Dis-Barred

Former Attorney General Bill Barr is urging the U.S. Senate to confirm Todd Blanche as President Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Justice. In a column in the Wall Street Journal last week, Barr said Blanche is well-qualified and will run the place as well as anyone could. Blanche, said Barr, will provide much-needed leadership and stability.

And he was serious.

Barr knows what the job entails. He’s been attorney general twice under two different Republican presidents. He is conservative to the point of being tribal. He openly campaigned for the job after Trump’s first choice, Jeff Sessions, imploded. He then embraced the Trump notion that the Mueller probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election was a stretch. And he published a glaringly misleading summary of the report, arguing falsely that it exonerated Trump.

Barr willingly did Trump’s bidding right up to — but not including — embracing the false rigged election nonsense. In fact, Barr literally called “bullshit” on Trump’s arguments that he somehow had an election which he lost by 7 million votes stolen from him.

But Barr is no hero.

And those who are disappointed by his endorsement of Blanche have just not been paying attention. I would argue that Blanche is exactly the kind of guy Barr would want because Barr believes the DOJ should be an instrument of Republican presidents to further conservative goals and to impede what he sees as a liberal onslaught on our American values.

“The main thing going for Mr. Trump and his party right now,” Barr wrote, “is the administration’s domestic policy agenda aimed at rolling back destructive progressive policies and restoring common common-sense, prosperity and public safety.” In other words, we all have to fight the transgendering of America and the creeping expansion of civil rights.

Certainly, he’s right that the “main thing going for Trump and his party right now” is not the war in Iran. Nor is it the ruinous tariff plan that has sapped America’s economic strength. It isn’t the immigration snafu which we don’t really want to talk about any more than we want to mention inflation. No, it’s definitely not the execrable Cabinet Trump has cobbled together from a local sewerage system. It’s not Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence, or RFK Jr., as protector of our health, or Push-up Pete Hegseth, who evidently wants to return to the glory days of the Crusaders.

Sure, let’s throw in the perfect Trump lackey, Blanche, to oversee law enforcement in this nation. He was Trump’s personal attorney, after all, and must be eager to further his boss’s campaign of vengeance against those who caught him in wrongdoing.

Barr wrote a book, One Damn Thing After Another, in which he freely concedes that Trump was responsible for the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr told NBC’s Lester Holt.

It sure as hell does “appear” so, Bill.

And yet knowing all that he knew about Trump up close and personal, this tower of integrity was still unwilling to consider voting against him in 2024. Why? “Because I believe the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party,” Barr told the Today Show, “it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee” — even if it’s Trump.

That’s right, Bill.

If Kamala Harris had defeated Trump, she would not have bombed Iran, tanked the economy, alienated our best friends abroad, lusted for Greenland, abandoned Ukraine to the bestiality of the Russians, sent bully boys playing dress-up into the streets of American cities to corral landscapers, maids, nannies, and busboys.

No, Kamala Harris would not have demolished the East Wing of the White House to build a dance hall or plastered her name onto the Kennedy Center’s facade. She would not have enriched herself or her family. She would not have gilded the Oval Office or entrusted the Reflecting Pool to cronies who transformed it into a swamp. There would be no talk about a “Harris triumphal arch” steps from the fallen of Arlington National cemetery. And Stephen Miller would hopefully be living in a trailer park right next to Steve Bannon.

And you know what else, Bill? Harris would not have lied 100 times a day. She would not have dozed off during Cabinet meetings. She would have understood the majesty of the office, its true meaning to Americans, and she would have embraced the responsibility that came with it instead of acting like a grade school jerk “because I can.”

Kamala Harris would not have bent the rules, skirted the norms, flipped off traditions, or trashed the guardrails that have governed every man who assumed the job since the Founding Fathers and George Washington envisioned it.

So, go ahead Bill. Tell me again why you voted for Trump. And I have one question. Are the Democrats so godawful that you would vote for President Pond Scum again when he seeks a third term?