A: 

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: Although we have learned a great deal about these events in the last several weeks, there are still missing pieces. The president has instructed the State Department and other agencies to ignore congressional subpoenas for documents. He has instructed witnesses to defy subpoenas and refuse to appear. And he has suggested that those who do expose wrongdoing should be treated like traitors and spies. These actions will force Congress to consider, as it did with President Nixon, whether Trump’s obstruction of the constitutional duties of Congress constitute additional grounds for impeachment. If the president can simply refuse all oversight, particularly in the context of an impeachment proceeding, the balance of power between our two branches of government will be irrevocably altered. That is not what the Founders intended. And the prospects for further corruption and abuse of power in this administration or any other will be exponentially increased.

B: 

REP. DEVIN NUNES:  But we should not hold any hearings at all until we get answers to three crucial questions the Democrats are determined to avoid asking. First, what is the full extent of the Democrats’ prior coordination with the whistleblower, and who else did the whistleblower coordinate this effort with? Second, what is the full extent of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign? And third, why did Burisma hire Hunter Biden, and what did he do for them, and did his position affect any U.S. government actions under the Obama administration? These questions will remain outstanding, because Republicans were denied the right to call witnesses that know these answers. What we will witness today is a televised theatrical performance staged by the Democrats.

In comparing and contrasting the factual basis for these two opening statements, use Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous formulation, the one that underlies all of her scrupulously impartial son’s decisions, now as a lifetime Supreme Court justice: ‘use your common sense, what has the ring of truth?  what rings false?’

Which way the facts ring, of course, will be a matter of hot emotional debate in our black and white, white is black America of 2019.

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.

It’s pretty straightforward.  Facebook will allow political ads that contain easily verifiable lies — like the ones a certain presidential candidate compulsively spouts.  A political ad can make any claim on Facebook and be directed, by ingenious algorithms, directly and exclusively to its target audience.  That’s fine with Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.  He argues, essentially, that in a deeply materialistic, competitive democracy nobody has the right to restrain Facebook’s ability to make unlimited money and wield political influence.   His policy of allowing political lies on Facebook directly favors the lying political candidate. His policy favors Donald Trump, a candidate Zuck likely doesn’t much like.  Supports him, yes, considering the alternative, but Mr. Zuck, in all likelihood,  likely don’t like Mr. Trump.

Although political ads account for only a tiny percentage of Facebook’s revenues, the incursion into Facebook’s right to decide all matters of policy is intolerable to Zuck.  The regulatory camel getting it’s nose in the proverbial tent.   A leaked recording of a recent Mark Zuckerberg address to his Facebook troops contained the following passage, responding to the potential challenge of a President Elizabeth Warren and the lawsuit that would try to prevent her promised regulation of gigantic, influential entities like Facebook.

“Does that still suck for us?  Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government.  That’s not like the position you want to be in.  We care about our country and want to work with our government to do good things, but look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

What is ‘that existential’?  The right to increase the value of Facebook (and Zuck’s personal wealth, currently a measly $70,000,000,000) without interference of any kind from anybody, and at any price to democracy (or anything else).  Only in America can someone make that argument with a straight face.  “I only have seventy billion dollars, several people have more.  I have every right to double or triple my personal fortune, without any interference from fucking bastards!  It’s called liberty, you Nazi assholes!”  

A billionaire’s right to unlimited additional wealth is an argument so basic to American society that it never need be explicitly made.   The belief is as deeply ingrained as the ubiquity of commercial (and increasingly political) advertising. Nobody is challenging Zuck on his right to amass as many additional  billions as his genius can secure.  Anyone in Zuck’s position, we assume, would feel exactly the same way, go to the mat for his right to infinite wealth.  The billionaire is, in the common American perception, an exceptionally brilliant species of human, a genius, an object of worship here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Elizabeth Warren, and others, recognize the dangers posed by the outsized power of unregulated corporate “persons” like Facebook.   Facebook is a leader in what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” its corporate genius is using customer data to target individuals and prey on their expressed desires and weaknesses. [1]

All corporations are psychopaths, that’s the kind of “person” they are.  Watch the trailer for this excellent movie if you have any doubts on that score (the whole movie is here)  Corporate persons have one interest only: the bottom line.  They employ any means necessary to pursue that bottom line.   Social Media corporations are uniquely well-equipped to feed in an ocean that is almost entirely unregulated.   That’s some existential shit, elected representatives seeking to impose rules to restrain the things that corporations, driven by eternal appetite, do in their ravenous quest for ever more prey. 

