Winning the election is what politics is all about, and men (and lately women) successful in it understand the rough wisdom of Leo Durocher, who observed that “nice guys finish last.” The friendship that Adams and Jefferson nurtured survived. They became friends again after the brawl, just like George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton two centuries later. It’s not a good way to preserve a friendship, but politicians, and particularly presidents, rarely hold grudges. They usually understand that “bashing,” as Mr. Bush called it, is not nice, but it’s inevitable. The stakes are too high for it to be otherwise. Civility in politics is a good idea, but bashing works. Sad.

We have Donald Trump trying to cover up a couple of consensual liaisons -- tacky, for sure, even creepy and morally repellent, but, as I said, humdrum. Nevertheless, they are trying to get Trump impeached (the obvious goal of the investigation, not anything to do with Russia) for using campaign funds for these payoffs. They do this in full knowledge of the obvious -- that the businessman himself had put millions of his own money into his campaign, so the funds were originally his in the first place.  Indeed the sums he donated to his campaign undoubtedly dwarfed the payments to the two women.

In 2016, legions of bureaucrats wanted to score points in Hillary Clinton’s foreordained new administration by vying with each other to “insure” her blowout, to brag they had done in the ogre Trump, and to expect not so much impunity as adoration for their illegal but supposedly patriotic service beyond the call of duty. Trump was not just to be defeated but humiliated and destroyed as a lesson. Then Clinton lost—or rather she blew a sure Electoral College victory. Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and Robert Mueller are all joined at the hip.

Holder was famous for not letting anyone but flagged liberals work at the Justice Department. Years of such hiring creates the kind of groupthink that would allow for a cock-up of FISA-gate’s magnitude, where an American citizen was treated as a “probable” Russian agent whose every communication, both past and present, could be ransacked by FBI agents, all based on the word of a political opponent. Take away Comey’s sanctimony and he was just a crook with a badge.

Leftists with Rep. Eric Swalwell’s mentality are not driven by notions of justice or reason, but by cold hatred for Normal Americans. We’ve been disobedient. We’ve been defiant. We’ve refused to surrender our means of defending our own sovereignty to our elite overlords, and that is intolerable. After all, a man without a rifle is not a citizen. He’s a serf, subject to the whims and will of his overlords who you damn well know are never giving up the guns their minions keep and bear.

Mr. Flynn’s being caught up in the probe is related to a glaring potential crime of disclosing classified material, yet Mr. Mueller appears to have undertaken no investigation of that. Is this selective justice, or something worse? Don’t forget Mr. Mueller stacked his team with Democrats, some of whom worked at the highest levels of the Obama administration, including at the time of the possible Flynn unmasking and the first leak.

Sen. Mazie Hirono's posturing, along with the antics of her accomplices, almost certainly killed the 2018 reelection bids of four Democrat senators who voted against Kavanaugh. And it helped enlarge the GOP majority in the Senate to 53-47. That means a lot of conservative judges will be confirmed during the next two years — and perhaps another Supreme Court justice. Finally, if her fellow brainiacs in the House impeach President Trump, she has helped to kill any chance that he’ll be convicted. Smart? Well, it’s just too complicated to explain to mere voters.