So, this happened on TV:
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Sunday defended investigations (or lack thereof) into Donald Trump by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, McCarthy repeatedly dodged questions about lies Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told in an attempt to clear the president of wrongdoing with regard to a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower.
…
“Take the name Donald Trump out of this, put the name Hillary Clinton in,” the CNN host suggested. “If a Democratic president started pardoning his political allies, you’d go bonkers. And we’re hearing crickets from Republicans now. What happened to checks and balances?”
Dana Bash makes a good, if obvious, point. Here’s another good and obvious point that no one ever seems to make: While we can be sure that we’d hear no end of Republican complaints if Hillary had done such a thing (and they’d be right in that one instance!) where are the Democratic complaints? Why aren’t we hearing a chorus of denunciations from the Democrats? It’s true that they are almost never invited on the Sunday shows, but that’s because they haven’t accused the networks of bias as the Republicans did, which has left the networks free to practice actual bias against them. But even given their relative lack of access, there’s no excuse for the Democrats’ failure to engage in coordinated condemnation of the very idea of a self pardon, or, for that matter, the clear indications coming from Trump that he’ll pardon his criminal associates if they stand firm and don’t talk.
And I’m not saying they should be running solely on Trump’s criminality. They should be running on bread and butter Democratic issues, something they are also not doing. That doesn’t mean they should be ignoring the crimes.
Credit where due: I guess this guy didn’t get the message.
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