By Jeffrey A. Rendall

It’s a sad sign of the times that it took something like the Manchester terrorist attack the other night to temporarily drag the public’s mind away from the Democrats’ reoccurring Russia-Trump collusion fixation, but it certainly won’t be long before the focus-challenged media returns to the subject.

But now that special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to specifically separate the truth from whatever the Democrats are claiming, Trump’s haters are ostensibly bracing themselves for the prospect that the investigators won’t find anything damaging on the new president.

When/if Mueller finds nothing, what then? Apparently the excuses are being prepared well in advance.

Eddie Scarry of the Washington Examiner reports, “[Trump critics] Brzezinski, Scarborough and Frum are just the latest voices in the media to suggest that the chase for evidence of collusion may be a waste of time. Last week, other left-leaning people in the media were drawing the same conclusion.

“’It may well be difficult to identify any criminal laws violated by the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia,’ CNN commentator and writer for the New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin wrote last Friday. ‘It will be important for Mueller to investigate, for example, whether anyone associated with the Trump campaign aided and abetted the hacking of e-mail accounts connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign; that would certainly be a federal crime.’”

Yes, such a circumstance would be a federal crime and the Democrats and their media pals would be beside themselves with glee if this kind of correlation turned up. There’s only one problem: it looks more and more likely that no “collusion” actually happened. Not only have waves of motivated and interested federal agents failed to unearth the necessary smoking gun, there isn’t even any substantiation liberals can use to keep the fires going strong.

Not to mention there’s also growing speculation that a DNC staffer may have provided the party-besmirching email dirt to Wikileaks last summer before he was summarily rubbed-out without a credible explanation for his murder. Was Seth Rich speaking Russian when he was shot? Maybe the Democrats need to investigate themselves in the matter.

For months Democrats have protested Trump’s alleged Russia ties, quizzing Trump’s cabinet nominees about them during confirmation hearings, endlessly speculating on Sunday morning news shows, whispering to reporters from major liberal newspapers and generally spreading their hyperbolic filth to any willing media figure with a pen, keyboard or open microphone.

Part of what they wanted – or said they wanted – was the appointment of a special counsel to get to the bottom of their accusations. Special investigators were pretty darn successful in the past, right? They brought down Richard Nixon, tarnished Ronald Reagan’s second term and even managed to switch the dirtier-than-all-get-out Clintons’ Whitewater emphasis to a young starry-eyed intern who turned an immature crush and a DNA-stained blue dress into impeachment proceedings.

It’s the stuff of Washington legend and Oscar-winning Hollywood movies. Just think of the money that would eventually be made from snuffing out Trump’s presidency for the price of a side of borscht and a couple shots of Stoli.

Liberals reasoned if there’s something sordid out there on Trump, an independent investigation would find it; and even if nothing came back explicitly on the Russians there was likely some other wrongdoing that would be just as titillating. The news would dominate Trump’s entire first term leading to an easy Democrat win in 2020.

But be careful what you wish for, Democrats. You got your special counsel and now you’re being forced to admit publicly that there may be nothing to the Russian collusion story. If Mueller is as proficient as everyone says he is it shouldn’t take long to determine there isn’t anything tangible to justify continuing the investigation.

Uh-oh, Democrats. When you have to go back to talking about the issues it once again only dredges up the reality that is the modern Democrat Party: a substance-free, leaderless collection of losers that the public really can’t stand and won’t vote for if given a choice. And hence, trouble.

If the media (and in fairness, Trump himself) can stay off of Russia long enough, it looks like there will be real issues to talk about very soon, too.

Joseph Lawler of the Washington Examiner reports, “President Trump’s first budget request would stake out a radically different path from the past budgets set out by former President Barack Obama, but it also makes a key departure from budgets that Republicans have proposed…

“Trump seeks to drive spending down from 21 percent of gross domestic product to just under 18.5 percent by 2027 and cut the national debt by about a fifth. The decline in spending relative to the economy would partly reflect that Trump’s budget counts on economic growth picking up. Even so, getting spending that low would require politically implausible spending cuts.

“To start, Trump’s budget would effectively cut spending on all the things the federal government actually does, outside of defense, in half. Through the ‘two-penny plan,’ nondefense discretionary spending would roughly fall to half of its current size relative to the economy in Trump’s budget, even though Trump wasn’t able to negotiate cuts for fiscal year 2017.”

That “key departure” Lawler refers to is the fiscal sanity reflected in Trump’s proposed budget contrasted with those of Obama and the Obama-era GOP leadership. Needless to say, both Obama and establishment Republicans wanted to spend, spend, spend-on into oblivion and debt.

Keep in mind Trump’s budget is only a suggestion; we all know the establishment dominated feckless GOP Congress will shred any notion of keeping spending down with the upcoming fight in September likely boiling down to another showdown with Democrats over funding for Planned Parenthood and the border wall – or whatever they feel like squabbling about at the time.

Their arguments are always the same. Just like Patrick Swayze’s character singing “I’m Henry the 8th I am” over and over in the movie Ghost, you could simply rewind the tapes from congressional budget negotiations past and still be very much in the present day.

For Democrats, it’s something like “Draconian cuts; paying for tax cuts for the rich with benefit cuts for the poor; taking food out of the mouths of children; taking healthcare away from the elderly…” For Republicans it’s more like “More money for the troops; block grants for the states; we need a balanced budget amendment to rein-in spending; this budget has the biggest cuts ever…”

Neither party talks much (if at all) about reducing the size of government. By all appearances it even looks like Trump eventually balances the budget only through economic improvement (and higher tax revenues) and by slowing the rate of growth of government. The “cuts” Lawler mentions above aren’t huge reductions in spending; they’re merely limiting how quickly the government will grow (though the two-penny plan would effectively cut department budgets by 1 or 2% a year).

What, the federal government would actually have to get by with less? What will the congressmen tell their angry entitlement-hungry constituents?

How about the truth? They can tell them directly about the American Health Care Act, for example, and likely not suffer politically for it either. Peter J. Wallison and Joseph Antos write at Real Clear Politics, “[F]rom a political perspective, can a group (those with pre-existing conditions) numbering perhaps 1 or 2 million be the cause for Republicans losing the 23-seat advantage they now hold in the House of Representatives?

“That would require more than 5 percent of the voters in at least 23 congressional districts to switch sides and vote for the Democratic candidates 16 months from now. In the 2016 elections, there were only 27 seats where Republicans were elected with less than 55 percent of the vote. In only 11 districts did the Republican candidate have less that a 10 percent margin over the Democratic candidate. It’s not impossible for the Democrats to overcome these margins, of course, but the triumphalism of the Democrats and the media on this is clearly only wishful thinking.”

Wallison and Antos compare today’s anti-Trump AHCA town hall protesters to the now defunct hoodlums of Occupy Wall Street. In reality they’re so small in number that they can’t really make a difference in next year’s election. Like with the Russia/collusion thing, they’re all show and no substance. It’s like looking at a bunch of translucent ghosts…

Democrats and the media are hanging all their hopes on the unlikely prospect that some damaging evidence will turn up linking Trump to Russia. When it doesn’t happen – and they have to return to talking about the issues – they’ll face an angry public just itching to make them pay.

Reprinted with permission from ConservativeHQ.com