Michael Cohen – Useful Stooges

It’s been three years since we last took a look at Lanny Davis, the longtime Clinton family operative and inside-the-Beltway lobbyist and image-massager for several of the world’s worst dictators. When we wrote about him in 2015, Davis was a TV fixture, running from one cable-news studio to another in an effort to put a positive spin on the damaging news about Hillary’s e-mail server.

“Do you ever get tired of cleaning up after the Clintons?” Fox News journo Chris Wallace asked Davis at the time. Salon has called him a “well-known spinster…whom no one trusts.” Some more fun quotes about this creep: in 2012, calling him “a pitchman for warlords” who “carr[ied] the Devil’s water in Washington,” the Atlantic‘s Jon Lovett said that Davis “represents all that is wrong with politics today.” A 2013 piece in the New Republic began: “The last time we heard from Lanny Davis, he was doing what he does best: representing a dictator.” Among his clients: Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbsogo, dictator of Equatorial Guinea, widely known as the “Auschwitz of Africa,” and the Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote D’Ivoire.

In short, to use a term that has gained currency since 2015: he is the swamp.

This July, after having kept a relatively low profile for quite a while, Davis resurfaced. News was that President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who is now the target of a federal probe owing to his role in Trump’s payoffs to former mistresses, had engaged Davis’s services. At the Federalist, David Harsanyi offered a timely reminder of Davis’s career history under the headline “Let’s Take A Moment To Remember The Corrupt Hackery Of Lanny Davis,” stating that “it’s going to be fascinating to watch a shyster like Michael Cohen be transformed into a hero of The Resistance.” Still, added Harsanyi, “America—even with all our transgressions—simply doesn’t deserve Lanny Davis. None of us do.”

Davis, explained Harsanyi, “can be properly described as a personification of the cliché, ‘everything that’s wrong with Washington.’ Cringingly slavish to those in power, a consigliere, fundraiser, surrogate, and cheerful liar, Davis was a perpetual presence on cable TV during the Clinton scandals. Few men in history have ever been able to summon his kind of loyalty in the pursuit of shameless, transparent deceit and corruption.” Well, caan’t argue with any of that.

Harsanyi emphasized how ironic it is that Davis, of all people, is now “preaching—without even a trace of irony—the value of integrity and honesty,” contending that Cohen, formerly a two-bit shyster and bagman type, “has turned a corner in his life, and he’s now dedicated to telling the truth to everyone.” After all, noted Harsanyi, Davis played a not unimportant role “in corrupting the value of personal responsibility, civility, and morality in our political culture. His unwavering defense of Bill Clinton’s corruption and extramarital dalliances (and possibly worse) is a valuable reminder of how we got to this place.” Yep.

“For years,” recalled Harsanyi, “Davis told America that what they were seeing and reading was not what was happening. After tapes emerged of the Clintons illegally soliciting donations from big-money donors at the White House in 1997, for example, Davis sprang into action, not only contending that there was ‘no suggestion that there was any solicitation for money’ — despite the fact that the tapes suggested exactly that — but that many of the big contributions of those who had attended the event and only days later donated to the Clintons were merely an ‘incidental’ occurrence.” Now, this same man who “handled” Bill Clinton’s so-called “bimbo eruptions,” “smearing women he surely suspected were telling the truth about President Clinton’s habitual womanizing” (and worse) is making the usual cable-news rounds striving to whip viewers into a rage over “the tapes of a president and his lawyer discussing how to hide an alleged affair.”

Harsanyi’s summing up is right on the money: “Lanny Davis possess a preternatural chutzpah that puts most contemporary partisan hacks to shame. We’re all worse off having him back.”

We used to admire the ACLU. Some of us are old enough to remember the Skokie affair of 1977. Many Western countries ban Mein Kampf and any symbols of Nazism. Not the U.S. In that year, the American Nazi Party planned a march in the village of Skokie, Illinois. The village successfully sued in Cook County court for the right to ban the event.

That’s when the American Civil Liberties Union entered the picture. Taking the Nazis’ side, they took the case to the state appellate court and then to the state Supreme Court. Both courts refused to overturn the county court’s decision. So the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a famous ruling ordered that the Nazis be allowed to march.

For some of us, that ruling – as well as the ACLU’s role in bringing it about – was the ultimate reflection of the greatest of America. Not, of course, because the ACLU sided with Nazis or because the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Nazis, but because both the ACLU and the Supreme Court stood up for the First Amendment.

By their actions, both the ACLU and the High Court made clear their recognition that the whole point of free-speech protections is that innocuous speech doesn’t need protection. What needs protection is the most extreme kind of speech. To refuse to defend the right of even the most offensive people to speak their minds is to start down the slippery slope toward banning any kind of speech that anybody, anywhere might consider inappropriate.

Times have changed, alas. Many of the most influential people in American society are would-be censors for whom political correctness is a higher value than freedom. The ACLU, unfortunately, has shifted its position accordingly. No less impressive a personage than Alan Dershowitz, the world-famous lawyer who identifies as a liberal and who used to be on the ACLU’s national board, said so in an April 12 article for The Hill. The headline: “For ACLU, getting Trump trumps civil liberties.” Dershowitz explained: “over the last several years [the ACLU] has turned from being a neutral civil liberties organization to a left wing, agenda-driven group that protects its contributors and constituents while ignoring the civil liberties of Americans with whom it disagrees.”

Now and then, admittedly, the organization still runs to the defense of “a Nazi or a Klansman as an easy, pretend show of its willingness to protect the free speech of the most despicable racists.” But when it comes to threats to free speech on college campuses, where far-left thugs have increasingly used violent means in an effort to silence speakers with whom they disagree, the ACLU has chosen to keep its dainty hands clean. In fact, in Dershowitz’s view, it’s gone even further, “becoming a cheerleader for the violation of the civil liberties of those on the other side of the political spectrum.”

When FBI agents “raided the law office and hotel room of Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen,” and possibly “seized material protected by the lawyer-client privilege, including communications between President Trump and his attorney,” the ACLU sat on its hands. “[I]f a similar raid had been conducted on Hillary Clinton,” observed Dershowitz, “had she been elected and a special prosecutor appointed to investigate her emails, the ACLU would have been up in arms.” Instead David Cole, the ACLU’s legal director, actually described the raids as a “sign that the rule of law is alive.” Never mind the fact that, to quote Dershowitz, the raids were naked “violations of the Fourth and Sixth Amendments.”

Why this disgraceful about-face by the ACLU? Simple: “Virtually every contributor to the ACLU voted against Trump, as I did.” And for the ACLU today, “getting Trump, trumps civil liberties.”

The ACLU, naturally, rejects these charges. We’ll get to that on Tuesday.

Useful Stooges

Useful Stooges

Tag: Michael Cohen

Lanny Davis: The swamp personified