PMC Commentary

When hearsay isn't hearsay

The frantic ForeverTrump website American Greatness explains, or so it believes, Trump's characteristically daffy conspiracy accusation this morning: "WHO CHANGED THE LONG STANDING WHISTLEBLOWER RULES JUST BEFORE SUBMITTAL OF THE FAKE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT?" [Caps ORIGINAL … !!].

No one, at least not in the way that Trump hopes his supporters will believe: that dark, deep-state forces rigged the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act so that the Ukraine whistleblower could then submit his complaint to the intelligence community's inspector general. (I was not aware of this latest conspiracy theory — they're coming too often, too fast — when I wrote earlier this morning of Trump's weird tweet, seemingly about the other, longer-standing Whistleblower Protection Act.)

The website's Diana Heine is all over this blockbuster story of skulduggery: "A previous version of the form only allowed first-hand whistleblower complaints — not hearsay, rumor, or gossip about presidential diplomacy with a foreign leader."

This previous version, continues Heine, "would have prevented the 'whistleblower’s' complaint from moving forward, as his 'evidence' of wrongdoing was based entirely on hearsay and publicly available news articles as evidence for many of the allegations." (To repeat, as Ms. Heine does, the whistleblower's "evidence" was based on evidence.)

Almost exclusively, though, the indefatigable Trump camp is going with "hearsay," not the evidenced evidence of news articles. I gather these gotcha folks of Trumpian hysteria haven't noticed that the White House notes taken on the president's impeachable phone call were not hearsay, but, well, White House notes taken on the president's impeachable phone call.

Good grief. House Democrats really must wrap up this impeachment thing fast, because we'll be daffy as Trump if we're obliged to hear and read his and his camp's "reasoning" past November.

***

Update: WaPo's Fact Checker has the complete story on Trump's rule-changing lie.

Trump goes from slapstick fatuity to the authentically bone-chilling

WHO CHANGED THE LONG STANDING WHISTLEBLOWER RULES JUST BEFORE SUBMITTAL OF THE FAKE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT? DRAIN THE SWAMP!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

From cpsc.gov:

"Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA)

"In 2012 Congress passed the WPEA into law to strengthen protections for Federal employees who report fraud, waste, and abuse. The WPEA clarifies the scope of protected disclosures."

Does 2012 come just before 2019? Well I'll be damned.

Anyway, we must add the president's fresh foray into mass bamboozlement to our list of "Trumpian Humbug."

This morning, on, of course, Twitter, Trump also asked this about Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff: "Arrest for Treason?"

Now that's not so funny. This punk of a "first captain" in military school increasingly resembles that punk of a little corporal on The Night of the Long Knives, during which the latter murdered possibly a thousand Brüder, whom he suspected of being a real or potential threat. All dissenters, all political contenders, all persons of ideologies of even the faintest deviation were to be corralled and slaughtered. 

If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this. In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life. Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone!

Your "Guide to the Galaxy of Trumpian Humbug"

Politico reports that Trump's "optimistic, even nonchalant attitude" toward impeachment perished last week in a hail of horrendous publicity. The White House "tested and retested strategies on the fly" — much as it once did with critical legislation, when such trivialities mattered somewhat — as it "began to
recognize the perilous road ahead."

What, Trump worry? I don't quite follow, since Bloomberg Opinion's Ramesh Ponnuru has already pondered "Trump’s Defenders" and their "Lame Excuses," as foreshadowed in Ponnuru's subtitle: "No quid pro quo! It’s just politics! Democrats did it too!"

There is also, in Ponnuru's telling, …

It’s fine for the president to ask for Ukrainian help in uprooting corruption.

The news media has edited the memorandum of the phone call to make Trump look worse. [Some have, though an "accurate recounting of the memorandum … is strong enough"].

It was just a phone call.

The “whistleblower complaint” contains a lot of hearsay.

Russiagate was a hoax, and the same people who spread it are yelling about this.

