The high price of Mitch McConnell's rigged impeachment trial
The most corrupt president in modern times- perhaps in history- absolutely loves to accuse his opponents of being corrupt. A man who lies with a frequency and a lack of shame unmatched in the history of modern American politics and habitually makes up his "facts" out of thin air as the occasion demands, doubling down on them when he is shown to be wrong and never, ever admitting error, is fond of railing at a critical media as purveyors of "fake news" (Kelly Ann Conway, one of his aides, in a fit of unintentional candor once described Mr. Trump's hostile response to the truth as the assertion of "alternative facts," as if false assertions could be rendered true merely by substituting them for true ones). Josef Goebbels said a very long time ago that a good propagandist will make it a point to accuse his opponent of the very thing of which he is guilty, and Donald Trump is a very good propagandist.
Are you under investigation by a special prosecutor? Rather than cooperate in every way possible to clear one's name, obstruct the investigation at every turn and try to make the prosecutor the bad guy. A congressional committee- a part of the House portion of the impeachment process, analogous to a grand jury, investigating simply whether there is adequate reason to go forward with an investigation and never involving input from the defendant because it's concerned not with guilt or innocence but only with whether there's anything worth investigating, is unfair because it doesn't go beyond its purpose and listen to the defendant's protestations of innocence. In fact, it's so unfair that the defendant forbids anyone accountable to him to give evidence of any kind before the committee!
Of course, his partisans see no contradiction in any of this. They're all scoundrels, they seem to reason, and at least Trump is our scoundrel. Or else they simply close their minds to the evidence and bob their heads at every prevarication and every bizarre falsehood the president comes up with, since what he says is by definition true and what his critics say is by definition false.
Hunter Biden apparently made use of his father's name to benefit himself in business deals carried out in Ukraine, and Joe Biden failed to tell him not to. Somehow this has become not only a bigger deal than using American military aid to bribe a foreign country to dig up dirt on a political opponent and systematically obstructing justice, interfering with not only a special prosecutor's investigation but with the very House investigation seeking to determine whether there are grounds to bother to even consider impeachment. As with withholding income tax returns for patently dishonest reasons and all the other attempts by this president to muddy the waters concerning anything for which he might be called to account, this is not the behavior of a man who has nothing to hide. But somehow, this never seems to register with his supporters. Or at least they are unwilling to admit how bad it looks to anyone who is not in utter and abject denial.
Mona Charon is a national treasure, a prominent conservative columnist whose ideological bona fides are impeccable. A senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, she not only actually has ethics but is concerned with them. That being the case, she is a forthright and eloquent spokesperson for the Never Trump movement, which is to say for those conservatives who are actually serious about the principles in which conservatives claim to believe, like integrity and competence and free markets, for example. And in this column, appearing in the National Review- a column which I heartily commend to you- she examines just what the seemingly inevitable acquittal of President Trump despite a slam-dunk case that he merits removal from office at the very least for his attempt to bribe Ukraine to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden despite the utter absence of any evidence that there's anything to investigate to smear his likely opponent in this year's election, and his arrogant and consistent obstruction of Congress in its attempts to perform its legitimate and constitutional duty would mean.
There is much more, of course, for which this dishonest, incompetent, erratic, and corrupt man deserves to be removed from a position of public trust he does not merit. But those are what the two articles of impeachment passed by the House mention.
It would mean that truth does not matter. It would mean that partisanship is more important than the national interest. It will mean that a precedent will be set for putting the standard of misbehavior justifying impeachment and removal so high that it will be difficult to imagine just how bad a president's behavior would have to be to meet it.
In another National Review article, another conservative icon, Ramesh Ponnuru, demonstrates eloquently that Donald Trump's behavior demands removal from office, and that it is for just such cases and for just such men as Donald Trump that the Founders included impeachment in the Constitution. But alas, the majority of those who claim adherence to a movement centered on faithfulness to that document, as well as to multiple other principles they deny in supporting Donald Trump, seemingly don't care much these days for either the Constitution or for truth.
For them, all that matters is sticking it to the liberals.
Comments