Trey Gowdy Breaks Rank, so He Must Be Meat for the Partisan Beast

My hero.

Actually, if nothing else, the 2016 election taught me not to make heroes out of men – especially not politicians.

I was so impressed by former Texas Governor (and current Energy Secretary) Rick Perry’s “Cancer of Trumpism” speech in 2015, as he and Donald Trump traded barbs on the way to the GOP nomination. He said everything right. Every word spoken was truth.

In the end, it meant nothing, because when Donald Trump was the last man standing, Perry did what every other party loyalist did. He admitted defeat and threw his support behind Trump.

To be fair, I get those who did not want Hillary Clinton to win. She was (and is) awful. The DNC shot themselves in the foot with their backroom deals and adherence to identity politics, feeling that after the first biracial president, they must continue on and push for the “first woman president.”

Indeed, when you looked at the GOP roster, it was weighted down by all the legit political talent (and Donald Trump). When you looked at the DNC side, it was Hillary Clinton and a couple of guys thrown in to make it look like she had battled back the boys, to ascend to greatness.

It was a nice bit of theatrics, but nobody told Bernie Sanders what his role was, so the DNC had to take him out.

We’ll eventually have a first woman president, but it won’t be Hillary Clinton, so everybody can calm down.

And please advance this message to her, because she still doesn’t seem to get it.

But back to the topic at hand: Heroes.

I saw men like Perry, who I had admired and supported for so long roll over for the hay-haired mountebank, and eventually, ended up on his Cabinet, and it was like a hard punch to the gut.

If he was awful in 2015, when Perry called him a barking carnival act, then he was still awful.

But it really is all about the partisanship, isn’t it?

In fact, it may have been Rick Perry’s move to “support the nominee,” even if the nominee was an unprincipled, foul, bumbling cancer, that caused me to go from heartbreak to defiance of partisanship.

I’m still very much “on the right,” politically. I’m still very much a conservative, lest anyone think my rejection of Trump and Trump’s Republican party makes me a friend of the left. I just don’t equate anything that goes on in service to the throne of Trump with actual conservatism.

I am a Christian first, and I shape my conservative views to conform to my Christian faith. I don’t bend my principles to make room for a party.

What that allows me to do is see the left as human beings, rather than ideological enemies. I don’t have to agree with them. I don’t have to require they agree with me, in order to at least hear what they have to say.

Partisanship has killed our ability, as a society, to have a dialogue of reasoned debate. It’s all about winning now, and politics has become a blood sport.

Killing the Heroes

The real heroes are those that can see what is going on in our government and call it out. That being said, if they’re in elected office and they choose to speak out, they can expect a biased media (on either side), as well as their colleagues to crucify them.

Let’s consider Representative Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

Gowdy will not be running for reelection. When his current term ends, he’s done. He’s going home to the great state of South Carolina. He’s going home to his wife and kids, and back to his original calling in the legal profession.

Good for him.

There are a few reasons for this decision, but one that stuck with me is that he sees the ugly unproductiveness of partisanship. Some have whispered that he and House Intelligence Committee Chairman (and Trump loyalist) Devin Nunes – a fellow Republican – have butted heads over the direction of the Russia probe, at least as it was while in their hands.

Gowdy’s latest crime against the throne is to agree that the FBI had not, as Trump insists, placed a “spy” within the Trump campaign.

To be clear, Trey Gowdy’s claim to fame is his beast-mode interrogations of leftist antagonists, such as IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, or even Hillary Clinton, during both the Benghazi scandal, and later, her email scandal.

Watching him work was a thing of beauty. I still go back and watch video clips of those exchanges. If you want to see how a razor sharp prosecutor lays the smack down, there’s nobody better.

He was a hero to everyone on the right, at one time. He was a rock star. Now, however, it would appear that the fix is in, and members of his own party, as well as the Trump loyalists in the media are out to make his name “Mud.”

Gowdy was one of a number of representatives included in a highly classified viewing of intelligence regarding Stefan A. Halper, the informant who approached three Trump campaign aides, after it was determined that they’d had contact with Russians.

What was expected of him (and the other Republicans present) was that he would tell the world that, in fact, the Trump campaign had been spied upon by the FBI. That every word Trump had been mindlessly bleating across social media and to his adoring fans was true, no matter what intelligence officials said.

That’s not what Gowdy did. He went into the belly of the beast (Fox News) and disrupted the narrative.

