For all of those hoping that hearings on impeachment will start turning things around in this country — and if they don’t, what then? — there is one thing to remember. For a certain percentage of the general public and Republicans in particular, nothing will change their minds about Trump. To expect them to react to the testimony that will be coming out, to the facts that will be revealed with anything approaching rationality is to ignore what they are.
WARNING: MAY CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE AND ERRATIC BEHAVIOR. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPERATE A DEMOCRACY WHILE INDULGING.
They are completely divorced from reality. They have their own media to tell them what they want to believe, they have a leader whose lies they swallow down without question, and they have scapegoats and conspiracy theories to excuse away things that simply don’t make sense and can’t be supported by actual facts or justified by logic. The institutions we rely on, science, history, the rule of law, even simple decent behavior is beyond them if it challenges their belief in their supreme leader and the belief system they’ve bought into.
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem. It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”
It’s a two-for: war on government and war on liberals.
And they’ve been that way for decades, going back to Reagan. Via Charles P. Pierce:
Far too many people are far too delicate about this. The Republican Party is completely mad, and it has been going in that direction for a very long time. It has been raving through all the halls of all the governments, large and small, like a lost soul with a big knife. The symptoms of the enveloping disease have been obvious for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan served up the first helping of monkey brains in 1976, when he nearly wrested the party’s nomination from Gerald Ford. It is full-blown now, and it is general throughout the Republic. The Republican Party has infected every institution with its own private insanity.
(More on this from Charles. P. Pierce here and here. It’s behind a pay wall at Esquire, which is a shame because Pierce should be required reading.)
How bad is it? David Atkins at Washington Monthly has compiled a list: The Conspiracy Theories a Conservative Must Believe Today.
The truth is out there — but it can’t get through my tinfoil hat!
As Donald Trump and his conservative defenders begin to construct a conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff personally orchestrated a massive conspiracy to entrap Trump in Ukraine, it’s worth noting just how many conspiracy theories you have to believe in just to be a standard Republican these days. Political parties in all eras have a number of questionable orthodoxies, but the sheer number of conspiracy theories that make up mainstream Republican ideology is remarkable...
Atkins goes on to list 11 ‘mainstream’ conspiracies that GOP holds as cult orthodoxy that can’t be questioned, and it gets worse:
It goes on and on. And that’s just the standard stuff you hear from most GOP politicians on any given day. It doesn’t even get into the really weird conspiracies that millions of Republican voters actively believe, like QAnon, secret 5th column communists, pedophile illuminati, etc. It also doesn’t touch the dangerously errant shibboleths like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “anyone can escape poverty if they really want to” which, while not conspiracy theories, are false articles of faith with destructive consequences.
Again, it would be one thing if these beliefs were limited to the GOP base. But it’s not just the rubes. It’s the Senators and the Representatives. It’s the President and his lawyers. They all feed from the paranoid conservative infotainment trough, which has to up the ante every year in order to make the world as it really is match up somehow with false conservative ideological orthodoxy.
emphasis added
Read The Whole Thing. When you see this all together in one place, it makes it hard to deny that the GOP has gone completely banana crackers. Which, is the big problem going forward with impeachment. Most people, the mainstream media especially, just can’t wrap their heads around this. False equivalence and both-siderism that attempts to paint both parties as different sides of the same coin — it’s as big a denial of reality as conservative orthodoxy. Matter and anti-matter would be a better comparison.
You can see the NY Times editorial board struggling with this in The Disorienting Defenses of Donald Trump; The president and his allies ask Americans to reject the evidence before their eyes.
The case for weighing the impeachment of President Trump boils down to a few simple points: In an effort to win re-election in 2020, Mr. Trump apparently attempted to extort a foreign government into announcing an investigation of his top political rival. The president did so while also trying to revive a conspiracy theory that casts doubt over whether the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Witnesses have already testified that in order to achieve those goals, Mr. Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid against the bipartisan wishes of Congress. All the while, the president and his staff have refused to cooperate with the congressional investigation into what transpired.
The Times goes on to list the ever-changing ‘explanations’ and CT theories that have been trotted out after making this straightforward statement:
Here’s a field guide to some of the lines of attack that Republicans have used so far. See if you can recognize them if they appear during the public hearings scheduled to begin this week.
To grab the headers from the piece (read the whole thing for the details), here’s what you can use to keep score:
- There was no quid pro quo.
- How could it have been a quid pro quo if the Ukrainians didn’t know about it?
- It’s all just hearsay. And the whistle-blower is a partisan Democrat.
- It was a quid pro quo. But so what? This happens all the time.
- It was a quid pro quo, but President Trump was only interested in rooting out corruption in Ukraine.
- It was a quid pro quo, but Mr. Trump had nothing to do with it.
- Fine. It was a quid pro quo. Trump ordered it. He did so for his own political benefit. The Ukrainians knew about it. That’s bad, but it’s not an impeachable offense.
- It wasn’t a real quid pro quo because the Trump administration is too disorganized to pull off such a scheme.
- “I hardly know the gentleman.”
- This is a coup by the Deep State! A decorated American soldier is a Ukrainian agent! The witnesses who have testified are “Never Trumpers”!
Possibly for space limitations, the Times editorial board omitted the whole line of attack on the Bidens, and the CT that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats working with Ukrainian hackers to attack Donald Trump and blame Russia.
What we can expect from Republicans going forward as the impeachment hearings begin is a Gish Gallop on steroids.
The Gish gallop is a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott and named after the creationist Duane Gish, who used the technique frequently against proponents of evolution.[1][2]
During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4]
In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
emphasis added
The impeachment will be about Trump — but the GOP will be on full display and in full cry. They are all complicit at this point.
Republicans will seize every opportunity to inject irrelevant issues into the hearings, waste time, create disruption, and spread confusion with bogus arguments. They will not be there for an honest inquiry into Trump’s actions; they will attempt to suppress or discredit inconvenient facts.
They are transferring one of their chief attack dogs to the House Intelligence Committee to do this.
House Republicans announced Congressman Jim Jordan as an addition to the House Intelligence Committee, replacing Congressman Rick Crawford. The pugilistic Jordan, a former wrestling coach known for his avoidance of suit jackets, has been a strong defender of President Trump as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee and a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Republican leaders in the House are hoping that Jordan can bring his combative questioning style to the first open hearings in the impeachment inquiry held by the Intelligence Committee next week...
The president will make increasingly deranged statements and unfounded accusations, like an octopus discharging ink to evade attack. (SOP for Trump — just more so.) The GOP will resort to any and every thing they can throw at impeachment to try to derail it.
Why? They really have no choice at this point. They chose power over principle long ago. They were always a cult, but they went and placed Trump at the center of it. Without Trump, they have nothing left. They have become a tribe who will fall apart without their leader.
The big problem for Democrats going forward is that this impeachment is not just about Donald Trump — it’s truly an impeachment of the entire Republican Party and everything it stands for. They have joined themselves to Trump; they will only separate from him if they see continued support as fatal to themselves — but they can’t bear to give up their grasp on power or face accountability for it.
It’s not going to be pretty. Duke’s observation in Doonesbury for 7-21-2019 should serve as a warning: Always bet on the cornered rat. In this case, we’re dealing with an entire rat pack.
Be prepared.
