HEATHER WILHELM: Tough times for the resistance?
At first glance, one might think that resistance membership might be at least somewhat exciting and purposeful, not depressing. After all, every few days, some fevered news agency announces some variation of the following: “This is it! We have the smoking gun that will crack the Trump presidency, and it is completely different from the 1,326 purported smoking guns that we thought we had before!”
If you found that headline intriguing, I fear you’ve missed what generally happens next: The story drifts, the supposed smoking gun sputters, and everything slowly morphs into a cable-news cartoon soap opera, narrated by a voice not unlike that of Charlie Brown’s disembodied and unintelligible murmuring teacher.
Depending on the day, the tale in question will likely involve layers of campaign-finance law, the name-dropping of a Russian oligarch, 13 unintelligible memos (probably), Stormy Daniels and her lawyer (definitely), several acts of mind-boggling incompetence from both sides of the aisle, countless insufferable bureaucrats who are wildly overpaid with your hard-earned tax dollars and at least one narrative element that you can’t appropriately discuss with children under the age of 23.
As an aside, the previous sentence is a fairly good illustration of why I think everyone should lean libertarian — well, that, and an alarming recent Washington Post piece that suggested D.C. hipsters be called “govsters.” But that’s a whole other column.
“Well, whatever,” a resistance loyalist might say. “Didn’t you read ‘All the President’s Men’ ”? (Author’s note: I did.) “Drip, drip, drip,” said loyalist might continue. “The truth shall potentially out, and this is not like the late 1990s at all!”
That’s right. In the ’90s, the Democrat-Media Complex provided the Clintons with just enough political cover to keep them in office. Today, that same (though enlarged) DMC has been trying to remove Trump from office since Day One, but has yet to reveal a smoking gun. And yet they persist.
So while it’s true that there are a lot of drips, it would be needlessly rude to call them that.