Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Adam Schiff & House Dems Must Ensure Impeachment Hearings Don't Descend Into A Circus


The main Reepo  ape,  Jim Jordan, left  - already under investigation for his role in ignoring Ohio State students' complaints of sexual attacks,  has been appointed to disrupt the impeachment hearings. This cannot be allowed.

"Republicans appointing Jordan to the Intel committee signals that they will not fight this on the facts.  They'll not fight other than rhetorically, using demonization of these witnesses, trying to impugn their character and their motives.  This is to be a political fire fight and they are bringing in one of their political fire fighters with a rhetorical flame thrower."  - John Heilemann last night on 'Last Word'

"What we will hear from Republicans is not an argument about the facts or about the Founders' view of impeachment. It will be geared towards a Republican reelection strategy in 2020.  This grievance politics that Republicans are victims. This will be about keeping their base and ensuring there's no erosion of Republican voters."  - David Jolly last night on 'Last Word'

Let us accept as a proposition the Trump ass lickers and enablers - also known as House Republicans - have nothing to offer in the way of the impeachment hearings. Nothing other than to try to trot out their usual half-baked conspiracy theories about the Bidens in Ukraine and trying to out the whistle blower.  At the top of this classless, nefarious bunch of reprobates is Jim Jordan, already facing new accusations he ignored warnings of sexual transgressions at Ohio State. But what would you expect of this toadie ape? Well, what you'd expect of all the Trumpie -serving cabal? Subservience and sycophancy to their master and the total absence of any moral center or compass.

That is why Jordan has been appointed as top disruptor for the impeachment public hearings,  to try to turn them into a clown show or circus.  As long as a week ago, Axios and other sources reported that Republicans formally made Rep. Jim Jordan a member of the House Intelligence Committee, a move that will allow him  to lead the party's specious PR  "defender" of Trump during public impeachment hearings tomorrow.

In case you're wondering why I employ scare quotes, it's because there is no genuine defense possible at all. Dotard the traitor committed impeachable offenses out in the open and even openly admitted to them in his released transcript.   This was by way of his extortion- shakedown of the Ukrainian president , Volodymyr Zelensky. 

As former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal wrote in a TIME essay ('The Case For Impeachment', Nov. 18, p. 39 ):

"If  Trump's efforts to coerce Ukraine into interfering with American democracy had stayed a secret until the 2020 election - if a whistle blower hadn't spoken out - we would have fundamentally, perhaps irrevocably, lost faith in the legitimacy of our republic. 

That is why there is no choice but to impeach and remove Trump: because he was willing to undermine our democracy to help his prospects of re-election; because he has stated unapologetically that he wold do it again; and most important, because he wielded the powers of his office for personal benefit instead of for the benefit of the people."


So, no, Jordan's alleged defense  will merely be a side show of distractions, non sequitur fake arguments and misdirection.  Basically,a spiel of spurious claims designed to  try to get Americans (any who watch the hearings) to take their eye off the ball of Trump the traitor's guilt.   Jordan's mission then is not to be a fair arbiter and questioner- but rather one of sabotage - to undermine our democracy and the constitutional process as badly as Trump has.

We know he will also try to resort to the usual bullshit  process arguments, i.e. that the Dems holding the witness depositions in secret makes them "illegitimate" and "unconstitutional"..  Never mind these were the actual rules drawn up by the Repukes themselves in 2015.  But since these maggots lack any sense of irony, and are stoked with hypocrisy on steroids, they believe they can get away with this codswallop.

While it's true Jordan is basically a clown primed for disruption, it is also true, as Axios notes:
  • Jordan has quickly become House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff's counterpart as the face of Republicans' defense so far. Unlike Devin Nunes, Jordan has been present at every deposition, according to transcripts he has already actively participated in questioning witnesses, and is among the first to speak in front of the cameras when the committees emerge from closed-door hearings.
  • Jordan’s general counsel Steve Castor is now shared staff with the House Intelligence Committee, and will be leading the 45 minutes of staff questions Republicans get next week during public hearings..
Let me quickly point out here that the actual ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is Devin Nunes, not Jordan.  In other words, the proper GOP role in these impeachment hearings ought to have gone to Nunes. So why isn't he involved in that role, allowing Jordan (a refugee from the House Oversight and Reform committee) to supersede him?

