Investigate What?

Paul Waldman has an excellent piece at WaPo on Trump's cell phone usage and the Republican reaction:

If you cast your mind back to 2016, you’ll recall that Republicans were emphatic when it came to their deep concern for proper information security and email management in government. The fact that Hillary Clinton used a private email server wasn’t an outrage simply because she was their political opponent; no, there were principles involved, about protecting American secrets and adhering to proper protocols and procedures.

Fast forward to 2018:

But no. No Republican members of Congress are calling for an investigation, no conservative pundits are shaking their fist at the cameras and saying this is a national crisis, and there will be no round-the-clock denunciations of the president on Fox News. (One National Review writer did note that “If Trump was a Dem, Fox might try to bend the space/time continuum to put Hannity on for 25 hours a day to chase the story.”)

You could call it “hypocrisy,” but that word doesn’t quite cover it. It’s become so expected that we’ll drop it and move on by tomorrow; all Republicans will have to do is avoid the cameras for a few hours so that they don’t have to answer any uncomfortable questions, and then they can go back to saying how mad they are that Brett Kavanaugh had to answer some uncomfortable questions before getting his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Via Digby, who underscores that last paragraph:

Senate Judiciary committee chair Chuck Grassley has called for an FBI investigation into lawyer Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick, one of the many women who have accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, reported John King Thursday on CNN.

That should be fun -- Avenatti is going to eat Grassley alive. And not even burp.

Let's see -- what kind of country is it where high-ranking officials call on the resources of the government to "investigate" (read "harass") political enemies? That, to me, is just as bad as Trump's casual disregard for national security. Oh, I forgot -- five thousand women and children seeking refuge is a threat to national security; the Russians and Chinese, not so much.