Michelle Goldberg at The NY Times has taken the time to put together the GOP case for impeaching President Biden. Here’s a link through the paywall:
* Apparently this headline was too edgy for the Gray Lady — the digital edition has changed it to read “Republicans Are Resurrecting Trump’s Burisma Lie”. SMH. The very first sentence of Goldberg’s opinion piece states it in no uncertain terms.
“When House Republicans return from their recess this fall, they’re likely to have an item on their agenda besides pushing the government toward shutdown: impeaching Joe Biden.”
If you are not a consumer of rightwing media like FOX, if you aren’t spending any time down the internet rabbit-holes of CT, if you don’t listen to talk radio, you may not realize how much effort Republicans have put into building a narrative of lies, distortions, and alternative facts for months now. (They were discussing the possibility of impeaching Biden even before the 2020 presidential election.) As indictments pile up against Trump, as their radical disruption in the House gets them no traction, as their draconian assault on women, trans people, teachers, etc. raise alarm, they need something to deflect attention elsewhere while they cater to their MAGA base and their billionaire owners.
Part of it is to simply destroy Bidens’ ability to lead the country. Part of it is to rewrite the history of Trump’s criminal behavior. Part of it is to create a larger alternative narrative where Republicans are the real victims here and only they can be trusted to defeat the “deep state”, the “woke agenda”, or whatever other boogey men they want to use to make people angry and afraid. Part of it is to justify their upcoming plans to set down the government and hold the country hostage until their demands are met.
And part of it is because Republicans want to make sure no one ever holds them to account for anything without paying a price.
Here’s some excerpts from Goldberg:
...Given McCarthy’s very thin margins in the House, he may not have the votes to begin a process some of his members are dreading. Nevertheless, with the Republican base clamoring for impeachment, McCarthy has clearly signaled it’s a live possibility. Which raises a question: Impeachment for what?
This is less obvious than it should be, at least if you’re not immersed in the Fox News cinematic universe. Democrats are largely tuning out the House’s lurid and shambolic investigatory hearings, which have so far featured photos of a naked Hunter Biden and a much-hyped star witness who turned out to be a fugitive indicted on charges of, among other things, arms trafficking and acting as an unregistered Chinese agent. Behind this circus, however, is something rather astonishing: A major part of the pretext for a possible impeachment of Joe Biden is exactly the same set of lies about Ukraine that helped convince Democrats to impeach Donald Trump the first time.
It’s all about projection. Republicans are trying to project their own bad behavior on Democrats and make them the villains.
Nevertheless, there is a sort of logic to House Republicans’ impeachment plans. Part of their motivation, Raskin argues, is an attempt to ensure that Trump isn’t the only 2024 candidate carrying the stigma of impeachment. More than that, by impeaching Biden for Burisma, they’d be signaling that Trump, as president, would have been justified in asking Zelensky to investigate Biden. Republicans may not be able to expunge Trump’s impeachments, which the ex-president is reportedly demanding. But they could retroactively try to excuse the behavior that led to the first one.
And since the Republican aim is getting revenge and sowing confusion, rather than actually proving high crimes and misdemeanors, they may be able to use the obscurity of the allegations — and the need to plunge down various rabbit holes to understand them — to their advantage. Rather than make a specific case, Republicans are trying to foment the cynical sense that scandal surrounds Biden just as it does Trump. The point is not to hold anyone accountable for actual wrongdoing, but to parody the process of trying.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing by Goldberg because it’s a good summary of the ‘facts’ Republicans will be tossing around. From a certain point of view, an actual impeachment would be irrelevant; the true-believers of the Right in MAGA America have already accepted this as ‘Gospel Truth’, want Biden’s head, and want to erase Democrats and their legacy from America.
They forget nothing and they learn nothing.
How It Works:
I’m bringing Goldberg’s essay up because it complements the story by Kerry Eleveld: Go ahead and impeach Biden, House Republicans. See you in 2024. Her post includes links to several articles laying out the GOP rationale for pursuing impeachment — although calling it a ‘rationale’ doesn’t really described just how factually, ethically, and morally bankrupt the whole thing is.
They’re preparing to take the GOP House shit-show to a whole new level because that’s all they’ve got. The plan is to keep throwing stuff out there to see what sticks and carry out Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone with shit”.
While watching the news coverage of Steve Bannon’s initial appearance in federal court on Monday, I kept thinking about his 2018 confession to the acclaimed writer Michael Lewis. His quote is like a compass that orients this crazy era of American politics. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
It’s not just the media that’s being targeted — it’s everyone who is trying to figure out what’s going on. The end goal isn’t just to push a particular narrative. It’s to make it impossible for people to know what to believe. It’s a refinement of the Big Lie technique. Repeat something loudly enough, often enough, and it becomes accepted as ‘truth’ — or people stop pushing back against it. Eventually they become unable to tell what is truth and what are lies. As Hannah Arendt put it:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Arendt’s analysis is all the more relevant in the way it captures how MAGA America operates these days. It doesn’t help that the media is reflexively self-flooding when it comes to GOP shit. (See the note about the headline above.) Decades of attacks on the press for “liberal media bias” have conditioned them to ‘behave’ or else. The conditioning process is being extended to convert education into indoctrination, with attacks on teachers, public schools, and higher education.
Reality vs. Shit
One of the basic principles of a functioning democracy is that it rests on citizens working out their differences of opinion by debating facts, considering evidence, and reaching logical conclusions for action on the basis of a shared understanding of the world in which they live. As I said in a comment on Eleveld’s post, expanded a bit here:
There’s this thing about being part of the reality-based community. We like to make decisions and act on facts, evidence, and logical reasoning. That’s not how it works for Republicans.
Remember this quote?
I'm talking, of course, about the statement about the "reality-based community." Here it is in its entirety:
The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [The New York Times Magazine]
Like most people who read that passage when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before Bush's re-election in October 2004, I scoffed. So much hubris! So much delusion! No wonder these bozos invaded Iraq and made such a mess of the place!
As in Iraq, so in America. But it’s not a “new reality” — it’s a fantasy because reality is antithetical to all cults, and conservatism in America is nothing but a collection of cult beliefs these days.
People trying to deal with the GOP as a political party would do better to treat them like they would 7th Day Adventists, Scientologists, and believers in the Gospel of Ayn Rand. As Neil deGrasse Tyson observed:
You can’t use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they didn’t use reason to get into.
It’s possible to have “sincerely held beliefs” and act on them — but Reality with a capital R doesn’t care what someone believes. When the gap between beliefs and facts becomes too great to sustain, it doesn’t end well.