Roger Stone, Roy Cohn, Donald Trump and the return of the political bogeymen
DAILY NEWS
t’s a straight line from Joe McCarthy to Roy Cohn to Roger Stone — who a jury found guilty Friday morning of seven counts including lying to Congress and threatening witnesses to shut up or change their testimony about his role in allowing foreign interference in our presidential election — to Donald Trump, who did his best Friday to live-intimidate a witness, tweeting about how “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad” in the midst of the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine’s testimony before the House impeachment inquiry.
There’s nothing new under the sun, and witch-hunters always end up creating more witches than they can drown or burn — and often end up crying about how they’re being hunted.
Cohn smeared without limits. (Ted Powers/AP)
Here was Harry Truman in 1954, just out of office, referring to McCarthy and Cohn as he warned the nation about “crude and sinister men”:
Racial, religious and class animosities are stirred up to add fuel to the flame. Smear attacks are directed against individuals who are the staunchest advocates of liberal and progressive principles…
Once again we are witnessing the return of the political bogeymen who proclaim themselves custodians of our freedom. They are making a mockery of the very institutions they so callously pretend they are seeking to preserve.
They have no more respect for the due process of law and order than the communists they say they hate but whose methods they copy. These descendants of the ancient order of witch-hunters have learned nothing from history. They care nothing for history. They care less for the American traditions of law and order and fair play.
The bogeymen now are Trump’s defenders. Just on Thursday, Joe diGenova went on Fox News to claim George Soros controls “very large parts” of the State Department while Reps. Steve King and Paul Gosar tweeted pictures of Soros’ son, bizarrely suggesting that he was the whistleblower. For good measure, Gosar put out a series of coded tweets where the first letters spelled out EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF.
To defend Trump and muddy things up, they are throwing mud at Jews, to see what sticks.
Speaking of acrostics and conspiracies, you can’t spell BENGHAZI without Devin Nunes, who helped lead the probe that turned a foreign tragedy into a domestic political assault on Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election. Yovanovitch subtly referred to that in her opening remarks, saying the Americans who died there are “rightly called heroes for their ultimate sacrifice to this nation’s foreign policy interests (and) represent each one of you here — and every American.”
Nunes is now the top Republican at the impeachment hearing, where he read aloud from the full rough transcript the White House released Friday morning of Trump’s first call with Zelensky, which consisted of boilerplate formalities along with Trump observing that “When I owned Miss Universe, they always had great people. Ukraine was always very well represented.”
The White House had put out a readout just after the call last year saying it covered Trump’s “commitment to work together with President-elect Zelensky and the Ukrainian people to implement reforms that strengthen democracy, increase prosperity, and root out corruption.” None of that was in the transcript.
Nunes cried Friday that impeachment is just a “Watergate fantasy” after “Democrats staged six weeks of secret depositions in the basement of the capital like some kind of strange cult.”
A secret cult is insisting that one transcript where Trump didn’t commit any high crimes or misdemeanors exonerates Trump, and that Trump’s enemies are inevitably the real criminals.
As Truman said, there is even one among them whose torrent of wild charges is calculated to damage the faith of Americans in the integrity of their government, army, schools, churches, their labor unions, and the press. Most of all he is threatening to undermine the respect and confidence Americans must have in one another. The cause of freedom both at home and abroad is damaged when a great country yields to hysteria. The way for us to spread democracy is to practice it ourselves.