The "Big Lie" or the "Fire Hose of Falsehoods?"

From November 20, 2019

What is most salient from these two days of public hearings includes Rep. Adam Schiff's closing statements from each day. In these remarks, Schiff summarizes the day's testimony from witnesses and properly classifies the subterfuge and/or desperate, disingenuous, and indignant rants/remarks from the Minority Party committee members. The chairman's remarks are also appropriately characterized as rebuttal.

On November 21, prior to the closing remarks, Schiff felt it necessary to call attention to the fact that those GOP members don't always preface their remarks by correctly stating that what they claim is not necessarily factual.

Rep. Devin Nunes and some of his henchmen, for example, make absurd claims that amount to repeated attempts to normalize "the Big Lie." Writes Cold War historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson, in a Washington Post op-ed in 2018,

From the pages of the New York Times to USA Today, the New Statesman to the New Yorker, a fear exists that the United States is about to fall under the spell of the Big Lie — a lie so big that it could disrupt the entire social order. Writers including Benjamin Wittes, Max Boot and Dinesh D’Souza have warned about the terror its return may portend. Charles Blow writes that President Trump has been “doing to political ends what Hitler did to more brutal ends: using mass deception as masterful propaganda.” ...

Yet such dread-filled treatises wrench the Big Lie from its historical context and misapply it to our own. What we should fear today is not the Big Lie but the profusion of little ones: an untallied daily cocktail of lies [not necessarily so small, but properly characterized as the Firehose of Falsehoods] prescribed not to convince of some higher singularity but to confuse, to distract, to muddy, to flood. Today’s falsehood strategy does not give us one idea to organize our thoughts, but thousands of conflicting lies to confuse them.

However, Conservative columnist and editor of The Bulwark Charles Sykes wrote this morning,

Yes, there was a quid pro quo. The president demanded it. Everybody knew about it. There was no secret.

But we knew all that didn’t we?

Kim Wehle has the highlights from yesterday’s extraordinary testimony by Gordon Sondland, who dimed out pretty much everybody in the administration from Mike Pompeo to Donald Trump.“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo?” Sondland said. “The answer is yes.”

“Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”

Boom?

I'd say so.

But let’s step back a bit here. One by one the various defenses and excuses of Trump World have been dismantled. There was no quid pro quo, the evidence is hearsay, the Ukrainians never knew about the delay in military aid … look there’s a squirrel over there.

But we knew those defenses would fall apart … and so did the GOP, because we’ve known what the story is all along. There is no mystery here. Trump’s efforts to bully Ukraine have been as subtle as a hacksaw in a surgery ward. [...]

And then, of course, Giuliani went on CNN to admit that he asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

We’ve seen the “transcript.”

Mick Mulvaney held a press conference defiantly admitting the quid pro quo.

The military aid was, in fact held up.

Key players have testified what they saw and heard.

And know we know that everyone involved in the cleanup of this mess knew what was going on. Republicans tried to make an issue of the fact that Sondland made some presumptions about the linkage between the aid and the investigations, but, frankly, you don’t have to be a Rubik’s Cube champion to figure all this out.

As George Orwell—who would be enjoying all of this enormously—once observed: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Most Republicans know this. Perhaps even Devin Nunes knows what happened. Surely Elise Stefanik, who is no fool, even though she occasionally plays one on television, knows it. So where does that leave us?

The impeachment hearings have already had more than their share of revelations and even “bombshells.” More may be on the way. The public is getting a clearer picture of the president’s willingness to subordinate national security for his political advantage. But, by now it should be clear that this process is not really about facts or evidence. It is about the GOP determination to protect Trump and maintain his hold on power.

No. Matter. What.

That is why they are so unmoved by the new revelations. They didn’t learn anything yesterday. They already knew what happened, don’t care, and see the whole process as an exercise in protecting the throne. Trump defenders will continue to shift the goalposts, because, for them, that is really the point. They will offer nonsensical, bad-faith defenses, watch them continue to be demolished, and keep moving on without blinking.

No smoking gun will change any of this, because the GOP knows the gun was fired; they know who fired it; and they know where the bodies can be found.

They just don’t care.

*****

In 2016, I participated in Maricopa County Elections Department hand count audits after (I think) three elections (Presidential Preference in March, AZ primary in August, and the general election in November). That process entails working with either one or two Republican voters to count a sampling of ballots by hand.

I asked several of the Republican voters at that time about what they expected from Trump. Most of them were optimistic that he would rise to the position and "act presidential" despite how he had conducted himself during the campaign.

One might wonder how they honestly feel about him now.