The multiplicity of grounds Trump’s enemies have cited to call for impeachment shows they are just after him for partisan reasons.

Trump’s enemies are trying to annul an election; they can’t accept his legitimacy.

In my Guide to Trumpian Humbug, the most enchanting of these "lame excuses" is the penultimate one, that of partisan vindictiveness. There is, no doubt, a lot of that. Trump has debased the presidency and defiled traditional political rhetoric, so there's much to be spiteful about.

But so what? What does vindictiveness have to do with the truth and consequences of Trump's manifestly extortionist phone call to Ukraine's quivering president?

You needn't memorize the above list. We'll all know them by heart by about the ides of October.

The right's bamboozlement machine has overpowered the U.S. Senate

The Constitutional ambiguity of Article II, Section 4, the most political and most seismic of all the founding document's provisions, is what offers Mitch McConnell an easy way out.

The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The sitting president has done the Democratic House the favor of a quadfecta, while the Constitution has done McConnell the favor of translucence. The founders failed to imagine a partisan Senate leader as corrupt as the impeachable president, hence no guidance was offered as to the inescapability of a Senate trial following a House indictment.

It's true that McConnell has offered his own guidance. In March he said, "If it [impeachment] were to happen, the Senate has no choice. If the House were to act, the Senate immediately goes into a trial." And this weekend the Senate "Republican leadership," reports HuffPost, released this statement: "There is no way we could somehow bar the doors and prevent the managers from presenting the articles to the Senate. The rules of impeachment are clear on this point."

McConnell's word and that of his leadership mean as much as did Trump's oath of office. The majority leader will do whatever is most politically expedient at any given moment of decision. And the ambiguity of Article II's Section 4 is as helpful to Mitch as was the Article's Section 2: "[… the president] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint ... Judges of the Supreme Court."

So in some ways the Constitution is a kind of jack-in-the-box; It's full of surprises based on the prejudices, malices and partisanship of the Senate, which the founders simply did not anticipate. They saw the institution as a body of deliberative, independent men, not as a backstop arm of the executive.

Yet the Washington Post's David Von Drehle argues, with significant merit, that Trump's fate "is in the hands of … not the Senate … [but] of Fox News." Its "viewers punch far above their weight in one regard: They are the core of any hard-right primary challenge that might be waged against an incumbent Republican senator."

At present the hard-right core of viewership is square in the network's corner. Recently, host Chris Wallace and correspondent Ed Henry have been struck by the outrageous notion that a president who extorts a foreign nation for his own domestic gain just might be worthy of at least an inquiry. Fox viewers took this development with their usual good grace

Yes!! Chris Wallace needs to go! Plus about 5 others. So disappointed with Fox News. #MAGA2020 #KAG2020

— Molly Barnes (@WalkbyFaith_12) September 29, 2019

Though he had a small following, lukepascal's tweet soon earned "27.3K Likes."

Von Drehle suggests that Fox News is in for some ideological changes, now that Trump-humiliated, "grudge-nursing" Paul Ryan sits on its board with the deputation of nominating future board members. "To have him advising the new Fox News leadership [Rupert Murdoch's son] on strategy and future directions cannot bode well for the aging star of the Donald Trump Show," he writes.

The columnist adds a caveat, however. "As long as Fox News is giving prominence to such cynical remoras as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, embarrassment alone is unlikely to carry much weight. Fox News will need a plausible alternative story line if it is to bring its glorification of Trump to an end."

Von Drehle sees a possibility that Fox News might promote "Midwestern conservative" and Ryan's former House colleague Mike Pence as that alternative story line. Should the network veer as outlined, Von Drehle then "venture[s] that impeachment has gained the upper hand." I'd venture that ratings-powerhouses Carlson, Ingraham and Hannity would strangle that idea in its crib.

Still, his larger thesis holds: Fox News — and, I would add, the rest of the far-right's cacophonous agitpropers — will lead Republican senators around by their elongating noses, thereby subordinating a once-deliberative body to vapid hysterics.

