“Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.” —Benjamin Franklin (1722)

The prospect of any factual wrongdoing associated with the Democrat Party’s fabricated “Trump/Putin collusion” conspiracy, along with the hope for some tangential shred of indictable evidence sufficient to take down Donald Trump, continues to fade.

Since Democrats can’t run against peace and prosperity in the upcoming midterm elections, they’re launching yet another divide-and-conquer strategy to help defeat Republicans in the Senate and House — hoping to divert voter attention from the considerable Trump administration successes.

Thus, the Demo-gogues, in collusion with their Leftmedia propagandists who have aptly demonstrated their editorial disdain for Trump (to put it kindly), are promoting a new theme: “Fear Crazy Trump — Vote Democrat.” It’s a perfect fit, given that the delusional decompensation among Demo constituents is growing louder and more desperate every day.

Prepping for their “Crazy Trump” campaign, the first installment came last week, free of charge, compliments of The New York Times editorial page. The Times ran an “anonymous op-ed letter” from a “senior official in the Trump administration.” If we assume that “Anonymous” is in fact “senior,” a label that could loosely be applied to more than 1,500 people with White House credentials, then there’s a dishonorable deep-state mole.

Anonymous writes that he/she/it singlehandedly protected the nation from Trump’s “misguided impulses,” because our duly elected president is “not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.” He/she/it even claims to have “preserved our democratic institutions” by removing documents from Trump’s desk before he could sign them.

But it can be fairly assumed that this inane, unsigned letter was all about setting the stage for a “Fear Crazy Trump” blockbuster book that was released this week.

Ever since the Demos successfully forced Richard M. Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate cover-up 45 years ago, they have sought a sequel. Enter Bob Woodward, the once-respected Washington Post reporter who, with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story.

Woodward was once a reputable journalist, but his credibility is long past its expiration date. He keeps bobbing to the surface periodically, promising a catch, and his latest and likely last entry into presidential politics debuted this week: Fear: Trump in the White House.

The book was released Tuesday, on the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 Islamist attack. (Apparently, Woodward and his publisher were banking that there would be no competing scandal coverage on that solemn day.) “Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office,” say the breathless folks at Simon and Schuster.

The Washington Post, which does the bidding of leftist mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, a charter member of the “Archenemies of Liberty Club,” predictably offered accolades for the book. Of course, Woodward is still on Bezos’s WaPo payroll as an “associate editor.”

According to the Post, “A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters. … Woodward describes ‘an administrative coup d'etat’ and a ‘nervous breakdown’ of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.”

That’s right, protecting the nation from Trump’s “impulses” by plucking papers from his desk before he can sign them — precisely the claim made in the anonymous NYT letter. Could there be a connection? (That was a rhetorical question.)

In an effort to distance himself from the anonymous Times letter, Woodward laughably criticized The Gray Lady, insisting that if he were a New York Times editor, he wouldn’t have published an anonymous letter. “I wouldn’t have used it. Too vague and does not meet the standards of trying to describe specific incidents. Specific incidents are the building blocks of journalism.”

That’s true, except those are precisely the “building blocks” absent from Woodward’s book on Trump.

Criticizing the Times was a supreme example of hypocrisy and arrogance, as if Woodward believes we should all fall under his “Trust Bob” spell regardless of the fact that his standards are no better than the rest of the Leftmedia hacks.

But such criticism is typical of Woodward, who for the last two decades has arrogantly promoted himself as a god above mere mass media mortals and talkingheads. For example, in March of this year, he was questioned about the Trump presidency as a “test” for the MSM. He was asked specifically, “Do you think the media is failing the test?”

Woodward responded: “Reporters have at times become emotionally unhinged. … In lots of reporting, particularly on television [and in] commentary, there’s kind of a self-righteousness and smugness, and people kind of ridiculing the president. When we reported on Nixon, it was obviously a very different era, but we did not adopt a tone of ridicule. The tone was, ‘What are the facts?’”

Under Ben Bradlee, WaPo editor at the time Woodward and Bernstein unearthed the Watergate cover-up, the standards for journalism there were very different. Back then, Woodward would’ve been expected to focus on facts — and fired if he’d wrapped them in ridicule. But the Post dropped that journalistic standard when Bezos took over.

And today, Woodward is the grand master of “self-righteousness and smugness.”

Before Woodward’s “Crazy Trump” narrative was released, there were already six high-level denials from very “senior” Trump administration officials, by name. Among them are White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who offered this assessment of Woodward’s book: “[It] is total BS. … This is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration’s many successes.”

