The Reality of Being Demented
For those of you who want to put your hands over your ears and not listen, now would be the time to do it. Donald Trump is demented and his Congressional sycophantic Republican acolytes are both enablers and at very least misguided.
Yesterday was the first day of the public impeachment hearings. Starting our day at our friends’ apartment in San Francisco, and given the three hour time zone difference, we arose to the start of the hearings with the Schiff and Nunes opening statements followed by the Kent and Taylor opening statements. We needed to go catch an Uber to the airport just as the questioning began. I used my phone the entire ride to SFO to let us listen to the questioning through live MSNBC coverage. After a brief hiatus to get through security, I was back at it with EarPods as we waited at the gate for a few hours (we are early to the airport people). Kim waved off at that point, opting for the newspapers (she’s always looking for a new Sudoko or Crossword). I kept it on my phone as we boarded until I was given headphones for the JetBlue DirectTV streaming, which has access to all the channels including MSNBC. So I barely missed a moment overall from apartment to Uber to airport to JetBlue. First time I’ve done that and I was impressed how seamlessly it all worked. Bless you MSNBC, Apple, DirectTV and JetBlue.
By the time the hearing adjourned on the tabling of the Republican motion to subpoena the Whistleblower to testify, a vote of 13 to 9 perfectly along party lines, I needed a break. I opted to watch a small unknown movie called Sword of Trust. There were no big stars, but the movie was quite funny in a sophisticated way. This movie, which takes place at a pawn shop in Alabama, is about people who most likely would not bother tuning into these Congressional hearings (even though they dominated every major network and cable news channel), so it was a total and effective break from the DC action. After a few hours we were still only over Ohio according to the flight map, so I went back to MSNBC to hear analysis from Andrew Weisman (the lead Mueller prosecutor who just wrapped up the Roger Stone trial), Dan Rather and anyone with a relevant point of view.
Trump began the day yesterday doing what we have all come to expect, he tweeted. His shout-out to his base was that they should not believe ANYTHING they heard during the hearings, because it was all rigged. Despite over three years of getting numbed to Trump’s idiotic, unpresidential and crude messaging, I found myself shocked that a President of the United States would utter such words, not on some hot mic, but in a purposeful tweet that would be published to the world. And that’s not all. So that he could dismiss the hearings out of hand, Trump spent his day in meetings with that great friend of America, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Turkey, Dictator of Middle Asia and man-about Istanbul and Ankara. If that isn’t one of the most arrogantly planned moves I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is. Imagine what that says about the state of our foreign diplomacy. While the House of Representatives is starting impeachment proceedings about Trump’s abuse of power in Ukraine, withholding appropriated military funds needed to fend off Russian aggression, Trump is so pompous and impervious to any negative publicity, castigation from his own party about his handing of the Kurds in Syria, and anything approaching the rule of law, that he flaunts his power in front of the American public and the entire world. Erdoğan is the latest, greatest Putin puppet. Remember what Pelosi likes to say about Trump’s actions; all roads lead to Moscow.
Turkey is proudly showing off its new cache of Russian weapons and despite (or maybe because of) the consternation it is causing NATO that one of its member states is cozying up militarily to Russia, Trump wants to endorse the purchase. That has to be as close to outright treason towards the security interests of the United States as I have seen in my lifetime. And Republicans care so much about keeping the Trumpster base in their electorate that they are prepared to look the other way? Astounding!
Watching the MSNBC commentators today talking about the hearings, the majority of the chatter was less about the power and compelling nature of the “prosecution” case seeking evidence to support impeachment (which it absolutely was), and more about the incredibly weak showing made by the Republicans in trying to find counter-arguments to the commentary by Ambassador Taylor and Secretary Kent. This ranged from shirtsleeved and crazed ex-wrestler Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) getting schooled by Peter Welch (D-Vermont) to the Republican staff attorney Stephen Castor getting stymied during his questioning of Ambassador Taylor.
When Jordan cried foul about the guy who started this all (the Whistleblower) not being allowed to testify, Welch suggested that he was happy to let the guy who started this all (Donald Trump) testify. Bam! And then when Castor tried to get Taylor to agree that having Giuliani, Sondland and their goons running an unauthorized diplomatic track was not so egregious, he came up embarrassingly blank. Boom!
Meanwhile Taylor dropped an even bigger bomb on the preceding, when he testified that he has now learned that one of his staff overheard a Trump/Sondland call on the day after the infamous Trump/Zelensky call with Trump seeking an update on Ukraine’s progress on announcing the Biden investigations. This tees up quite an interesting testimony for Ambassador Gordon Sondland next Wednesday. He has already shown a high degree of spinelessness in defying the White House edict not yo testify and then amending his testimony when all the diplomats started implicating him. Lucky for Trump he only hires the “best” people. I’m betting that this day-after cell phone call from Trump to Sondland, for which direct closed-door testimony will come from the Taylor staffer tomorrow, will make Sondland go cold to his socks and cause him to squeal like a stuck piggy, implicating Trump left, right and center. A man can dream about the unseating of a demented villain.