It's been a while since we went Out and About with Jiminy Glick, so it's time to rectify that. Here he is with Ellen DeGeneres, sort of mid-career in 2003-- she'd done her first sitcom and just started her second, so it's right before her talk show began.. What's notable too is that more than most guests, she clearly has a hard time to keep from laughing.
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I'm beginning to understand the Republican base better. After listening to three days of Trump's lawyers talking, I feel like I got more stupid with each passing word until they finally ended. I now have an idea what it must be like listening to "Fox News" and Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Michael Savage all the time.
It was quite a remarkable thing. I sort of expect lying from these above and from Trump with his 16,241 lies documented by the Washington Post. And I expected Trump's lawyer to deflect attention and spin stories, but -- as lawyers in a trial setting in front of the freaking Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, I really, truly honestly didn't expect them to actually lie. And worse, to knowingly push literal Russian propaganda. And of course they know it's a lie to say that Ukraine may have hacked the 2016 election, because they're not Trump, and because Putin didn't tell them, and because they're not total idiots, and because they know every U.S. intelligence agency says that Ukraine didn't. Yet push that Russian-driven misinformation like Russian dupes -- or "useful idiots" as the Russian term goes -- they did. And repeating what can only be describes as lies that had been contradicted under oath during the House impeachment hearing, and which news story reported very clearly -- like the evidence that Ukraine knew long before Trump's phone call that U.S. aid was being withheld. And that Republicans didn't have access to the "secret" impeachment depositions. (They did, they got to ask as many questions as Democrats did, and the transcripts of it all were released.) And that Trump wasn't given an opportunity to have his lawyers cross-examine witnesses in the House impeachment hearings. (He was, but turned it down.) And that Adam Schiff intentionally misquoted Trump in the House impeachment hearings. (He didn't, he made very clear that he was paraphrasing Trump for dramatic effect.) And more. Much more. And again, to be clear, this isn't lying to the press or the American public (which is Not a Good Thing, even though life under Trump tries to normalize it). This is lawyers lying during a trial presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But beyond the lies and Russian propaganda, it was three days of mischaracterizations, distractions, deflections, subverting and mind-numbing journeys into charges so deeply off-topic (like suggesting that former President Barack Obama should be the one on trial, for some unexplained, albeit bizarre reason) and convoluted legal theories so twisted that even they themselves noted that most legal scholars don't agree. On and on and on and on they went, defending Rudy Giuliani for a quarter of an hour, rising in angst again Hunter Biden who -- it must be stated, since Republicans opted not to -- is not an elected official, is not a government worker, and is not involved with politics in any way other than birth, but is just a private citizen, yet apparently aggrieved Trump so much that it caused him to try to get a foreign nation involved in investigating him, though clearly not aggrieved enough for Trump or any Republican elected official to ever once ask the U.S. Justice Department or any GOP-led Senate committee to investigate him or even raise a single concern, until his father announced his candidacy to run against Trump. On and on and on it all went, as you could feel the effort doing its best to make you feel as stupid as possible. Thank heavens that God created the mute button, and that the Senate had to take periodic breaks, and that it would always adjourn and come to an end each day, rather than have the Senate equivalent of All Night Radio. And thankfully too I actually followed the news before the trial, so I was able to say, "Hmm, wait, no, that isn't true" and keep a solid, grounded foundation through it all. To be clear, I am certain Republicans were bothered by the 21 hours of Democratic House Manager opening statements. But that reaction was generally based on disagreeing with it, insisting there wasn't enough evidence to prove the case, believing that the charges weren't impeachable. It was not because Democrats were lying, were delivering Russian propaganda, were going off on empty tangents that had nothing to do with the Articles of Impeachment, and weren't presenting facts germane to the case. Two totally different matters. One -- we don't agree with you. The other -- see if you can come through this hell hole of head-banging digressions, misdirections, obfuscations and lies with your view of reality intact. But I came through it, fortunately. Yes, there's more to go, but the speeches are over. And I survived. And came away with a deeper understanding of why so much of the Republican base is the way it is. If this is what you listen to throughout the day, every day, day after day for weeks and years, it explains the results of the 2012 study by Farleigh Dickinson University that showed people who watch Fox News knew less about current events than people who don't watch any TV news at all. It explains the results. What it does not do is excuse them. Let's check in and head back down to New Zealand for another of those oddball and absolutely wonderful in-flight safety videos for Air New Zealand. This one is called "Safety Old School Style" and stars Betty White, along with some guests. I believe that at yesterday's Senate trial we saw the end result of Trump driving away top lawyers from representing him.
