Dear America,
It's difficult to remain dispassionate about what one hears at the impeachment hearings, though I am making an assiduous effort. I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate and so my thinking is oriented toward analysis and the nature of reality. My masters degree is in college counseling and student personnel, which results in constant assessment of the motivations of the witnesses, but of their interlocutors--I say interlocutors rather than interrogators because there are far more fulminations than questions intended to elicit answers at these hearings--more particularly. And I am a retired lawyer, so my experience with the law is always a backdrop against which I assess all of it. So I try to be mindful of the facts I can verify when thinking about what congressmen and women like Jim Jordan have to say.
For example, today Jordan more or less quoted Trump when he said that Trump had won the electoral college by a landslide...his word, not mine. The fact is that Trump won 304 electoral votes. But the fact is that the only president since Jimmy Carter who has gotten fewer electoral votes than Trump was George W. Bush...twice. Jordan also claimed that the Democrats were trying to reverse the will of the American people who elected Trump. But the reality is that the American people elected Hillary Clinton in the popular vote by nearly a three percent margin with two other third or fourth party candidates siphoning off a few percentage points between them and there Trump ties Bush again. Bush was the last president elected while losing the popular vote. I didn't keep track of the misstatements made by Jordan, or by any of the others either...except of course for these two glaring lies, and lies is what they were. Trump's electoral college and popular vote totals are common knowledge, and I'm sure that even Jordan is aware of them. Thus, his ardent claims to the contrary have to have been intentionally false, and that makes them deliberate lies. So if Jordan, despite his ardor, is telling lies at these hearings, what is true?
Well, here's the rub for the Republicans. With all their flailing about in what I think will be the vain attempt to either distract people from the truth of the allegations against Trump or squeal so loud as to drown them out, they are becoming the story because everyone already knows the story about Trump. Devin Nunes spouts such eristic casuistry that even those who want to believe him will be challenged to do so. And the other Republicans--attributing ulterior motives to one of today's witness's appearance in uniform and impugning his credibility on the basis of another witness's testimony that is contrary to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's official personnel evaluation from this year; using new specious questions to interdict the answers the witnesses try to give when they go in an inconvenient direction--are shooting themselves in the foot just as fast as they can reload their foot-shooting pistol. Still, the minds of partisan voters haven't been changed according to current polls. In other words, this whole spectacle will effect no one but the one third or so of Americans who think of themselves as independents. But that still has negative implications for Republicans.
For one thing, there are more Democratic voters (31%) than there are Republicans (29%). And if the independents split as they did in 2016 without any third party static intervening, the Democrat will win if nothing changes. But the changes that seem to me to be in the offing will effect Republicans negatively, not Democrats, and that may obviate the election in some sense. When Republicans begin getting feed back as they
campaign for reelection, they are likely to reap the whirlwind of public disdain for politicians...lying politicians in particular, which means that senators, who probably are Trump's only remaining hope of avoiding being the first successfully impeached president in our history, are going to have to think twice before toeing the party line. And if I'm right...if the Republicans in The Senate don't stand unanimous in Trump's favor, the Republican who runs for president in 2020 might be Mike Pence, and "Goody three shoes" doesn't have a chance as far as I can tell. For most people, two shoes is enough, and three is too many.
So don't believe the Republican rhetoric about what the American people "know" not just about Donald Trump and not this July phone call, but about everything he is and does. Don't get me wrong; I think they do know all about it. But I think that with each passing day it is harder to fashion it all as something other than what it is.
Your friend,
Mike
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