Gowdy insisted that the FBI did not, in fact, plant a spy in the Trump camp for political purposes. Rather, he said, the FBI appropriately deployed an informant to glean intelligence from members on the outer edge of Trump’s campaign. The FBI had received troubling evidence that those individuals had suspect ties to Russia, and the bureau had been obligated to pursue those legitimate leads, Gowdy said. The briefing, for only a select group of nine senior lawmakers of both parties, only bolstered his position, he said.

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got — and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said in the interview.

Gowdy brought good news for the president, and said that what he viewed pointed away from Trump. You’d think that was enough, but it’s not.

If we look at Trump’s behavior, it was never solely about clearing Trump. It was about totally discrediting the U.S. intelligence community.

Because of that, and because of Gowdy’s refusal to play ball, his party has turned on him, like a pack of slobbering, wild dogs.

Trump allies have been pummeling Gowdy in recent days, branding him a gullible or clueless backer of the intelligence community. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, labeled him “uninformed.” Another Trump-tied attorney, Victoria Toensing, said Gowdy “doesn’t know diddly-squat” about the particulars of federal investigations. And Fox News host Lou Dobbs tagged him a “RINO” — a term for a fake Republican.

To be clear, Giuliani and Dobbs are well past their expiration date, and Toensing, a Fox News regular, is simply toeing a line, in order to keep getting those Fox News appearances.

They weren’t the only ones who lost it, because of Gowdy’s comments.

The comments soon earned him punishing rebukes from Trump’s most vocal allies. Fox’s Sean Hannity said Wednesday that “Trey Gowdy doesn’t get it.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, father of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, distributed a 950-word treatise Friday questioning Gowdy’s position. And Dobbs said Gowdy appeared to be auditioning for a job after he leaves Congress.

He’ll likely have a job, Dobbs, as a prosecutor, once more. As for Sean Hannity, his associations with conspiracy theorists and Kremlin operatives, like WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange over the past couple of years have put him a rat’s hair away from being an actual traitor to our nation, so maybe he should just sit this one out.

These people are ridiculous, truly.

But What About Trump?

The president’s bipolar opinion of Gowdy is enough to induce whiplash.

Trump, who in 2014 praised Gowdy’s ascension to lead the Benghazi probe as a “great decision,” has had a seesawing relationship with the soft-spoken South Carolinian in recent years. In July 2015, Trump tweeted a supporters’ suggestion that Gowdy become his attorney general. But he soured on him in late 2015, when Gowdy endorsed his primary rival Sen. Marco Rubio. “I hope @TGowdySC does better for Rubio than he did at the #Benghazi hearings, which were a total disaster for Republicans & America!” he tweeted at the time.

But by mid-2016, Trump was ready to embrace Gowdy again after earning his endorsement. “Thank you for your wonderful endorsement today @TGowdySC. It means a great deal to me,” Trump tweeted at the time. “We will not disappoint!”

And during the same interview where Gowdy said the FBI did not spy on Trump, he also made comments about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, suggesting that if Sessions knew he was going to have to recuse himself from the most important investigation of Trump’s presidency, then he should have stepped aside and let Trump choose someone else.

Trump approvingly tweeted out those quotes from Gowdy, last week.

So while Trump loyalists continue to rip at Gowdy, it’s hard for a thinking person to watch without a certain level of disgust. The partisans are incapable of considering that just because he didn’t go along with Trump’s “spygate” narrative, that doesn’t make him the enemy.

Gowdy also believes Trump should sit with Mueller, and has repeatedly said that if you’re innocent, act like it.

Good advice.

“He didn’t collude with Russia, he doesn’t know anything about it, and if anyone in his campaign did, he wants the public to know it,” Gowdy said on CBS. “I think that’s what he ought to tell Mueller.”

He’s making perfect sense. At least, he’s making perfect sense if you’re not crippled by partisan poison.

The usual attack you hear from Gowdy critics – the same attacks that have been leveled against him by Trump – is that in all his tough questioning of Hillary Clinton, John Koskinen, Lois Lerner, and others, he accomplished nothing.

It’s the dumbest of really dumb takes, made by really dumb people.

He was a single member of several multi-member committees. He had no authority to act on his own in order to hand down justice. He was also working against an Obama presidency and either an Eric Holder or a Loretta Lynch Justice Department.

Other than some fantasy scenario of going Rambo during a hearing, what do his critics (including Trump) think he could do?

He made his case. He asked the right questions. He was at the mercy of the constraints of the system, however.

That he’s being attacked now for his insufficient partisanship is a symptom of how low things have become. He’s right to throw his hands up now. And a man who has nothing left to lose can be trusted far above those who are still groveling for power. He’ll say what’s on his mind.

Kudos to Representative Gowdy. I truly do wish him well as a private citizen, even as I mourn the loss of one more commonsense voice on the political field.