal allegations against his supporters who, following a labyrinth of legal procedures, unsuccessfully attempted to continue the appeal to reopen the recounts.  In spite of all this, former president Trump was indicted and booked (mugshot and all) on the charge of criminally trying to overturn Georgia’s election.

Finally, we come to Trump’s New York real estate doings.  According to The Independent, “the case centres around what New York Attorney General Letitia James has described as an ‘astounding’ level of fraud and deceptive business practices over more than a decade, during which the former president and his associates ‘grossly and fraudulently’ inflated the value of his properties to obtain tax, loan and insurance incentives.”  In short, according to the newly minted real estate maven Letitia James, the former president asked too high a price for real estate that he was refinancing or selling to various established real estate professionals like banks and other New York developers.  The record and subsequent testimonies show that all participants were profitably satisfied with the transactions that involved the alleged over-valued properties – no one was harmed.

But what this really indicates is the Left’s willingness to back this know-nothing pinhead James in her previously admitted intent to nail Trump.  But the entire leftwing braintrust that formulated the basis for this indictment shows the world that they understand nothing of how markets, especially in real estate, work.  And their dogged pursuit of this attack is further proof that Democrats in general and specifically their socialist core understand nothing about market capitalism save for some Marxist inspired propaganda slogans.

In a free market the seller can put any price he wants on what he intends to sell.  It is the buyer’s responsibility to do the due diligence that will inform him about prudently accepting or rejecting the deal.  The seller will, more often than not, overprice his goods/services at the beginning of any negotiation, it was ever thus and expected.  From such leftwing machinations, supported by the legions of market distorting regulations they have already passed and proposed, the informed American voter can easily tell what the prospects are for a road to serfdom when these socialist finally fasten their autocratic grip on the country.

I end this diatribe for the record by wishing all RR readers a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2024.