Up The Hill

Fiona Hill (below) was certainly impressive in her testimony on how American national security was diverted to help Trump with domestic politics and how it should never have been allowed to happen, and she was just as impressive in withstanding attacks on her loyalty to the United States just because she was born and raised in England.  She was especially forceful in refuting the bogus charge that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton, a charge that Trump has embraced.  She and her fellow witnesses also made it clear that Joe Biden and his son did nothing wrong regarding business with Ukraine. 

"The Russians’ interests are frankly to de-legitimatize our entire presidency," she told House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff.  "The goal of the Russians [in 2016] was really to put whoever became the president - by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale - under a cloud."

And yet, none of this matters one iota.

Voters who want to hear more about what the government is going to do about them and their own concerns have pretty much stopped caring about the impeachment inquiry, assuming they ever did.  Or, as I said at the start of the month, meh.  Not only has interest in the inquiry waned, so has interest in impeachment.  Independents have turned against it, and voters in swing states have followed suit.  Democrats are suddenly in danger of losing the 2020 presidential election for going after Trump. 

Trump voters simply believe that their guy did nothing wrong.  They do, however, believe that the Bidens did something wrong, which is why they'll be pleased to know that the Republican Senate is launching an investigation of them.  And the Republicans in Congress have paid no heed to Dr. Hill's insistence that the story about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election is a fake - they're looking into it in hopes of finding something.  Because why should anyone listen to Dr. Hill - "That Limey bitch, what does she know?"

Maybe Adam Schiff should ask what the naming Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, knows.  It seems he went to Vienna to meet a now-discredited Ukrainian prosecutor to dig up dirt on the Bidens, even though he's supposed to be an impartial as ranking member of the House intelligence Committee. Lev Parnas, the recently indicted Soviet-born American who was working with Rudolph Giuliani to push the story of corruption in Ukraine caused in part by Democrats, is ready and willing to tell everyone about it.

But hey, if no one cares, because the economy is doing so damn well . . .

The House Intelligence Committee hearings are over, and so, quite frankly is any hope of getting enough people concerned about Trump's actions to ensure his defeat in the 2020 election.  To sum up: Legally, the impeachment hearings have been a success for the Democrats.  Politically, they have been a flop.

Of Heaven's Gate proportions.

They Chose Not To

The Republican majority on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee could have opted to refrain from making incendiary charges against the FBI in the midst of the Russia investigation investigating Russian interference in our election, which could possibly implicate Donald Trump in collusion with Putin.  They chose not to.   

House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), who wrote the Republican majority's memo charging abuse of power by the FBI and the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and bias based on using a dossier prepared in part for the Democratic National Committee by a British intelligence expert named Christopher Steele, could have kept the document classified even when the rest of the committee's Republican members wanted to release it.  He also could have acknowledged that the surveillance court's actions emanated from that start of an investigation of Trump ally Carter Page and the Russian contacts he allegedly made after Page left the Trump campaign.  He chose not to. 

The Democratic minority wrote a rebuttal that Nunes could havedeclassified simultaneously in the interest of balance.  But Nunes chose not to.

The Democrats could leak their memo. They will likely choose not to.

The media could explain all this in layman's terms so that schmucks like I, schlubs who are completely clueless about intelligence issues, can put it in proper context.  They chose not to.  (I was watching CNN as I wrote this; I still can't figure it out.)      

Trump could have avoided a possible constitutional crisis by refusing to let the memo go through.  He chose not to.

The Republican Party is so much in disarray over all of this, but meanwhile, the Democrats can't get their act together either.  As all this was going on, Trump gave his first State of the Union address, and Democrats could have ensured that Representative Joseph Kennedy III's official Democratic response was the only Democratic response.  The Democrats chose not to; there were four other responses, including one from non-Democrat Bernie Sanders.  Representative Kennedy could have decided to eschew the party's lame "Better Deal" slogan in his remarks.  He chose not to. 

The Democratic Party could nominated someone for President who could have defeated Trump and allowed America to avoid all of this . . . 

  . . . but it chose not to.

"Can I get thirty seconds?"