By Chris Satullo
My original plan for today was to deliver calm, sober analysis of some serious policy matter unto y’all.
Yeah…no.
When evidence that a huge chunk of the nation has lost its ever-loving mind keeps bubbling, foaming and spurting all over the place, calm and sober just won’t cut it. Let me try urgent and pungent.
Our political realm is a daily gusher of crazy that’s so overwhelming it’s addled even the judgment of many voters and journalists who remain basically sane. For example:
Yes, Joe Biden is freaking old. We get it, CNN and New York Times, even without you bringing it up approximately 87 times a day. Yes, he sometimes forgets people’s names and loses the thread of long anecdotes (stuff, by the way, he also did when he was 50). That might matter mightily if the alternative on offer was Jed Bartlett in his Notre Dame sweatshirt or Elizabeth McCord in her signature silk blouse. But our option here is not some real-life version of a Hollywood dreamboat POTUS.
No, it’s the fat, red-faced guy who’s just three years younger than Joe and now looks perpetually on the verge of a transitory ischemic attack. Who, to boot, has been spewing incoherent word salad at us since the moment he came down that escalator. And, to the degree we can follow the stuff he’s saying, it’s violent (increasingly so), vindictive, ignorant, proudly corrupt and chock-full o’ lies.
Yeah, sure, America, let’s give that guy the lead in the polls, because, hey, Biden is too old. Remember: If Joe age’s is the football goal line, Donald Trump is just one Philadelphia Eagles “tush push” away from that line.
Want to support a candidate who’s standing closer to midfield? There are a couple, but they’re all polling around where I would if I were in the race. Sad to say, we likely face a binary choice: ol’ Joe vs. a deranged criminal bent on vengeance.
Even though Joe is octogenarian and not exactly Abe Lincoln as an orator, a sane nation would grasp that he’s had a first term any incumbent would be happy to run on: A pandemic tamed, a predictable flare of inflation countered ably while keeping unemployment low, industrial investment soaring, an end to ostrich strategy on climate change, and Ukraine deftly bolstered against vile Russian attack without sending American troops into harm’s way.
But, ah, Ukraine. Nowhere is the bizarro nature of our current politics more vivid than there. The Republican party, once the party of adamant resistance to Russian imperialism – the party of Joe McCarthy, Sputnik panic and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” – now noisily refuses to support a democratic ally that’s fending off an unprovoked Russian invasion.
What’s the one thing that Kevin “We Hardly Knew Ye” McCarthy couldn’t get his crazy caucus to include in the budget package that, for the moment, averted a government shutdown? A mere $300 million in additional aid to Ukraine.
That’s an upside-down-world, what-is-happening?! twist worthy of Stranger Things or a Jordan Peele nightmare plot: The party of Barry Goldwater now openly roots for Vladimir Putin to lap up the blood of Kyiv.
Some of this is just blind partisan sickness: Ukraine shows Biden to be a masterful coalition builder on the world stage – which undercuts Fox News’ Joe is senile! shtick. And, my goodness, that can’t be allowed, so no more money for Ukraine.
But, in some precincts of the right, it’s even worse than that: The party formerly known as the GOP, now a Trump cult, is no longer the sworn foe of Slavic authoritarians. In fact, it kinda digs them. Putin’s penchant for committing war crimes, for imprisoning his enemies (or poisoning them or tossing them out of airplanes)…for some on the right, all that is a feature, not a bug. They want Trump unleashed to give some of that a try here.
Next up on the cult’s agenda, if its House members can ever manage to park their clown car close enough to the Capitol to pull off the vote, is the impeachment of Biden. Deep down, the high crime and misdemeanor for which they’re really mad at Joe is this: He actually won the last election, which turned Trump into a relentlessly demented pain in their collective ass.
A tit for tat impeachment of Biden is one of the Orange One’s non-negotiable demands of the House members he regards as his gofers. They’re trying oh-so-hard to comply. Just one problem: Their attempts to uncover a high crime they can pin on Joe are far more of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther than of Benoit Blanc in The Glass Onion.
