Ignorance, Or Intent? MSNBC’s Reid Disregards Facts and Constitution On Trump Acquittal

P. Gardner Goldsmith | February 15, 2021
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“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The more one watches politicians and their pop media pals, the more that line from “The Princess Bride” reverberates in the infinite expanses of one’s mind.

These people use terms like “bailout” when they’re really engaging in multi-generational theft and redistribution of wealth. They use the term “job-creating” when engaged in more of that tax-thievery and the funneling of it into pet projects -- projects that they could simply invest with their OWN capital if they really thought said projects were “job creating”. From 2017 through all of 2020 they used the term “peaceful protest” when huge swaths of cities had been looted and burned to the ground by rioters. And, now, they keep spouting the term “insurrection” as they either show their ignorance of the word, or intentionally misuse it to prop up a politically useful narrative.

Thus, we see MSNBC’s Joy Reid and guests, as she vented her anger at the Senate acquitting Donald Trump in the absurd impeachment trial of a non-President.

The visibly angry Reid welcomed her enlightened posse to her poorly-named “Reidout” program February 13 by saying:

There were two kinds of Republicans in that (Senate) chamber today. There were the kinds of Republicans who saw what they saw and heard what they heard and experienced the, uh, one-six insurrection, and voted accordingly…

Let’s pause here to reflect on three points.

First, there’s the brief, but notable, reiteration of a term that other leftist media and political figures recently have parroted. It’s the shorthand “one-six” for the chaos at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, something that seems to be a linguistic lever, used to liken that tumultuous event to the term “nine-eleven,” and lift it to a new level of historic significance.

Which, if intentional, is a devilish, towering insult to history, to the lives taken on September 11, 2001, to grieving loved ones, and to the people who sacrificed so much in rescue efforts and clean-up of Ground Zero.

Second, there’s the implication that a “correct/virtuous” vote is one that corresponds to the “true” experience of Senators there during the infiltration – “true” experience being defined by Joy Reid as an “insurrection.”

RELATED: Leftist Media Claims All GOP Are ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Suggest ‘Drone Strikes’- Wacky MOLE

Third, there’s the term “insurrection” itself, which is the basis for the entire Democrat-led circus.

And which is unsupportable in part because not one of the people arrested in the events in DC on January 6, 2021 has been charged with... insurrection. Period. There was no insurrection at the Capitol, and Joy Reid either knows this and is intentionally misleading people, or she is such a bad journalist she continues to offer nonsense without realizing it.

Regardless, and heedless of reality, Reid continued, claiming that those who voted against Trump in the trial were not motivated by evidence, or the Constitution, but by political calculation. They are the "other kind of Republicans":

…And the kind who are making some sort of political calculation to cling to Donald Trump like he’s a life bouy.

In other words, Joy gets to frame the debate and claim people are engaging in "political calculation" when they don't abide by her desires to convict Trump in a purely political trial.

To back up her childish narrative, Reid flashed the words of Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), who also appears to have traveled to fantasyland and not passed the TSA screening to return home:

The evidence is compelling that President Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection against a coequal branch of government and that the charge rises to the level of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Which not only is patently contradicted by Trump’s own words on January 6th, but also contains an additional fallacy: that the branches are, as Burr and public school myth-tellers claim, “co-equal.”

Only a person with limited faculties could look at the branches and claim this, because the Legislative Branch not only has the vast power to create the federal court system beneath the US Supreme Court, it has the super-power called Impeachment.

And when Impeachment is used for purely political purposes to remove someone from office, that’s almost its own form of slow-motion, legalistic insurrection.

When a non-judicial trial in the Senate is conducted for what appears to be an attempt to negate a former President’s right to run for office again, that seems close to a Bill of Attainder, which is prohibited by Article One, Section Nine, Clause Three of their vaunted US Constitution, and which, as Cornell Law notes, was described by 19th Century Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story thus:

Bills of attainder . . . are such special acts of the legislature, as inflict capital punishments upon persons supposed to be guilty of high offences, such as treason and felony, without any conviction in the ordinary course of judicial proceedings. If an act inflicts a milder degree of punishment than death, it is called a bill of pains and penalties. . . . In such cases, the legislature assumes judicial magistracy, pronouncing upon the guilt of the party without any of the common forms and guards of trial, and satisfying itself with proofs, when such proofs are within its reach, whether they are conformable to the rules of evidence, or not. In short, in all such cases, the legislature exercises the highest power of sovereignty, and what may be properly deemed an irresponsible despotic discretion, being governed solely by what it deems political necessity or expediency, and too often under the influence of unreasonable fears, or unfounded suspicions.

And Cornell’s Legal Information Institute goes on to note:

The phrase ‘bill of attainder,’ as used in this clause and in clause 1 of § 10, applies to bills of pains and penalties as well as to the traditional bills of attainder.

But, for the sake of hologrammatic “unity” the left keeps telling us we must embrace, even as they continue to work to tell us how to live, let’s pretend the Impeachment Trial of a former President is constitutional.

The idea that there was an “insurrection” on January 6 is falsified by the fact that no charges for such have been brought against any of the civilians who entered the Capitol. And, even if one claims that the charges against them are irrelevant, and that Trump tried to “incite” an insurrection, Trump’s statements that day explicitly contradict such a claim.

As his legal representative, Michael van der Veen, offered as part of his closing statement at the Senate “trial”:

At no point in their presentation did you hear the House Managers play a single example of Mr. Trump urging anyone to engage in violence of any kind. At no point did you hear anything that could ever possibly be construed as Mr. Trump encouraging or sanctioning an insurrection. Senators, you did not hear those tapes because they do not exist, because the act of incitement never happened. He engaged no language of incitement on January 6th or on any other day following the election. No unbiased person honestly reviewing the transcript of Mr. Trump’s speech on the Ellipse could possibly believe that he was suggesting violence. He explicitly told the crowd that he expected the protest outside the Capitol to be peaceful and patriotic.

Of course, as we know the term “peaceful” seems malleable in the eyes of many Congress members and Senators, including people like Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), who once explicitly told supporters to confront Trump Cabinet members and make sure those people were “not welcome, anymore, anywhere!”

And it includes Nancy Pelosi, who seemed to want “uprisings all over the country” against Trump in 2018.

And it seems to fit all the Democrats in the Senate, as well as seven Republicans, who voted to convict Trump. The Dems needed seventeen GOP-ers on their side to convict, but only seven joined the Democrats. Those included, Susan Collins (ME), Mitt Romney (UT), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Ben Sasse (NB), Patrick Toomey (PA), Bill Cassidy(LA), and the aforementioned Burr.

Is it too much to ask that these people bother to understand the facts and the Constitution? Are their salaries, power, and pensions so huge that they can’t take a moment away from self-puffery to consider how Alice-in-Wonderland this looks to those of us who DO know the facts and who DO read the document they are supposed to uphold?

Joy Reid doesn’t seem to care about their ignorance. In fact, she either shares it or assiduously avoids offering information and shades the definition of words in order to propel her awful, insulting narrative.

One need not be a supporter of Trump to see how juvenile and pretentious, how fictional and fantastical, this crazy display has been. It's even more fantastic than "The Princess Bride", but it's in no way entertaining.

And one need not pretend that Joy Reid and the Senators standing on their soapboxes care in any way for the facts or for the Constitution that is supposed to limit the government they continue to try to expand.

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