Donald Trump, Texas Hold’m and the Big Ukrainian Bluff

 

I am a Texas Hold’m addict. The game of poker encompasses many of my favorite things: strategy, risk, socialization and even a little acting. Every Monday night, my friends and I get together to play hours and hours of Texas Hold’m style poker. One of our most infamous players is my good friend Tommy (a.k.a. Tommy Tilt.) Tommy is an excellent poker player, and a prolific bluffer. Poker isn’t about the cards you actually have in your hand, but rather what you can convince the other guys at the table you have in your hand. Tommy is an expert at fooling everyone at the table that he has a great hand when in reality he might as well be holding two napkins. However, even the best bluffers sometimes “overplay” their hands. On the first three cards they might make a convincing case that they have a pair of kings, but then when an ace comes out, they don’t back down, leaving some other savvy player scratching his head. Ultimately, the bluffer gets called and reveals he had neither an ace nor a king, and he loses a big pot because he got too greedy.

The democrats in the House of Representatives are at it again. Is this their third or fourth call for impeachment of the president? Each week it seems media bring us a new sensational story of theft and intrigue, that then very quietly falls by the wayside once the facts emerge.

This time the controversy centers around business dealings that former Vice President Biden’s son had in the Ukraine. Allegedly, Biden’s son was on the board of a company that bribed Ukrainian officials to end a corruption investigation into it. Democrats now allege that the President threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine should it not reopen the investigation into Biden’s son. The President denies this claim, and intends to release the transcript of the phone call in question. Currently Speaker Pelosi and her cohorts are planning impeachment, before any real evidence of misconduct has come to light.

If it is true, I would agree that it is the kind of grotesque political maneuvering that we have become all too accustomed to from Washington. The President should not use his office to attack political rivals. However, if this is grounds for impeachment, few in Washington are beyond reproach. Attorney General Bill Barr is currently investigating several Obama administration officials accused of weaponizing the American intelligence community against the Trump campaign to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election. There is no comparison in terms of severity between these two accusations, yet we hear only crickets from NBC and CNN when it comes to the latter.

I also recall the Obama’s IRS chief, Lois Lerner, being found in contempt of congress when she refused to testify about the IRS’s targeting of prominent Christian and conservative nonprofits for excessive audits and harassment. The IRS was found to have target lists for tax-exempt groups with labels like “Tea Party” and other conservative standards in their names, but again there were crickets from the left. And now this is the issue that draws forth their outrage?

Lost in this debate is an important question; did Biden commit criminal wrongdoing? If so, was this action from the president even morally ambiguous, much less criminal?

This is the extension of several failed campaigns to derail the conservative agenda anywhere but at the ballot box. It started with the much maligned Mueller probe, which produced nothing after over a year of chop licking and promising from the same bad actors at work now. Then it evolved into the Stormy Daniels soap opera. And of course who could forget the campaign against Brett Kavanaugh? Time and time again, when the left can’t win honestly, they resort to political attacks and smear campaigns unrooted from reality. Today I would say to them the same thing I say to Tommy Tilt every Monday  night, “Do you actually have something this time, or are you just trying to win the pot?”