Watch Rudy Giuliani filibuster, manhandle and maul George Stephanopoulos

 

The only honest, verifiable statement Rudy makes in the entire interview is, "Believe it or not, I'm an attorney." How proud his profession must be.

And he finishes by saying he would and would not cooperate with Adam Schiff's intelligence committee. 

Perhaps the choicest part is that in which Rudy essentially makes self-love (I have in my hand!) to an affidavit by Ukraine's former, fired, corrupt prosecutor general — who wrote the worthless thing at the request of a Ukrainian oligarch on the run from U.S. extradition. 

How could anyone lose a debate with such a clown as Rudy Giuliani? 

This is "what being a Republican has come to."

"At this point, [Trump] could be caught walking out of a Federal Reserve bank with two giant sacks of money in his hands and no Republican would vote to impeach him for grand larceny," a Senate GOP staffer told the L.A. Times.

The aide then pointedly characterized the rank-and-file tree sloths and prosimians whose blinkered assessment of all things political has been reduced to this:

"Our voters want two things from their congressmen: [dumping] on the media and blindly defending the president. That’s what being a Republican has come to."

A marvel, it is, that the prehensile adherents to this party — once the party of Lincoln, T.R., Eisenhower — still call themselves Republicans; and utterly mystifying is that their tree sloth brothers still call themselves conservative.

In their defense, however, even Merriam-Webster is behind these radically metamorphosed times, defining a "conservative" as one "tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : TRADITIONAL; marked by moderation or caution; marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners."

Just visit a pro-Trump website, say, at Reddit or 4chan, and witness the moderation, elegance, style and manners of the keyboarding primates who gather there to share "ideas." Most of their scrawled entries — and this is rather typical of chimpanzees — are jackhammeringly incoherent; the others are simply venomous toward anyone who lacks their philosophical elegance.

This is what has brought so low the conservative-holdout Ross Douthat, who reflected yesterday that "my days of writing high-dudgeon columns demanding that Republicans act in concert against Trump are behind me; cynicism and bemusement define my attitude toward G.O.P. decadence these days."

Yet it seems the Trump campaign isn't quite as defiantly chipper as the rib-scratching rabble. "I think he’s badly wounded right now," confided a campaign advisor. "I’m suddenly very worried about 2020."

He or she, I'd wager, is especially worried because the candidate can't seem to distinguish between the Mueller investigation and the Ukraine scandal: "I thought we had won," said Trump last week. "I thought it was dead."

Trump's spirits will return, no doubt, when he returns to his otherworldly Bund rallies and their undulating oceans of adulation. Meanwhile, campaign advisers such as the ever-scrupulous Kellyanne Conway have put together a $10 million television buy in this, their time of trouble, announcing “They lost the election. Now they want to steal this one. Don’t let them."

You too can be a Trump media consultant. All you need to know is how to turn tables.

The L.A. Times adds a humorous note: "Although Republican support in Congress appears solid, that firewall could falter if damaging new revelations emerge or if lawmakers find public support crumbling back in their districts."

The latter is most unlikely, while the former is amusing but also bewildering. Damaging new revelations have already "emerged" — that is, exploded — mostly in Trump's own words and actions. But congressional Republicans don't give a damn. See opening quote.

Thus, as did Groucho Marx, we say hello and goodbye — we really must be going — to the necrotic party of Trump. This blight on the nation is so distant from respectable Republicanism, it's unrecognizable as such. The good news is that the party of Trump is necrotic.    

More tomorrow

A "senior Senate GOP aide" speaking to the @LATimes: "Our voters want two things from their congressmen: [Dumping] on the media and blindly defending the president. That's what being a Republican has come to." https://t.co/AQ7Bqzq0r6

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 28, 2019

Trump is more unhinged than ever, and he's had help

Quiz time: What's wrong with this sentence?

"Trump told two senior Russian officials [Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak] in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people."