A key clue here is that to snatch 'brownie points'  Jordan appeared  on “Fox & Friends” last Tuesday, when he bellowed: “I want to help the country see the truth here, that President Trump didn’t do anything wrong. And what the Democrats are doing is partisan, it’s unfair and frankly, it’s ridiculous.”

Nunes, meanwhile, has been up to his eyeballs trying to tamp down a farcical clown show that erupted after he filed a   $250 million lawsuit against Twitter for allowing two fake accounts: Devin Nunes' Cow and Devin Nunes' Mom.   Rather than seeing the accounts as  raw forms of humor and free speech, Nunes lost it and pressed ahead despite being lampooned  across social media for taking them so seriously.  In effect, he  filed the lawsuit against the social media company and three individual users in Virginia state court in March, and is seeking a quarter billion in damages for defamation.

Also, in effect, Nunes showed himself to be too much damaged goods to lead any impeachment charge against  Adam Schiiff, or the star witnesses (e.g. William Taylor), or the other House Dems on the Intel committee overseeing the hearings.

When you watch the hearings tomorrow pay attention to the distracting diversions Jordan will attempt to use in trying to turn the proceedings into a sham investigation into Hunter Biden and the whistle blower.  An 18-page memo on "strategy" disclosed on CBS this morning exposes the balderdash these imps will try to use to snooker the American public - hoping its critical thinking skills don't pass muster. This includes:

1) The evidence does not prove that Trump "pressured Ukraine, covered up misconduct or obstructed justice".

2) The evidence only shows Trump was interested in combating legitimate corruption in the Ukraine, a "concern that stemmed from his deep seated, reasonable and genuine skepticism about the country."

All of which is irrelevant claptrap, of course. Indeed, no 'quid pro quo' is really required for the impeachable offense, only the solicitation - which Trump clearly did. As Lawrence O'Donnell observed last night it might be best for the Dems to drop the quid pro quo emphasis entirely as an unnecessary euphemism (apart from which those 3 Latin words are merely obscuring more than they're saying, according to many political commenters, e.g. David  Jolly last night on O'Donnell's program)  Bear in mind the simpler the case made the easier it will be to get the majority of citizens on board, to impeach and remove Trump.

In any case,  as CBS' reporter on the issue - Nancy Cortes- even noted after dispensing these two gems:

"However, according to the testimony of two diplomatic aides released on Monday, the president actually bought into some conspiracy theories about Ukraine, insisting at one White House meeting that Ukraine tried to take him down. One aide said they worried that if these theories- pushed by Giuliani - took hold, i.e. that the Ukrainian government was an enemy of Trump, it would be very hard to have high level engagement with that country."

Adding:

"Another diplomatic aide, Catherine Croft, testified it was Mick Mulvaney - the acting White House chief of staff, who placed the temporary hold on Ukraine military aid this summer at the direction of the president, just before the president's July phone call with the president of the Ukraine- where he told him he 'wanted him to do him a favor, though'. 

And in the first testimony by a military  official, Laura Cooper - the assistance Secretary of Defense, testified that even the Pentagon was in the dark about why this aid was being held up. She said her understanding was the Ukrainians did know the aid was being held up this summer. And that's important because it runs counter to the GOP argument that the president couldn't have been pressuring the Ukrainians to investigate Biden because they didn't even know that their aid had been held up."

So in other words, all we're going to get from Jordan and the House Reeps are lies, subterfuge and smokescreens, to try to protect the Traitor - in -chief.

The job of Adam Schiff is to play the role of referee and ensure: a) nothing that doesn't pass the basic facts smell test is allowed at any time, say to distract viewers from the core issue of Trump's extortion, and b) firm control is kept over the whole proceedings to make sure it doesn't devolve into a circus side show. If that means   - after the nth Reeptard irrelevant "point of order" -  sending in the Sergeant-at-arms to frog march Jordan and his imps out, so be it.

  This is particularly critical as more and more media buy into the false narrative pumped by FOX News, Dotard and his GOP quislings and enablers.  (See last link below).  The sad fact is the corporate media are in over their head in covering most of what the GOP and Trump cabal are up to. In particular, my main beef is allotting their talking points way too much air play and credibility - as opposed to dismissing them as the irrelevant malarkey they are.  The result is saddling too many  fellow citizens with skewed perceptions.

See also:


by Cody Fenwick | November 12, 2019 - 7:55am |

And: 


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