Prepare for repercussions! Also, replace your leaders with some folks who have some sense!
The tv ratings are going to collapse after today’s sh*t show! That is when the media will run for cover!
What we learned:
Ukraine is corrupt
No one has any direct knowledge of President Trump committing any crime.
Ukraine got the aid without any conditions.
The Democrats impeachment hoax just imploded on live TV for the dozens who bothered to watch it.
Let me get this straight:
Taylor never met President Trump or talked to his Chief of Staff.
Zelensky never mentioned anything improper to him.
His testimony is hearsay of six people having four conversations.
THIS is the Democrats’ star witness? What a waste of time!
WATCH: Devin Nunes Condemns ‘Impeachment Sham Drama’ in ‘Search of a Crime.’
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: 10 reasons why this impeachment ‘inquiry’ is really a coup.
1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.
Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.
2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.
3) First-term impeachment. The Clinton and Nixon inquiries were directed at second-term presidencies, when there were no more electoral remedies for alleged wrongdoing. By contrast, Trump is up for election in less than a year. Impeachment, then, seems a partisan exercise in either circumventing a referendum election or in damaging a president seeking re-election.
4) No special-counsel finding. In the past, special counsels have found felonious presidential behavior, such as cited in Leon Jaworski’s and Ken Starr’s investigations. By contrast, special counsel Robert Mueller spent 22 months and $35 million, and yet his largely partisan law and investigative team found no “collusion” and no actionable presidential obstruction of that non-crime.
5) No bipartisanship. There was broad bipartisan support for the Nixon impeachment inquiry and even some for the Clinton impeachment. There is none for the Schiff impeachment effort.
6) No high crimes or misdemeanors. There is no proof of any actual crime. Asking a foreign head of state to look into past corruption is pro forma. That Joe Biden is now Trump’s potential rival doesn’t exculpate possible wrongdoing in his past as vice president, when his son used the Biden name for lucrative gain.
In other words, it is certainly not a crime for a president to adapt his own foreign policy to fit particular countries nor to request of a foreign government with a history of corruption seeking US aid to ensure that it has not in the past colluded with prior US officials in suspicious activity.
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ROGER KIMBALL: A tale of two quids: The Democrats have decided to weaponize impeachment.
Today marks the official beginning of the Schiff Show Impeachment Follies. It is therefore fitting that I take as my text for today’s meditation Matthew 7:5: ‘Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’
What do I mean? I’ll tell you. The ostensible predicate of this spectacle is President Trump’s alleged effort to influence the 2020 election. Specifically, the allegation is that Trump made aid to Ukraine (the quid) conditional on Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden’s demand (the quo) that the prosecutor investigating a company on which his son, Hunter, sat be fired. Biden’s demand is not controverted. He bragged about it himself, in public, at the Council on Foreign Relations.
‘I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.’
Unless you haven’t been paying attention, you know that ‘quid pro quo’ is this season’s ‘Russian collusion’. A meme that is ubiquitous but also empty. Just as in yesterday’s phrase, it’s all Oakland, at least so far as Donald Trump is concerned, with respect to any quid pro quo. You can read the transcript of the president’s call with the Ukrainian president. Read it. Then take this reading comprehension quiz: What was that call about? You get a gold star if you said if you said ‘Ukrainian corruption, especially efforts by Ukrainian figures and entities to help Hillary and hurt Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle.’
Efforts to meddle in the 2016 election: that is what the call was chiefly about. Since that effort was part of a larger concern about corruption in Ukraine, Trump also asked about reports that Biden’s son Hunter was trading on his father’s name and position to peddle influence and line his pockets.
This is a subject that Adam Schiff will be at pains to avoid airing, but do not worry. It has been, and will continue, to be aired.
If you are worried about President Trump asking about Joe Biden in his telephone call to President Zelensky, what do you make of Ukraine’s efforts to aid Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump during the 2016 election? Back before ‘Ukraine’ and ‘quid pro quo’ became memes, even Politico, no friend of Donald Trump, was frank about that reality. On January 11, 2017 before Trump even took office, Politico reported that.
Now Politico is hoping you’ve forgotten that reporting.
Meanwhile, if there was a Republican version of Code Pink, it would have flooded the hearing room with clowns. But then again, the Democrats basically took care of that themselves.
h/t bigD111 & phen