ROGER KIMBALL: The Rule of Law Hostage to ‘Enemy Action.’
I have always admired the admonitory wisdom that Auric Goldfinger imparted to James Bond early in Ian Fleming’s novel named for the gold-loving villain: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
I have thought often of that sage advisory in recent months as so many once-trustworthy institutions of American life seem to have been weaponized against the people they were meant to serve.
This is, alas, a huge topic, and today I will only scratch the surface
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During the Trump years, why was it that the awesome power of the state was routinely brought to bear against anyone in the president’s orbit while people in the Justice Department and various intelligence services could lie, leak, and even alter critical evidence with essentially no consequences?
Why is it that the Biden DOJ “declines to prosecute” five people arrested as Chinese spies while it continues its policy of harassing, arresting, and incarcerating people who were milling about the Capitol on Jan. 6?
Why is it that the Biden DOJ has declined to investigate the scandal of blue-state nursing home deaths in the wake of the COVID hysteria?
“The Department of Justice will not pursue investigations into New York, Pennsylvania, or Michigan nursing home policies,” The Washington Examiner reported, “that resulted in thousands of residential COVID-19 deaths.”
It wasn’t just that the policy of stashing COVID patients in nursing homes was a deadly mistake, there was also a massive coverup.
In New York, for example, an aide to Governor Cuomo admitted in a leaked Zoom video that the Cuomo administration “purposely undercounted nursing home deaths to avoid a federal investigation.”
Don’t try this if you are Republican governor.
Now that Trump is out of office, the Biden administration, staffed with Obama retreads, is back to doing what Obama perfected, viewing American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head: History Will Condemn Bigots Using Coronavirus to Persecute Trump Supporters.