by Scott S. Powell, American Thinker:

With the constant drumbeat from the mainstream media, Democrats now hope that the whirlwind in Washington of the so-called impeachment investigation will spread so much smoke that people won’t be able to see what’s going on, except to subliminally conclude that with all that smoke around Donald Trump, there must be a fire, and that it’ll die down with his removal from office.

In fact, President Trump has so much smoke around him because history has thrust on him the role of American firefighter-in-chief charged with extinguishing corruption in government and in the media, as well as fighting a myriad of other smoldering battles — from protecting the nation’s sovereignty and borders and redressing unfair trade deals and cost-sharing of military defense alliances to promoting policies to secure energy independence and drive economic growth, with a particular passion to deliver opportunity for those at the bottom.

With a second term, Trump is likely to become a historically consequential political realignment leader — what Andrew Jackson was to the Democrats and Abraham Lincoln was to the Republicans.  He has already broadened the base of the Republican Party, and with a little more political jujitsu he can easily make more inroads and gain support from minorities and other constituencies who feel they’ve been neglected, or worse — have been used as political pawns by the Democrat Party elites, election cycle after election cycle.

The United States is absolutely unique in human history being founded on two bedrock tenets.   First, the American people are endowed with unalienable individual rights that come from God and not the state — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, along with privacy rights, due process and a presumption of innocence.  Secondly, the legitimacy of the American government established by the Constitution comes solely from the will of the people determined by their choice through elections. States and districts choose their senators and representatives by popular vote, but the chief executive — the President — is elected by an Electoral College system, with electors being proportionally equal to each state’s number of U.S. House Representatives plus one for each of its two U.S. senators. The Founders’ wisdom regarding a need for an Electoral College thus established a blueprint for a governing a large and diverse country by balancing the preferences and will of the people living in sparsely populated states with the different priorities of densely populated states and urban areas that typically have a greater concentration of government dependency and welfare — and the sort of patronage and political corruption that comes with that.

Few can deny that the ascendance of the United States from colonial poverty to the world’s top economic and military superpower in just 200 years is a historic miracle. It is attributable to a few key differentiating factors: Judeo-Christian beliefs and work ethic, family values and the rule of law enshrined in the founding documents of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Essentially, America was unique in its birth creating a system of limited government and the empowerment of its citizens to take risks, innovate and build.

And so it should come as no surprise that America’s social and cultural decline that has accelerated in the last 50 years has coincided with growing secularism, a loss of respect for and practice of religion (and that is overwhelmingly Christianity), the decline of traditional family values and work ethic, as well as the fraying of the U.S. Constitution and the corruption of the nation’s law enforcement and judicial order, culminating in a two-tiered justice system.

It may not be a crime to engineer the manipulation of public opinion, but it certainly is a multiple-count felony to conspire and submit false information to a FISA court to obtain surveillance warrants to spy on a presidential campaign — an actual U.S. intelligence operation initiated on July 31, 2016 against the Trump campaign, known as “Crossfire Hurricane.” The justification for surveillance was allegedly that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian operatives in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.  The real reason for spying can be deduced from FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, who referred to  Crossfire Hurricane  as “the insurance policy,” the purpose of which was to leak and seed the media with enough dirt on Trump to discredit him and sabotage his campaign leading up to the November election.

The evidence assembled in the last two or three years now shows that it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that got support from the Ukraine and knowingly or unknowingly colluded with the Russians by paying for opposition research in the form of Russian disinformation that constituted the bulk of the Steele Dossier.  In addition to using that phony dossier to sully and discredit Trump through the media, it was then utilized to politically weaponize the U.S. intelligence agencies. The Department of Justice and the FBI positioned the dossier as the primary evidentiary source content in the affidavits submitted to obtain a FISA warrant in October 2016 authorizing surveillance on Carter Page–and through him, on the entire Trump campaign.  Three additional renewals every 90 days thereafter were made after Trump became president.

The Steele dossier was again used by cabinet members in the Obama Administration, notably the heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies — specifically CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey. It was included in their January 2017 official report, “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election,” that conclusively suggested the incoming Republican president was compromised by the Russians. Thus, the way was paved for what would be the Mueller investigation, which became a two-year fishing expedition that ended with the exoneration of Trump from collusion charges with any Russians.

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