Et tu, Mulvaney?

White House Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney has had a major oopsie.

He told reporters that President Trump withheld aid from Ukraine, among other reasons, until that nation helped him prove that they, and not the Russians, interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. He admitted that there was, in fact, a quid pro quo involved in the president's conversation with the Ukrainian president: you do the investigation to validate Mr. Trump's zany premise and we'll give you that military aid. Oh, and about Joe Biden's son...

Then he reversed course and tried to "unsay" it. Too late.

The stubborn blindness of those who simply refuse to see how corrupt, unstable, incompetent, and generally unfit this president is truly astounding. But their number is diminishing. It shouldn't be hard for anybody- even those who have been in willful denial all this time- to see that in seeking the interference of a foreign government on his behalf in an American election Mr. Trump abused his power seriously enough to meet the Constitution's requirement of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The wording is significant. An offense doesn't need to involve the breaking of the law to qualify as impeachable. "Misdemeanors" are enough.

While "misdemeanor" is a legal term for a minor crime that is not a felony, its general meaning includes even a minor misdeed. Given the "and" in the Constitution's phrase, there seems to have been a clear intent to distinguish between "crimes" and mere "misdemeanors." It was the second meaning the Founders intended, and there can be no doubt that using the powers of the presidency to enlist a foreign government in an attempt to get dirt on the son of a personal political opponent qualifies. And in case anyone misses the point, complicity in getting a foreign government to interfere in an American election is what that whole "collusion" business was all about.

In fact, get this.

Unsurprisingly, House Democrats want to subpoena Mulvaney to testify about the matter under oath as part of their impeachment investigation.

Albert Einstein once said that only two things were infinite: the universe and human stupidity. He added that he wasn't sure about the universe. Stupidity is not necessarily the reason that people refuse to see the unfitness of Donald Trump. Stubbornness is far more often the reason- stubbornness, and the blind tribalism which increasingly makes Americans on both ends of the political spectrum as blind to the faults of "our side" as they are hypercritical and even creative about the faults of the other.  But there is a limit even to that. The percentage of Republicans who close their ears to the mounting evidence of Mr. Trump's unfitness is shrinking, and it's even becoming imaginable that John Kasich or someone else from Planet Earth might credibly challenge Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination.

Well, a guy can dream, can't he?

In any case, one of my fellow original Never Trumpers, National Review columnist David French, lays it all out in terms that anybody ought to be able to understand here. I have little doubt about how history is going to see this whole business. The major question is how big a bunch of fools the American people are going to look like for putting up with so much for so long.