The Washington Post enumerated 26 separate and moving defenses to Trump's Ukraine aid crime:Speak “truth to power”—this is how most people standing up to the constant disinformation and bullying of the Trump administration may have once reasonably described their task. Increasingly, though, that work is being honed and refined into something a bit more complicated: speaking truth to nonsense.
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It’s not, by any means, that the power imbalance is irrelevant anymore. If anything, the power differential between President Donald Trump and those seeking to hold him to account is more chilling than ever: Trump has pressed the entire Justice Department (including new threats of abusing its policing powers) into service to protect his interests above those of the nation, the White House counsel currently serves as his personal lawyer, the foreign service and the military are being purged of experts and patriots, and Senate Republicans have debased themselves to the point that they are openly peddling debunked Russian propaganda in his service.
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Also axiomatic is the fact that, frequently, it is women who have come forward, in droves, to speak truth to that power, or to nonsense, or, perhaps most accurately, to the nonsense that feeds his power. From Sally Yates to E. Jean Carroll to April Ryan to Greta Thunberg to Fiona Hill to the undocumented housekeepers who used to work at his properties, it is often women who have stood up to say “No” to this president.
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On Wednesday, professor Pamela Karlan was the only woman testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s panel on the constitutional framework for impeachment. (Disclosure: Karlan is a friend.) Her presentation was so effective and so crystal clear that House Republicans, of whom all but two were men, were too afraid to question her on history or doctrine, opting for personal threats and shouting instead. Ranking member Rep. Doug Collins suggested in his opening remarks that she hadn’t read the witness transcripts (she had). Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., shouted at her about her campaign donations as well as a joke she made on a podcast. When she attempted to respond to his claims that she was “mean,” he shouted, “Excuse me, you don’t get to interrupt me on this time.” When Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., asked all of the constitutional law professors whom they had voted for in the 2016 election, it was Karlan who shot back that Americans still enjoy the right to a secret ballot. Rep. Jim Jordan just used his time to scream.
But everyone really agreed to melt down when Karlan referenced the name of the president’s youngest son, Barron, to make a point about the difference between monarchs and presidents. Yes, she used it in a bit of wordplay, and yes, people laughed, but, no, it was not a targeted attack on a child—it was a targeted attack on claims of monarchic powers. But let’s be honest. Whether Karlan had done a joke about the British nobility, or Ninja Turtles, or diet soda, the rage machine at the White House would have singled her out for vivisection, just as it did with Hill, who didn’t make a joke, or Yovanovitch, who also didn’t make a joke. [...] The rage machine, in coordination with the White House spokeswoman (who does not do press conferences) and Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, finds their rabid talking point and repeats it and tweets it until there’s nothing left, until absolutely no fact, or statistic, or idea, can cut through the dry-ice fog it creates. (Tucker Carlson started Wednesday night’s news show with “This lady needs a shrink” and “What a moron.”) In the end, Karlan apologized for her pun, because Republicans, who put children in freezing cages at the border and leave them to die, told her she was the one being mean to children.
It is worth recalling that Karlan—like Fiona Hill before her, and Yovanovitch before her, and Thunberg, and Carroll, and Karen McDougal, and Christine Blasey Ford, and Debbie Ramirez, and Sandra Diaz, and Lisa Page, and all the other women who have subjected themselves to the raging Trump campaign of abuse—was simply speaking the truth.
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The truth does not really have a place in this administration.
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The evidence that Donald Trump has, on several occasions, conditioned foreign aid on domestic political favors is now so unequivocal that Republicans have advanced three dozen alternate defenses for it, without even attempting to coordinate a theory beyond the Russian propaganda line upon which they now seem to have settled. Any attempts to pierce the logic of that illogic is pointless, which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has no option other than to keep seeking and speaking truth into the factual void. Doug Collins somehow kept up his refrain on Wednesday that nobody in the room could agree on the most elementary facts, even as every single fact witness (including those selected by the GOP) and every single legal expert (including one selected by the GOP) agrees substantially on all of the material facts surrounding the Ukraine transaction.
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These women all know they’re being catapulted into the epistemological wood chipper, and that, if they’re lucky, the death threats and the violence directed at them and their families will eventually subside. But this is about much more than speaking truth to power—in its own way, speaking truth to nonsense is even more important. Power is immune to truth-tellers these days, but history may not be. And women have had centuries of experience in what happens when you let the gaslighters win.
Slate
- The July 25th call to Zelensky was appropriate
- There was no quid pro quo
- The call was inappropriate but not impeachable
- Trump was merely expressing his opinion on the call
- Even if there was a quid pro quo, it wasn't a corrupt quid pro quo
- Even if there was a quid pro quo, it's done all the time
- Trump didn't now about the quid pro quo
- Trump is incapable of a forming a quid pro quo
- Trump wasn't serious when he publicly asked Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens
- Interpretations of Trump's actions are mere differences of opinion
- The whistleblower complaint was based on hearsay
- The whistleblower complaint was inaccurate
- The whistleblower has a political bias
- The whistleblower is part of the deep state
- The impeachment inquiry is a secret and unfair process
- Trump wasn't afforded his due-process rights
- Ukraine said there was no pressure
- Ukraine didn't agree to the investigations
- Ukraine didn't know the security aid was held up
- Ukraine ultimately got the aid
- Impeachment is a coup d'etat
- Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from the moment he was inaugurated
- Sondland never directly heard Trump mention Ukrainian security aid
- It's the media's fault
- Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election
- The impeachment inquiry is moving too quickly
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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