Sessions Smear Showcases Dems’ Neo-McCarthyism

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave an insufficiently nuanced answer during his Senate hearing and it has Democrats demanding he resign. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — in his biggest emotional overreaction since he cried about President Donald Trump’s travel ban executive order — said “I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.”

At the risk of causing stomach-pretzeling, here’s the exchange between Sessions and Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.):

After eight years of treating the president with white gloves, the media appears to be making up for lost time.

Franken: “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”

Sessions: “Sen. Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”

Is it just me, or have the Democrats wildly adjusted their threshold for calling something perjury? Seriously, are these the same people who defended Hillary Clinton when she told the Select Committee on Benghazi that “nothing was marked classified at the time I sent or received it”? That blatant falsehood was blown out of the water by the director of the FBI and Democrats couldn’t wait to defend it.

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Yet Sessions’ lack of nuance causes gastrointestinal trauma? It’s clear that Sessions meant in his role as a “surrogate” for the campaign. He didn’t mean that he’s never spoken to any Russians before in any capacity or for any reason. According to his spokesperson, Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions conversed with over 25 foreign ambassadors in his capacity as a senior member of the Armed Service committee.

Is it possible that the Democrats are just making partisan noise? The news-cycle-changing timing of these new revelations is certainly suspect. Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress was so outstanding that the mainstream media was forced give it positive coverage.

Finally, Trump got a positive news cycle. Americans — regardless of party — were pumped up for a job-creating, America First agenda. They were excited to see that — despite mainstream media characterizations — Trump isn’t a mustache-twisting villain intent on tying America to the train tracks. It was the most unifying message Americans have heard from a president in years.

But, alas, we can’t spend any time discussing the agenda he laid out because we have to keep Russia in the news.

This is just the latest in the Democrats’ McCarthy-esque game of pointing their finger and declaring people members of the amorphous Russian conspiracy. And the game all rides on the mainstream media who have been force-feeding the “Trump Loves Russia” narrative to Americans, no matter how sparse the evidence to back it up.

What’s worrisome is not that Sessions has some sinister plan to make secret deals with Russia — nobody with a brain thinks that. What’s worrisome is the party-first-country-second partisanship on the Democratic side of the aisle. Maybe the Trump administration should do as Clinton would and find a YouTube video hardly anyone has ever seen and offer it up to the mainstream media as a scapegoat.

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After eight years of treating the president with white gloves, the media appears to be making up for lost time. Where was the outrage from jabbering head pundits when Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for withholding information on Fast and Furious? Where were they when National Security Adviser Susan Rice was peddling Benghazi lies on all the Sunday shows? Where were they when the IRS was illegally targeting conservative groups and evidence kept disappearing? Where were they when ransom planes filled with cash landed in Tehran? Where were they when the Justice Department went after Fox News reporter James Rosen? Where were they when Secret Service agents in Cartagena were making sure they had “Plenty of Magnums” and “Cash for dem hoes?”

There’s a McCarthy-era political cartoon that shows senators forcing an elephant to stand on a precarious stack of tar buckets labeled “McCarthyism.” The terrified elephant exclaims, “You mean I’m supposed to stand on that?” Replace the elephant with a donkey, and it’s perfect for today.

Democrats are calling for special prosecutors without any evidence of crime. They’re calling for the attorney general of the United States to resign over semantics. Worst of all, they — along with their mainstream media allies — are trying to smear good people as evil conspirators without facts to back it up.

Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and regular LifeZette contributor.