As the impeachment inquiry continues and the former U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine testifies, two distinct stories are emerging.   They are two unreconcilable stories, one Red, one Blue (White is conspicuously absent from this patriotic stalemate  — except perhaps for the color of the lies everyone now expects and dismisses as beside the point).   

In one story, the president has abused the powers of his office since the day he was sworn in and credible evidence of that pattern of abuse is mounting daily.   A long string of his closest aids continue to resign or are banished for opposing his will, several were indicted and a few are already imprisoned — as the president continues to defy the law by asserting an unlimited blanket privilege to prevent the release of any and all subpoenaed documents and testimony.  In this story the president is a mendacious monster of vanity and impulsiveness, many of his worst deeds, done openly, have already been seen by everybody.    

In the other story, the president’s term has been near-perfect, his achievements are many, his attackers are a partisan cabal of jealous losers motivated by revenge for the president’s decisive defeat of their party’s monstrous candidate.   In that story, if not for hateful traitors, there would not even be any allegations of wrongdoing against this great American.  In that story the “whistleblower” is a criminal who must be unmasked and confronted publicly.

It’s a familiar tale, and familiar in the sense that many families know these kinds of angry divisions intimately.  The brother-in-law, a jovial un-prosecuted  serial criminal with a history of violence, who one must never criticize, the opinionated uncle freely spouting abhorrent beliefs, the aunt reserving the right to physically discipline her nieces and nephews for their disrespect.

Charles M. Blow put the situation succinctly in the New York Times the other day:

The Red team and the Blue team, each in its own information silo.  If you wear the red hat, today’s conviction of Roger Stone, political provocateur and longtime Trump adviser, for seven counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, including lying under oath to the Mueller witch hunt, is just more proof of how determined ruthless, partisan “Democrat” liars are to bring down Mr. Trump by any means they can glom on to.    The partisan Mueller team, under DOJ criminal investigation themselves now for possibly treasonous crimes against the president, completely and totally exonerated the president and the corrupt Democrats still won’t shut up about its so-called “findings”!  It’s the same with the secret star chamber testimony given in those depositions Democrats keep releasing full transcripts of– a lynch mob conducting a baseless witch hunt with NO DUE PROCESS for POTUS!   

Ordinary citizen members of the blue team may not examine the evidence very much, or at all, before leaping up, fist in the air, to see Stone convicted for lying to protect Trump when he perjured himself to the Mueller team.   I’m not trying to be even-handed here.  There are stupid bastards, willfully ignorant bastards, stubborn bastards and plain old hateful, angry bastards on both sides.  It doesn’t mean there aren’t facts that can be placed on the table for discussion.  The fact that Republican questions appear all over the released deposition transcripts, and the witnesses were compelled to answer them (Read the Transcript!), clearly and irrefutably debunks the talking point that these were secret “star chambers” where Democrats proceeded in darkness, with no Republicans present, to extract anything harmful to the president.   

But as we all know, nothing can be debunked with plain facts in a fact-free zone and as even a quick glance at FOX news will demonstrate, inconvenient facts will never be presented to FOX viewers.  The point of view they receive will be their own point of view, forcefully confirmed for them by talking heads who confidently inform them of what they already know, while expressing no doubt or hesitation.  Abortionists, fornicators, homosexuals, transsexuals, angry blacks and Hispanics, criminal illegal aliens and their defenders, liberal cucktards, feminists, militant evangelical atheists, liberal elites, Communists, Socialists, insane, privileged “social justice warriors”, climate hysterics, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and other haters of America have an organized, well-funded, insidious agenda to turn the once-glorious United States of America into a weak and despised European-style socialist shit-hole.

At the risk of seeming to take sides here…  this interview with Liz Holtzman, at one time the youngest member of Congress (during the Nixon impeachment) lays the facts out beautifully while comparing the underlying facts of the two impeachments.    Check it out, well worth the fourteen minutes and twenty four seconds of your day.