While the banana Republicans prepare to exonerate their guilty boss, let’s hit pause on this historic Senate sham and behold its most perverse subplot:
Trump was on trial because he wanted Ukraine to announce a fake probe into the fake charge that Joe and Hunter Biden had done something corrupt over there. So guess what happened next: Trump’s Senate supplicants defended him by weaponizing the fake charge that Joe and Hunter Biden had done something corrupt over there.
Say what you will about the Trumpists – we’ve long exhausted our adjectives – but one thing is clear: They know how to stay On Message. The authoritarian playbook decrees that opponents shall be smeared as corrupt (regardless of whether the allegations are vague or fake); therefore, the lies about the Bidens shall be repeated as mantras during the primary season.
The whole purpose of this strategy is to sow fear in the grassroots Democratic ranks, to stop Joe from winning the nomination. The Trumpists want primary voters to say, “We can’t nominate Joe, because if we do, they’ll pound him and Hunter the same way they hammered on Hillary’s emails!” And even though the Trumpists are blatantly lying – Joe as veep did not force the firing of a Ukraine prosecutor in order to shield his son from an investigation that was, in truth, not happening – grassroots Democrats know all too well that gullible Americans swallow lies like candy.
Indeed, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst gave the game away earlier this week after one of Trump’s lawyers repeated the lies during the trial. She told the press: “Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening. And I’m really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus-goers. Will they be supporting Vice President Biden at this point?”
Ernst and her impeached leader clearly hope to erode that support. And why is that? Why is Trump flunky Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, paying for an anti-Biden ad in faraway Iowa, an ad larded with the same lies?
It’s because they fear Biden as a general election opponent. They’re trying to game the Democratic race because they’d much prefer to run against Bernie Sanders – for good reason, because they’d gleefully market Sanders’ socialism as a clear and present danger, and I agree with their belief that Trump would win re-election in a walk.
So they’ll simply reiterate the lies that got Trump into trouble in the first place. As evidenced by Scott’s ad, they’ll keep saying that Joe successfully pushed the firing of a Ukraine prosecutor who was targeting Hunter and the gas company on whose board he served. The truth – which has been documented over and over – is that Joe, as vice president, was acting in his official capacity (with unified support from the international community) to force the removal of a slacker who was not prosecuting Ukraine corruption. And Burisma, the gas company, was not being investigated at that time.
The Obama administration’s mission, which Joe was tasked to implement, was to compel Ukraine’s budding democracy to get tough on corruption. That was even the subject of congressional hearings in 2016; none of the Republican senators raised any objections. The GOP ran Congress in 2016, but it held no hearings about Burisma. Granted, Hunter’s decision to join the gas company board was stupid – Joe recently conceded, “it looked bad that he was there” – but no Republican assailed it, nor did Trump, until the ’19 polls tapped Joe as a formidable election foe.
There’s a potential upside to all this. Believe it or not.
Regardless of how Democrats feel about Joe – and it’s clear he has many detractors – they should all be pleased that the fake narrative has failed (thus far) to crash his candidacy. Among Democrats, he was polling in the mid-20s last year before he announced his bid, and he’s still in the mid-20s. In advance of Iowa’s Monday night caucus, he’s even wearing Trump’s smear as a badge of honor that boosts his electability pitch (“he is scared to death to run against me”).
Will it work? Trump’s whole strategy, best articulated by ex-aide Steve Bannon, is “to flood the zone with shit,” to create a fog of disinformation so dense that citizens shrink from the task of separating facts from lies. The Hunter-Burisma narrative is Exhibit A. We can only hope that Joe is up to the challenge.
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And by the way: If the Democrats can’t chant “rigged acquittal” from now until November, they belong in a museum with the Whigs.