Let me stipulate right now that Biden’s son, Hunter, has been a sleaze who sought to make a bundle trading on his father’s name. But, gee, who does that remind you of? Oh, yeah, Trump’s two sons, Eric and Donald Jr., with the singular exception that they likely did what they did with their father’s explicit approval. (Let us not even get into son-in-law Jared Kushner, who made a taxpayer-funded, lame-duck “diplomatic” trip to the Middle East in December 2020, then six months later stuffed $2 billion in Saudi blood money into his deep pockets. This graft has such breathtaking scale that it makes Hunter – and Jared’s bumbling brothers-in-laws – look like pikers.)
A quick word or two on the history of presidential impeachments:
Andrew Johnson, who rose unready to the presidency after Lincoln was assassinated, was probably a drunk and definitely a jerk. He tried to slow-walk Reconstruction, a not-good stance. But his impeachment was nonsense, a policy dispute that Radical Republicans took nuclear. Johnson was properly acquitted by the Senate.
Fast forward a century. People forget that Richard Nixon was never formally impeached. He subjected us to one last awkward, suit-wrinkling double-V hand gesture, hopped on a helicopter and fled town before the full House could take the vote. Still, that was the first impeachment inquiry with true meat on the bone; plenty of people went to prison for breaking real laws at Nixon’s urging.
Two decades later, Bill Clinton was a horndog and a pig. The record shows that I wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial saying he should resign for what he did to Monica Lewinsky; I’ve still got the scars on my back to show how well that went down with my liberal friends. Decades later, it belatedly became clear to some of them that, among white males who deserved a MeToo reckoning, Clinton sits a bit closer to the Harvey Weinstein end of the spectrum than the Al Franken one. That said, his moral sins did not amount to high crimes against the Constitution and his impeachment was a blatant – and sadly predictive – act of hypocrisy by a GOP majority schooled in permanent partisan warfare by Newt Gingrich.
With all that in mind, here’s the key point:
Trump is not only the first president to be impeached twice. He’s also the only one to have been impeached for utterly sound cause.
The facts in his first go-round, about his betrayal of Ukraine, were a bit hard to parse, but they still amounted to a violation of his constitutional duties as commander-in-chief. The second impeachment was, by a very long country mile, the worst sequence of actions by any American president ever. We’d better pray it remains the worst going forward. If not, we’ll have ceased to be a democratic republic.
Which makes the Republicans’ button-button-who’s-got-the-button? search for something, anything, to fuel a Biden impeachment all the more pathetic and outrageous.
My favorite moment of the House Oversight Committee’s disastrous first day of impeachment hearings came when Missouri congressman Jason Smith gave a news conference to brag about the “700 pages” of evidence that had been released by the GOP caucus that day. As one smoking gun, he highlighted a 2017 WhatsApp message by Hunter Biden. The message’s meaning actually was murky, but even more important: Joe Biden was neither vice president nor president in 2017. Whatever Biden did or did not know about how his son was pimping his family name, that could not be an impeachable act, because Biden wasn’t in office at the time.
When a reporter pointed out this little problem in “the case,” it was clear that had never occurred to Smith. He mumbled about not being an “expert on the timeline.” Yes, Jason, we can see that.
Smith also cited an email by a Justice Department attorney as a sign of double-tiered preferential treatment of Biden…except the email was written while Trump was president and Bill Barr was attorney general. Yes, Jason, do brush up on that timeline before you face the media again.
Smith kept falling back on “700 pages, 700 pages” as his mantra to insinuate Biden did something illegal. Well, Mein Kampf is 720 pages of egregious, disturbing stuff, too, but it contains absolutely no proof that Joe Biden committed high crimes and misdemeanors. And I’m willing to bet that neither do Jason Smith’s beloved 700.
—
Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia