11/21/19
E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s Congressional testimony landed like a grenade yesterday, piercing the torpor of official Beltway punditry. Although a steady parade of career diplomats had soberly laid out the case that the Trump administration had engaged in a sleazy and illegal bribery scheme to force the Ukraine to announce investigations into the Bidens in exchange for military aid and a White House visit, it took Sondland’s smirking betrayal to shake the cynical belief that nothing in the hearings would fundamentally affect the outcome.
Like a rat deserting a sinking ship, Sondland tried to exonerate himself by implicating as many others as he could. Sondland asserted that Pompeo, Pence and Mulvaney all knew about the scheme, stating that, “everyone was in the loop,” (Source: “There Was A Quid Pro Quo,” by Rachael Bade, Aaron C. Davis and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post, 11/20/19). It is true that Republicans stuck to their usual denials, confident that the hermetically sealed alternate reality media bubble of Fox News would not be pierced to let the truth in. At a minimum, we got a reprieve from the theater criticism that the hearings were lacking in “pizzazz.”
Back in the fact based community, the specter of Sondland’s testimony haunted the Democratic presidential debate. Instead of a circular firing squad, the candidates “trained their fire” on the existential threat posed by Donald Trump, (Source: “With Impeachment As A Backdrop, Democrats Direct Fire at Trump in Debate,” by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, The New York Times, 11/20/19).
Sondland’s testimony yesterday, along with that of Dr. Fiona Hill today, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s earlier this week and Marie Yovanovich last week, showed more clearly than ever, the choice before us. On one side, is an immoral criminal enterprise that has hijacked the government for private pecuniary gain, used the Constitution as a floor mat and shown contempt for the quaint concepts of civil and human rights. On the other side are honest, dedicated, and decidedly unflashy civil servants who have devoted their entire lives to public service. They seek nothing more than to honor our alliances and ensure that our foreign policy actually serves our articulated national interests.
It should never have had to come to this. Even if we have forgotten the atrocities committed by this administration that have fallen off of the front page — the kids in cages at our border or the Muslim ban that has been in effect for more than two years, Trump commits a new heinous act every week, to remind us of what is at stake . A week after cutting and running on Kurds in Syria, Trump cleared three war criminals. It’s not clear who the constituency is for pardoning war criminals, but presumably the same ones who have no issue with the fact that The White House’s resident Nazi, the self-loathing Stephen Miller, is “immersed in and trafficking in white supremacist ideology,” (Source: “Stephen Miller And White Supremacy,” Weekend Edition Transcript of Interview of Kathleen Belew by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR.org, 11/17/19).
For a group that is quick to dehumanize everyone who is nonwhite and crow about their vaunted superiority, they reveal themselves, over and over again, to be uncivilized knuckle draggers trafficking in hatred and violence. We didn’t need Sondland’s smirking, smoking gun to know the choice before us. When it comes to combating Trump and his ilk, as Benjamin Franklin said, “we must indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” These Barbarians will make sure of it.