If I see Trump as a pestilence, I may not see in your tome of plans a cure.
- Charles Blow "To Beat Trump, Put Ideals Before Ideas"
1-15-2020
This week's featured post is "Ten Principles that Unify Democrats (and most of the country)".
This week everybody was talking about the impeachment trial
House impeachment managers head over to the Senate.
So it's official now. The House delivered the articles of impeachment to the Senate on Wednesday. Thursday, the senators took an oath to render "impartial justice". The substance of the trial will start tomorrow.
Fairly soon, the Senate will have to vote on the key question of whether to hear witnesses. Trump blocked the most important witnesses from testifying before the House, but would have a harder time blocking them from the Senate, if the Senate chooses to subpoena them. Mitch McConnell is against witnesses, because the less the public learns about this case, the better for Trump.
How this vote will go is still not clear. All 47 Democrats will probably want to hear witnesses. USA Today picks out Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Lamar Alexander as the most likely Republicans to vote for witnesses. I'd love to hear how other Republicans facing tough re-elections -- Cory Gardner of Colorado comes to mind -- will try to spin this. They have to realize that stuff is going to come out anyway. (John Bolton is writing a book, after all.) How will a decision to participate in Trump's cover-up look when it does?
It's striking how much of the closing message of Trump's defenders is just simple intimidation. Here's Rand Paul's threat to Republican incumbents who might be thinking of taking their oath seriously:
Paul says if four or more of his GOP colleagues join with Democrats to entertain new witness testimony, he will make the Senate vote on subpoenaing the president’s preferred witnesses, including Hunter Biden and the whistleblower who revealed the Ukraine scandal — polarizing picks who moderate Republicans aren’t eager to call. So he has a simple message for his party: end the trial before witnesses are called.
“If you vote against Hunter Biden, you’re voting to lose your election, basically. Seriously. That’s what it is,” Paul said during an interview in his office on Wednesday. “If you don’t want to vote and you think you’re going to have to vote against Hunter Biden, you should just vote against witnesses, period.”
And Marc Thiessen warns that Hunter Biden could just be the beginning of a parade of witnesses that would lead to the former Vice President himself.
Biden has been shaky under mild questioning during the debates. How would he fare under the withering pressure of legal cross-examination? If he stumbled, or appeared confused, it could expose to voters how old and frail he really is at the very moment they are going to the polls to decide their party’s presidential nominee. Do Democrats really want to put Biden through that, especially since they know that the president is going to be acquitted?
And for what? Democrats have no idea what Bolton will say under oath. His testimony may be exculpatory for the president, in which case they will have opened the Pandora’s box of witness testimony for nothing. So, call your witnesses, Sen. Schumer. They may very well pose a greater danger to Biden’s presidential prospects than they do to Donald Trump.
Trump's defenders can't credibly argue that he's innocent, so this is what they're left with: Do what we say and nobody gets hurt. [BTW: I think the Biden-is-shaky point is off-base. Biden has a lifelong stuttering problem, which can make it hard for him to answer quickly, as you have to do in a debate. As a witness, he could take a moment to compose his answers.]
and the new evidence
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I get suspicious when a bad guy suddenly switches sides and starts telling us exactly what we want to hear. Lev Parnas is under indictment, so it would make sense for him to tell this stuff to his prosecutors to get a plea deal. But it's not clear what advantage he gets from putting it all out there in public. So I'm listening closely to what Parnas is saying, looking at the corroborating documents he's providing, and wondering where the trap is.
Nonetheless, I think Tom Malinowski has got it right:
GOP Senators are entitled to be skeptical of Parnas, since he wasn't under oath. They're not entitled to be skeptical while refusing to call sworn witnesses who could corroborate or refute him.
That point makes sense across the board. Again and again, Republicans have complained about the evidence House Democrats assembled: The witnesses weren't always in the center of the action they were describing, few of them talked to Trump directly, and so on. Those are all reasonable things to complain about in the abstract. But it's unreasonable to complain about those issues when you have the power to resolve them, but you're refusing to do so.
Another major development this week was that a GAO report came out, saying that Trump's freezing of the Ukraine aid violated the Impoundment Control Act. So much for the "no laws were broken" defense.
So who is Parnas anyway? He's a crony of Rudy Giuliani who was working the Ukraine side of Trump's get-Biden scheme. He did a long interview with Rachel Maddow that broadcast this week, and he's provided a bunch of text messages and other relevant documents to the House impeachment investigators. Pieces of the Maddow interview are available online, but I haven't found a complete video or transcript of it yet.
The Hill boils it down to five big points:
- Trump was ready to withhold all aid from Ukraine if they didn't announce a Biden investigation.
- Bill Barr "had to have known everything".
- Trump knew exactly what was going on.
- When Mike Pence cancelled his trip to the Ukraine president's inauguration, that was part of the pressure campaign.
