"Have You No Sense Of Decency Sir?"

Amongst the electrifying moments of political history, one of the most memorable is surely Joseph N. Welch's response to Joe McCarthy. Welch, Chief Counsel to the U.S. Army at a time when it was being investigated by Senate Committee on Investigations, had turned the table on McCarthy wth allegations of cronyism. In response, McCarthy sought to blacken the name of a young attorney in Welch's own firm who had previously been a member of a professional organisation deemed to have Communist leanings, prompting Welch's famous rebuke: "Have you no sense of decency Sir?"

Sordel doesn't have a vote in U.S. elections but can hardly be imagined to be a Republican sympathiser in general or someone who would make common cause with Donald Trump. That said, it has become increasingly clear that someone needs to ask Trump's opponents Welch's question. Have they no decency? Is there nothing to which they will not stoop to blacken the man's name?

For years we were rightly told by Democrats that there was something troubling about the so-called "birther" lie that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya rather than Hawaii and was therefore ineligible to become President. To be sure, it was problematic accusation since what seemed like a nice legal point also had a discernible undercurrent of racism. But where a person is born is rather beyond their control. Had Obama been born in Kenya, it would not have amounted to a fault, merely a technical disqualification.

Donald Trump, however, has been branded "a self-confessed molester of women", someone with an incestuous passion for his daughter, a crook, a "vile misogynist", a "Russian stooge" & someone already convicted in court of public opinion of treason.

There are those amongst these accusations which are thin in the extreme: for example, an Australian politician's claim that Trump is a "self-confessed molester of women and [has] green-lighted sexual assaults" is obvious nonsense. Trump never said that he had personally grabbed women by the pussy, made it clear that consent was granted ("they let you do anything"), claimed this dubious privilege only for a "star" (not your regular working stiff) and can hardly have been said to give the green light for anything in a private conversation. Trump may, in fact, be a molester for all Sordel knows (there have been occasional stories but surprisingly few for a man who was going about shaking hands with completely the wrong part of a woman's anatomy) but all Sordel knows in this case is pretty much all that you, Constant Reader, know.

If any of these allegations against Trump were true, it would be a big deal, but it has become increasingly clear that the anti-Trump movement doesn't care.

Consider the treason allegation. In some fanciful minds (not all those who use the term, but certainly some) Russia decided to "turn" a TV celebrity notably lacking in even the most elementary espionage skills (such as discretion), ran him in a presidential campaign that he seemed all but certain to lose and then "rigged" the election so that they could have their man in The White House. Prima facie evidence of collusion is very, very, very thin and it is important to bear in mind that - even if the Russians did, as supposed, hack the DNC servers and leak the results in a bid to turn the course of the election - those leaks actually had virtually no effect on public opinion during the Presidential election, being completely dwarfed in importance by a great many other factors. Among those factors was another leak: the leak of Trump's "Pussygate" conversation, which no one seems to object to in the least despite the fact that there was a clearer public interest for the publication of the DNC leak than there was for the Pussygate one. (And yes, a leak orchestrated on the basis of an illegal operation by a foreign country would, of course, be different from a leak by a U.S. citizen but nonetheless, there is a double standard at work here.)

It is not Sordel's business to determine whether Trump is, in fact, a Russian sleeper agent or a misogynist etc. etc. That's not my point. My point is that with Trump a psychological point seems to have been crossed at which what people are prepared to say about a sitting President is no longer innuendo about where he was born or what religion he follows in secret. Now it's everything you can possibly say about another human being, whatever the evidence. Often the people who say these things hardly seem to believe them, resorting to the childish excuse that "they started it." If you value Truth at all, then your valuation should not change depending on how much your opponent lies.

What route is there forward for the U.S. now? What businessman will ever stand for the Presidency again? Why would next election's losers ever hold themselves to a higher standard than the last election's losers? Whatever happened to the fundamental decency of the Left?

Or are they just all Joe McCarthy now?