It is possible America has crossed a boundary from which there is no return.

I don’t mean that to imply that Trump caused it, it is more likely that he is the product of it. I was thinking about this in conjunction with something Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist, tweeted this week:

“Every now and then I wonder if media will ever get how their treatment of Romney (and other GOP candidates) as a monster led to President Trump. Probably not.”

Since Barry Goldwater in 1964 every GOPer, especially presidential candidates and presidents, have all been racists, bigots – and each one successively worse than the last one. That is until they need to use the past nominees against the current president/candidate and then the Democrats and media wax nostalgic about the good old days of angelic GOP candidates.

Looking back, there seems to be a tipping point at the time the GOP attacked Bill Clinton and the Democrats defended him – and in the process, changed American politics forever.

In my opinion, Bill Clinton’s behavior while in office was a legitimate concern. His affair, not so much, but the lying under oath was a problem for me. Should it have resulted in impeachment? I wasn’t sure it should have been then and even today, I am still unsure. I was more for a censure and move on…but the Democrat defense of it being a “private matter” caused the GOP to push even harder and opened the door for personal behavior to be separated from professional.

This process normalized the idea that the Democrats held a valid perspective and we should not care about who the person is if they do what we want done.

The fault in this logic is common. Most people like rules – as long as the rules only apply to other people. Laws are never made to govern the actions of the lawmakers, they are made to govern other people. The mistake people made over time was to believe the Democrats believed their own bovine fecal matter. The treatment of Trump – dredging up events from decades ago when he was a private citizen to try to “Monica” him, the constant hammering of Russian “collusion” (especially when the evidence points more toward the Democrats) – proves they don’t.

Even after their defense of Bill Clinton regardless of the faults in his character, they now set an ethical standard for Trump? Hypocritical? Sure, it is – but a hypocrite doesn’t care he is a hypocrite, if he did, he wouldn’t be one.

All is fair in love and war, and since politics is war by other means, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

The release of the Cohen/Trump tapes is disgusting…and disturbing…on several levels. In the “discovery” of these tapes, 1) a government raided a lawyer’s office on what amounts to a fishing expedition for “campaign finance violations” by his client, 2) a lawyer recorded a client without his knowledge in contravention of state law, 3) the recording was leaked to the press and 4) the contents of the tape do, while apparently not revealing illegal content, certainly present a compromising perspective and 5) law enforcement displayed a far more aggressive posture of law enforcement toward Cohen as compared to the passive approach they took in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

These actions are over the boundary and the destroy institutions and traditions that are necessary for our political system to fairly function…and that destruction will spread. It’s a disease.

This is proof that now there is nothing out of bounds when you fight a political enemy.