The House Intelligence Committee voted today to release a classified memo to the public detailing alleged abuse by senior Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials in their investigation of the Trump campaign.
The memo reportedly details — among other things — how senior Obama administration officials abused federal law to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump foreign policy campaign adviser Carter Page.
What took Republcians so long to vote on this? The public has known about this memo for weeks. If positions were reversed, the relevant Repubicans would have been tried and convicted by now, at least in the media.
Democrats don’t wait for evidence to find a Republican guilty. In fact, they’ll make up evidence, as they’ve done throughout the whole pseudo-Russia scandal.
Republicans can be sitting on overwhelming evidence and they move like molasses. What’s the reason for this? Stupidity? Perhaps. But stupidity has to be caused by something.
My best guess of the cause: unearned guilt.
I write about unearned guilt all the time. Unearned guilt means feeling responsible for something bad that isn’t your fault. Or thinking you’re bad when you’re not.
A lot of Republicans feel guilty because they worry they’re not good people. The reason they worry they’re not good people is because they support less wealth redistribution and socialism than Democrats. In their minds, this translates into not being generous. Deep down, many Republicans feel they’re mean, or at least they worry they might be mean. This impairs their ability to stand firm, hold convictions and treat morally depraved opponents for what they are.
Actually, the bad guys are the Democrats, not the people who favor free enterprise or less wealth redistribution. They are the ones who have created the “swamp”, the stinkhole of corruption that started out as the nation’s capital of a free country. Of course plenty of Republicans are to blame, and that hypocrisy is a good reason to feel guilty. But I don’t think it’s the reason so many Republican politicians feel as guilty as they do. They’re worried that they look like mean people, because they don’t want the all-out socialism that the modern Democratic Party now unequivocally endorses.
Republicans need to remember that the essence of goodness is not giving away wealth. It might be a generous thing to give one’s own wealth away, at least judiciously and when one has the spare wealth to do so. But giving away other people’s wealth after forcibly taking it from them, and turning the government of a free country into a legalized Mafia, is not generosity. Take a look at people like Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and ask yourself if they represent anything close to goodness.
The essence of goodness consists of using your mind, using your talents and producing objectively valuable things through a meaningful and purposeful career. I use “career” broadly to include enterprises like raising children and doing things that don’t make money but still produce value and virtue. Your duty is not to serve others, but to serve yourself in a rational, productive way. In the process you end up helping others as well, even though it was not your primary goal.
Democrats do not feel guilty about making up evidence to harm President Trump or any other Republican. They are dictators at heart and cannot tolerate dissension. Republicans are so confused about what’s right and wrong that it causes them to cave, wobble and even drag their feet on the most obvious opportunity to expose people from the Obama administration as the tyrants and criminals those paying attention always knew them to be.
Given how Republicans have behaved with this smoking gun memo proving that the Obama administration spied on candidate Donald Trump, you’d never know they won the election and are, at the moment, the majority party. It’s all because of unearned guilt, and it’s a shame.
Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Rehoboth Beach DE). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1