A SENSE OF OUTRAGE – AT 12:44 P.M. ET:  Readers might notice that there's not much happening.  It's typical of holiday time.  You've got lots of document dumps, some public statements, and announcements of a guy in Washington getting a new job, or leaving an old one.  And CNN staffers can still give you an opinion on almost anything.

But people are distracted during the holidays, and the sense of size in the news is diminished.  Sometimes, during this period, I have to poke around for a story worth telling. 

There is one that is definitely worth telling, and that is a sense of outrage that I see emerging in the country at the growth of the investigative state.  Not since the so-called McCarthy era have I seen such concern over the power of investigators to paralyze and distort our government.

We elect a president to serve, not to be under constant investigation.  Yet, Mr. Trump, no matter what you may think of him, has been under siege almost since the day he took office.

We have the Mueller probe, which goes on and on.

We are told, with some enthusiasm, by the usual suspects, that the new, Democratic House will open a number of fresh investigations into the president.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is getting into the act with a new probe of Trump.

This week we learned that the New York State attorney general, a leftist hack of hacks, intends to investigate the whole Trump family.  Maybe even the ancestors.  No evidence presented, of course. 

And now we are told that the attorney general's office in New Jersey is starting its own inquiry into Trump business practices in that state.

Many of the announcements of investigations have come just in the last few weeks, right after the election. 

And it's an outrage.  Clearly, this package of probes is intended to bring down the president, to make it impossible for him to govern.  We elected this man, but it doesn't matter to the opposition.  To them, we made a mistake that they, in their greater moral position, must correct.  Democratic officials or supporters are involved in almost all of the investigations.

This is not the way a democracy can work.  If there is real evidence, pursue it.  But the sheer number of probes raises the gravest of questions – do we currently have government by investigation?  The power of the inquisitor is well known throughout modern history.  Sometimes it is used legitimately, other times it is not.

I have a feeling that this is one of those "other" times.  Too much like the early 1950s.  The sad fact today, though, is that the press is on the side of the grand inquisitors, and asks few probing questions of its own.  The inquisitors' power is unchallenged.

December 15,  2018