How bad was it? It wasn't so much that they didn't make a compelling case to defend their client, but after about six hours of talking they pretty much didn't make any case. Indeed, as I watched for much of the day, I felt less like a potential juror and more like I should be taking notes as a 1-A law student because there would be a test when the class lessens from guest lecturers were over. The presentation by Trump lawyer Jane Raskin to defend Rudy Giuliani was especially weird. In fact, it was compelling in its weirdness. She spoke about the former mayor for 15 minutes, using her entire time. At first I thought that it was Giuliani who was on trial, but then I realized that that matter is under investigation by the U.S. Attorney in New York, not the U.S. Senate.. Perhaps it was done as a sort of moot court, trying out a test run in case he ends up being indicted. Or maybe the Trump team had nothing else for Ms. Raskin to talk about, since facts to defend Trump was clearly not in their gameplan. The biggest problem though wasn't that it had nothing to do with defending Trump, It's that she made Giuliani look guilty. It was Ken Starr's lecture on the History of Impeachment, however, which might cause the most trouble on the final exam. I lost the thread when he got to bemoaning the "era of impeachment" and began explaining how divisive and polarizing impeachment is. The best I could do to make sense of what point he was trying to make was by comforting myself that he's an expert on making impeachment divisive and polarizing, and therefore knew what he was talking about. Still, hypocrisy has it's limits, and I kept thinking too that this is the same guy who was fired as president and chancellor of Baylor University for his handling of a sex abuse scandal there. However, realizing that that made him the ideal lawyer for Trump got me focused once again. We also got dissertations from Trump attorneys Eric Herschman and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (you know, the one who took a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump before dropping a lawsuit against Trump University) who both tried to make the impeachment trial about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, rather than actually defend their client. The only significant difference in their presentations is that Mr. Herschmann also chose to use his time to argue that former President Barack Obama is who should be impeached. No, really. Thank goodness he didn't also drag in Hillary Clinton's emails. The one good thing about the lesson repeated all day by the Trump lawyers lecturing on the concept of what impeachment means today from its foundation in English law is that I think I can now handle an essay question on the subject if it shows up on the test. Mind you, I'm still not quite sure if I follow their attempts to explain why "abuse of power" is not an impeachable offense, since "abuse of power" was, actually, used as an impeachable offense in the charges against Bill Clinton and in the Judiciary Committee charges voted against Richard Nixon (who of course resigned before the articles could be voted on by the full House). For that matter, it also wasn't made clear why all the Trump lawyers were trying to argue that impeachment requires an underlying crime when -- at the time the impeachment clause was written into the U.S. Constitution -- there were no "underlying crimes" yet since the U.S. legal code didn't even exist. The first federal law wouldn't be written for another two years! Still, Alan Dershowitz did a scholarly job explaining didactically how laws work, although his verbal gymnastics unfortunately got too convoluted when explaining that a judicial ruling he wanted to use as precedent was "right" when it supported his position, but "wrong" in the part where it didn't. And admittedly he got a bit lost in the woods trying to explain why his opinion today on impeachment is hypocritically different from 20 years ago, since he doesn't say he was "wrong" 20 years ago, just that he apparently learned more, even though the result is pretty much the opposite. I guess that I can use either version on the test since he says they're both correct. With so much to study from the professors, I was at least happy to know that nothing about John Bolton would be asked about on the exams because he wasn't even mentioned once until Professor Dershowitz sneaked him at the end of his lecture at the end of the day. I suspect that Trump was happy about that, too -- especially since Dershowitz's point was that even if Bolton's allegations -- of Trump having extorted Ukraine for personal benefit against a political opponent to help subvert the 2020 election -- were true, the act supposedly wasn't impeachable. In the end, I didn't learn anything at all about why Trump wasn't guilty of committing the illegal acts he was charged with, but the good news is that I do think I have enough notes on the history of our legal system to get a passing grade. I'm not sure if I'll get more than a C+ since all I can do is respond by rote and not make analytical sense of what was said, however I do feel confident that I could not go into court and help convict Rudy Giuliani.
I don't think that I would particularly describe this as "calm and serene," but more probably as a dog observing everything around him and deciding to just have "pure, adulterated fun."
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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