Trump coupled his stated indifference to a foreign power micromanaging our presidential contest while he was divulging top secret information to the Russians and puffing himself up for having sacked the "nutjob" of an FBI director, which, in Trump's words, deflated the "great pressure" of a criminal investigation.

All that is disturbing enough. Even more disturbing in the Washington Post's quoted sentence, however, is that a U.S. president had just condoned Russia's electoral interference (which he thunderously denied in public), thereupon inviting further interference in 2020. And yet Trump's Constitutionally unhinged "assertion" merely caused "alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people."

These alarmed officials should have leaked the president's spectacularly bizarre and addled notions about right and wrong to every major U.S. news outlet. A clear and present danger to our national security and electoral integrity had just exposed itself in the Oval Office. What did those high-ranking officials do? They locked it away, restricted its access to an "unusually small number of people," and concealed from the body politic vital information on the commander in chief's abhorrent unAmericanism.

Given Trump's privately disclosed, now public, remarks, given his thoughts as to what had passed and what would be, given his twisted motive and philosophical daftness of embracing a hostile foreign power, can we not imagine how the Mueller Report otherwise would have read, if only the officials had leaked the unpresidential secrecies rather than locking them away?

We can't know with any exactitude what would have come from such an official disclosure. Yet a rather safe bet is that the stunning revelation would have softened up the public for an impeachment endorsement now — now that we have black-and-white evidence of Trump's dramatically unconstitutional Ukrainian dalliances.

Instead of being partly amused at the president's whimsical creepiness today — "It's just Trump being Trump" — the public at large would now concede that he's not only unfit for his office, but that he's totally crackers. From his unprecedented malice at the United Nations Thursday — "These animals in the press. they’re animals actually; some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet; They’re scum, many of them are scum" — to his childlike pleadings and unmasculine narcissism and brain-scrambled mutterings — "I didn’t do anything…; I just said I’m the most presidential except for possibly Abe Lincoln when he wore the hat…; but I can’t do that, that hat wouldn’t work for me. Yeah, I have better hair than him" — Trump is better suited for a massive Thorazine injection and butterfly net.

Is Trump at all concerned about Russian interference into our most cherished liberty, that of voting? Not quite. This is what occupies the vast, free space in the most powerful man in the world's mind: "To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing [sic] Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen [sic] out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!"

Yep. Worse than the Russians.

I close with another unserviceable sentence. Upon returning to the White House this week, Trump said, "It should never be allowed, what's happened to this president." He had most of the words right, but in the wrong order. "What's happened is that this [kind of] president should never again be allowed."

Fox News is having a nervous breakdown

Speaking of the mad, mad, mad world of conservative media, and returning, for moment to Jeremy Peters' NY Times article, this bit of frenzied lunacy is noted:

"[Mr. Hannity's radio show begins each day] with an announcer declaring that he is 'Fighting the Trump-hating liberal media one day at a time.'"

But get this, from Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman: Yesterday, "Sean Hannity told friends the whistle-blower’s allegations are 'really bad,' a person briefed on Hannity’s conversations told me."

Hannity is bamboozling his base, but not himself.

Sherman's larger point is that Fox News has been hurled into unmitigated disarray. And it's Trump who heaved it there.

Anchors, hosts and guests are battling among themselves; on crackpot Tucker Carlson's show, crackpot Joe DiGenova called Judge Napolitano a "fool" for having said that Trump committed a crime, which prompted anchor Shepard Smith to call Carlson "repugnant" for not standing up for Napolitano.

This, in turn, prompted Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and president Jay Wallace to threaten Smith with unemployment if he doesn't stop picking on Tucker.

Trump has been attacking Fox for its slumping polls, which makes him mad and his base sad, very sad.

"It’s management bedlam," said a Fox staffer, "this massive thing [impeachment] happened, and no one knows how to cover it."

Fox board member and former House speaker Paul Ryan is urging management to "decisively break" with Trump, others are arguing a stay-the-course strategy; and Rupert's son, Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch, "is already thinking about how to position the network for a post-Trump future."