- The effort to pressure Ukraine was never about corruption; it was about Biden.
In addition, I was struck by how clear Parnas makes it that Giuliani was operating as Trump's personal attorney, not as a government official. So far, none of Trump's defenders has been able to explain why (if this whole scheme was legit) it had to be done outside ordinary channels. To me, the off-the-books nature of things looks like consciousness of guilt.
Why, for example, couldn't Trump just fire or transfer Ambassador Yovanovitch because he wanted to? Why did she have to be smeared and followed and threatened first?
Another thing that's striking me: For a long time there, Rudy Giuliani just couldn't shut up. He was all over TV saying all kinds of crazy things. Since Parnas started talking though, where has Rudy been?
Ben Rhodes asks a more general question:
Can you imagine how many corrupt grifters there are like Parnas circling around Trump’s foreign policy? On Saudi, UAE, Venezuela, China, Russia?
and the Democratic debate
The featured post was inspired by watching Tuesday's debate, but doesn't actually say that much about it. Here's the transcript.
The debate in Des Moines was much like the previous debates, with the difference that there were only six candidates. That meant that each got to speak often enough that I never forgot who was up there. So while the previous debates looked like cattle calls, this one looked like a collection of possible nominees (with the possible exception of Steyer, who I still can't take seriously). That had to work to the benefit of Amy Klobuchar, who trails the clump of Iowa front-runners (Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren), but looked like she belonged in that group.
Any of the front-running four is polling close enough to the top to win, especially considering how bizarre the caucus process is. So I don't understand how soft all the other candidates were with Biden. Biden is the leader in almost every national poll. He could win Iowa, and if he does, that victory could be the beginning of the bandwagon that he rides to the nomination. This debate was the last chance to take him down before the caucus, so I don't understand why nobody tried to exploit that opportunity.
So while Biden wasn't all that sharp in the debate -- he almost never is -- to me he came off as the winner, because his opponents missed another opportunity to knock him down.
The NYT endorsement came out this morning: a split decision between Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
The whole Bernie-and-Elizabeth spat has got to be the dumbest story in this debate. Warren claims Sanders told her that a woman couldn't beat Trump; Sanders denies saying that. It was a one-on-one conversation, so there's no tie-breaking witness. I have two reactions:
- So what if he did? Lots of people -- most of them women -- have told me in private conversations that (after watching what Hillary went through) they doubt that a woman can beat Trump. If Sanders were arguing publicly that people should vote for him rather than Warren because women aren't electable, that would be terrible, because he'd be trying to cash in on the public's sexism. But in private it's a completely legitimate point of strategy for two politicians to discuss. So I think this whole thing should never have become an issue and CNN shouldn't have asked about it. If Warren is responsible for raising the issue (and she may not have been), she shouldn't have.
- I thought Bernie's response in the debate ("as a matter of fact, I didn't say it") was unskillful, because he turned the disagreement into a somebody-must-be-lying issue. I agree with GoodNewsRoundup on Daily Kos, that people can remember conversations differently without either party lying about what was said. So Bernie could have answered: "That's not what I believe, so I can't imagine that I would have said something like that. But apparently something I did say gave Elizabeth that impression, so I wish I had caught that misunderstanding at the time." From there he could have segued into the rest of his answer: "If any of the women on this stage or any of the men on this stage win the nomination ... I will do everything in my power to make sure that they are elected in order to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country."
and you also might be interested in ...
I'm not all that interested in the British royal family, so I've mostly ignored the Harry-and-Meghan-move-to-Canada story. However, BuzzFeed did some interesting research into what might have motivated the move: The article pairs 20 Meghan stories in the British press with directly comparable stories about her sister-in-law Kate Middleton. Again and again, something that was covered positively or indulgently for Kate and William was covered negatively for Meghan and Harry.
Here's the transcript of a rally Trump held in Wisconsin on Tuesday. It's common to read isn't-that-outrageous articles based on specific quotes from Trump rallies. But what strikes me about this rally isn't any particular part; it's the impact of reading the whole thing.
If your Dad or Grandpa were this incoherent, the family would need to have a conference and make some decisions. You wouldn't want him living on his own any more, and probably you'd want someone with him whenever he went out.
BTW, he still says Mexico is going to pay for the wall. "It's all worked out. Mexico's paying." Sad.
The claim that no Americans were injured in the Iranian missile attack on January 8 ... let's just say it wasn't completely accurate.
and let's close with something that will blow you away
You might think that since the Netherlands is so flat, Dutch bicycle races wouldn't be that arduous. However, there is one very Dutch obstacle: the wind. Every year on some very windy day they hold the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships: 8.5 kilometers straight into a wind that gusted up to 127 kilometers an hour, riding a standard upright single-speed bicycle.
Since I don't speak Dutch, most of the YouTube postings on the event are unintelligible to me. But Global Cycling News covered it like this, with one word of commentary: "Nutters."
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