Defense Secretary James Mattis responded to Woodward on the record: “The contemptuous words about the President attributed to me in Woodward’s book were never uttered by me or in my presence. While I generally enjoy reading fiction, this is a uniquely Washington brand of literature, and his anonymous sources do not lend credibility. … In serving in this administration, the idea that I would show contempt for the elected Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, or tolerate disrespect to the office of the President from within our Department of Defense, is a product of someone’s rich imagination.”

Here’s White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “People have come forward to say that Woodward never reached out to corroborate statements that were attributed to them, which seems incredibly reckless … to not … get a $10 fact-checker to call around and find out if half of these quotes were accurate.”

For his part, President Trump declared, “It’s just another bad book. He’s had a lot of credibility problems. It’s just nasty stuff. I never spoke to him. Maybe I wasn’t given messages that he called.”

Of course, Woodward and his Leftmedia promoters dismiss the president’s comments. But prior to Woodward’s anti-Trump hit piece and its adoption as a launchpad for the Demos’ midterm “blue wave,” Woodward had been the object of a lot of Leftmedia criticism for lack of evidence and sources, especially when he stepped off the Leftmedia reservation and dared criticize Hillary Clinton.

In August of 2015, for example, Woodward exercised his once-famous journalistic reputation in evaluating Clinton’s infamously illegal communication subterfuge. He declared, “[This] reminds me of the Nixon tapes: Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his. … 60,000 emails and Hillary Clinton has said 30,000 of them, half, were personal and they were deleted. Who decided that? What’s in those emails? … The big question about Clinton is, who is she? … The answers are probably not going to be pretty.”

Needless to say, that assessment didn’t get a lot of press coverage.

Leftist literary journalist Joan Didion says of Woodward’s writing, “Measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.” Furthermore, he “covers the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

There are also scholarly critics of the content of his books, from his “Deep Throat” character in his bestselling All the President’s Men, to Veil, in which he stands accused of fabricating a key deathbed confession by former CIA Director William Casey.

But wait. There’s more.

Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “What the hell happened to Bob Woodward? … As an analyst, Woodward is a particular kind of awful.”

Charles Pierce in Esquire: “The full depth of Bob Woodward’s plunge into sheer hackery.”

Arianna Huffington in HuffPost: “He’s the dumb blonde of American journalism.”

Jeffrey St. Clair in CounterPunch: “Woodward, despite filing one dubious story after another, retains his position as an éminence grise of DC reporters.”

Noam Scheiber in New Republic: “It is relentlessly biased against the president.”

Max Holland in Newsweek: “Woodward is the same now as he ever was. His misrepresentation … is only the latest in a long string of questionable journalistic episodes. … It reveals a grotesquely swollen ego fed by 40 years of hero worship.”

Even Ben Bradlee, Woodward’s Washington Post editor at the time of Watergate, suspected he fabricated elements in All the President’s Men.

So, what to make of the “Crazy Trump” fear-mongering by Woodward and his renewed Leftmedia sycophantry?

Brit Hume, an even-keeled political observer, offered this assessment: “The problem is of course … [Woodward] doesn’t disclose his sources, he doesn’t annotate his books, [and] he doesn’t give you a sense of who the people are with whom he spoke. … A tremendous amount of Woodward’s reports are never verified. … It leaves us in a poor position to evaluate the work. … What I would like to see … is a connection between these [claimed] outbursts of the president and real policies and actions on his part that match their claims about how reckless he is. I haven’t seen that. … He’s doing what he campaigned on. Some policies may not work out, but they’re not ‘crazy.’”

Fact is, a broad swath of American voters disgracefully characterized by Hillary Clinton as “deplorables” elected Donald Trump to accomplish three things with his “MAGA” platform:

1. Drop a metaphorical bomb on Washington, including status quo politicos in both parties, special interests, regulatory and bureaucratic behemoths, failed trade- and national-security policies, and all the pundits and mainstream media outlets. He’s done that and continues to do so.

2. Put our economy on the right track. He did that and continues to do so.

3. Reestablish a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He has done that and will continue to do so if Republicans hold the Senate.

So shocked was the Left after Clinton’s defeat that all of Trump’s actions are viewed by deranged leftists as “crazy.”

Will the Woodward/Demo-Leftmedia “Crazy Trump” strategy work? Can Democrats generate enough noise to energize the leftist base for a successful run on congressional control?

The midterm elections for control of the House and Senate will be very close.

But what America should fear most is the power the Leftmedia exercises over public opinion, and thus, control of the future of Liberty.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776