That he'll have to do slowly, gently, incrementally — if he does it sooner rather than later, which is beginning to look almost inescapable — for there are no skins quite so thin as those of Fox News viewers. For more than two decades the network has shielded them from reality, so by now any electric shock treatment would plunge them into incurable catatonia.

This is fun, is it not?

Adam Schiff did what?

Rep. Adam Schiff totally made up my conversation with Ukraine President and read it to Congress and Millions. He must resign and be investigated. He has been doing this for two years. He is a sick man!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2019

I've no idea how even Trump's fleeceable base could swallow the tale that quoting him is the same as "making up" stuff, but somehow, I'm sure, they'll manage.  

Conservative media goes ape

The Times' Jeremy Peters examines "How Right-Wing Media Talks About Impeachment," in which he highlights gabfesters such as Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage. His piece is both amusing and harrowing:

Their narrative omits key facts, like Mr. Trump’s entreaty to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky: "I would like you to do us a favor." It portrays the president’s political opponents and the mainstream media as contemptible and corrupt persecutors, blinded by hatred and their failure to bring him down so far. "Russia, Russia, Russia. Racism, racism. And recession. And now it’s going to be Ukraine," Jeanine Pirro, a friend and fierce defender of Mr. Trump said on the Fox Business channel….

"It’s not about Trump is it?" [Savage] said on his show. "It’s about us. It’s about our love for America. It’s about our love for our own borders, language and culture"….

Their words echo those of the president himself, who once declared, "What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” and beseeched his followers to "stick with us," and not to believe what "you see from these people, the fake news."

Savage has voiced doubts about Trump of late, especially over The Wall's lack of progress. But the president's dire predicament has thrust him squarely back into the hideous, overdramatized camp of no-metaphor-is-too-emphatic. Take hold, for instance, of this vile imagery: "[Trump] is already in the hay wagon on the way to the guillotine because of the fascist vermin in the media."

The Pirro quote above is also of particular interest. Who does she think ignited the issues of Russia, Russia, racism, racism and Ukraine? How is it that White House instigator is always faultless, never deserving of personal responsibility and accountability?

And why am I squandering valid questions on an airhead like Pirro? 

If you missed this related piece of mine of three days ago, you may wish to visit it now.

A 223-year-old reminder

From Washington's farewell address:

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government…. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other….

"The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop…. [I]t must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of [foreign] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities."

With all of Europe's intrigues, foreign entanglements were a supreme concern of the founders. (As was demagoguery.) First hand we now know why. Had it not been for the cybersnoopers in Russia, whom Trump publicly encouraged to intervene in the 2016 contest, he likely wouldn't be where he is today. Then came his less than subtle overtures to Ukraine, which might also have contributed to a Trumpian 2020 victory.

The screaming irony is that it's Republicans who for years have tub-thumped for original constitutionalism. Of course they also advocate "family values" as they bang some intimidated female staffer — and then encourage her to have abortion. Shhhh.

They never stab at the soft underbelly

This DNI hearing before the House Intelligence Committee just about has me nodding off. It's little more than a collection of coulds, shoulds, woulds, mights and maybes. 

If Republicans were in charge of the committee, and some helpless soul were testifying, we'd be witnessing some spilled blood by now. 

"Outside the bounds" of what?

I never quite understood where The Resurgent's Erick Erickson, formerly of Red State, stands on the everyday subject of Trump. I'm not sure Erickson has either. This entry of his was helpful — also informative:

Speaking on background to a Republican congressional source who has direct knowledge of the whistleblower report, he says it is really bad…. "The whistleblower is credible."

According to the source, the report "paints a clear path to impeachment" with enough information that Democrats will be able to make appropriate document requests and subpoena witnesses for a focused effort.

"I wasn’t happy with the transcript, but it was Trump. What do you expect? Now we are dealing with something that looks like it could be outside the bounds of acceptable conduct."