On today’s BradCast: A few holiday morsels that we hope may come in handy over your Thanksgiving weekend with friends and family. [Audio link to show follows below.]
Donald Trump, along with his cowardly Republican apparatchik and dishonest rightwing media machine, have all been busy pretending over the past several days that the first two weeks of public impeachment hearings in the U.S. House Intelligence Committee were somehow “a disaster for Democrats.” Even mainstream corporate media have been helpful in spreading that fake news.
Polling, however (among other things), suggests the opposite — unless 50% majority support for impeachment and removal of the President of the United State from office, according to CNN [PDF], and steadily increasing support for impeachment over each week of public hearings, according to Reuters/Ipsos, is somehow “a disaster for Democrats”.
By way of comparison, at the height of Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, support for the GOP effort among Americans was never higher than 29%. And yet, 50% want Trump out already, after just two weeks of public testimony. (It took nearly a year of impeachment inquiry before the worst evidence against Richard Nixon even became apparent, by the way.)
At the same time, even since the first round of hearings concluded last week, there has been a constant drip, drip, drip of increasingly damning information against the President, shoring up an already overwhelming amount of evidence that Trump directed a quid pro quo bribery scheme against Ukraine by withholding a White House meeting and hundreds of millions in military aid in exchange for the announcement of a Ukraine investigation into his 2020 political rival Joe Biden and a debunked, nonsensical theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton, not Trump.
In just the few hours since our previous BradCast, newly released testimony from a top official in the White House Office of Management and Budget reveals that two OMB officials quietly resigned over the summer due, at least in part, to their concerns about the legality of Trump’s order to withhold Congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine for personal political purposes.
Also, the New York Times has reported that Trump had been briefed about the complaint from the whistleblower that kicked off this impeachment inquiry before he finally unfroze military aid for Ukraine in September. Moreover, that report helps to explain Trump’s strange insistence to his EU Ambassador that “there is no quid pro quo!” long before the phrase had even made it into the public discussion of the matter.
So, as things get worse for the President, somehow it’s “a disaster for DEMOCRATS“?
As many Americans today are heading home for the holidays and may have to discuss all of this with their Trump-lovin’ relatives over the holiday table, we thought it’d be helpful to supply a bit of (non-lethal) ammunition. While various blockbuster revelations from witnesses received most of the attention over the first two weeks of lengthy public hearings in the House, the closing summations each day and at the end of the series of hearings by Intelligence Chair Rep. Adam Schiff received far less attention. That’s a pity, as the Congressman — a former prosecutor who served as Asst. U.S. Attorney in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office before being elected to Congress — gives one helluva closing summation.
Today, we share two of those closing arguments, as they nicely wrap up both what this impeachment is about, how damning the evidence already is against the President, and what the stakes are for the country.
Our mission, as journalists, is to help educate and inform the electorate. That’s not easy these days in a post-truth world full of fake news, a lying President, and still far too much corporate media hackery. We hope today’s program might help you to help ALL of us find our way out of this otherwise very dark hour in American history. We ALL must play a part in that, right now, if our republic is to survive this unprecedented attack.
Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving. Somehow…
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