“Something ‘that existential’. you know, the right to have no obstacles to increasing my mere $70,000,000,000 net worth.  I am one of the greatest geniuses mankind has ever produced and I strenuously object to lesser, non-corporate, persons telling me what I can and cannot do.  I will go to the mat.  To the fucking mat, do you hear me?”

We hear you, baby.

[1]  Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

This post previously began:

At the risk of a simplistic formulation:

I realized the risk was a stupid one, in these troubled times when good and evil take their cast from political “ideology”.   So to clarify what I am setting out — good, in the abstract, is what we’d wish on ourselves and our loved ones,  if extended to everybody, would make life better, increase contentment, peace and understanding; evil, in the abstract, things done with knowledge that people are being seriously harmed, but the thing done benefits you, so what the hell?  We’ve always had war, what’s one more?)

Our fundamental moral choice as humans is to act toward others in a way that helps or hurts.   In most situations the outcome of this choice is clear, though there are complicated situations when it’s not always easy to know if our actions will result in harm or benefit.    People who routinely act based solely on what’s best for their own narrow self-interest tend to hurt others more than help them.  It’s the way justice and fairness works out in a competitive world of limited resources.  Doing good requires a high regard for others, evil uses the much lower standard of what’s better for me right now and fuck everybody else.  Sometimes this attitude of “winning” is called being “transactional”– everything is a business deal where the only consideration is being the greatest artist of the greatest deal.

On Saturday the New York Times ran an article entitled Trump Stymies California Climate Efforts Even As State Burns.   The article summarizes Trump’s long, ongoing, transactional denial of Climate Change, noting that he “directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back nearly every federal policy designed to curb the heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution that is the chief cause of global warming.”  [1]    As climate change-exacerbated wildfires burn, Mr. Trump continues to double down in an attempt to force the big blue state to back down from more stringent fuel emissions standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down the rapidly worsening climate catastrophe.   The only “good” that comes from denying what we are all seeing, that alarming trend that scientists have documented for years, is that reduced regulation on pollution increases profits for some already very wealthy toxic polluters.

Trump spokesman, Judd Deere, is quoted as saying California leaders “support destructive liberal policies” and the state “should focus on its own affairs rather than trying to regulate 49 other states with its big-government policies.”   Trump, for his part, seeks “to eliminate California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set standards on planet-warming tailpipe pollution that are stricter than those set by the federal government”.   

The Trump administration has also threatened to withhold highway funding, opened an antitrust investigation into California’s deal with the carmakers [who’d agreed to the more stringent emissions standard] and filed suit to block part of a state initiative to limit greenhouse gases from power plants.

Wildfires rage in increasingly hot, dry California while Trump pursues political goals for himself and his powerful backers, in this case the fossil-fuel industry and the major American automakers.    He doesn’t read the NY Times, but if he did this line might have hit home: 

“Hotter temperatures means drier vegetation, making it more likely to burn.” 

On the other hand, he no doubt reasons, fossil-fuel is a dynamite product and there’s nothing wrong with selling what the people need and want —  including big, powerful SUVs — and, that repeatedly and forcefully bitch slapping liberal California, a gigantic and powerful state that clearly is against him, is simply good politics.   I have to once again state the obvious, Trump does not “reason” in the usual way people come to reasoned conclusions — he thinks and acts the only way he knows how — by reflex.

I had a close friend for many years who was stuck in the Repetition Compulsion, painfully fighting the same fight over and over.   He had no choice, he simply had to endlessly reenact the same primal battle, with everybody he met.   It no doubt started in early childhood when, the youngest of three boys, he used to hide his candy from his older brothers and vigilantly wolf down his food at restaurants so his brothers couldn’t poach his fries.   It may seem simplistic to say, but he simply could not act any differently — not as a child, not as a teenager when I met him, not as an adult.   

He always felt he was being short-changed and would wheedle, whine and cajole his way to the better end of every deal he ever made– with the predictable result that he also eventually wore out and alienated everybody he triumphed over.  Whenever the inevitable alienation happened he always felt that he was the victim of a totally unfair “putz”.   When he ran a small business, he underpaid and exploited everyone who worked for him.  There was a lawsuit for years of unpaid overtime brought against his business right after he died.   There was no joy in any of this regular winning he did, it was simply the way it had to be for him, for no doubt painful reasons he couldn’t bear to examine.

I think of the president very much the same way.   It’s not that he wants to lie all the time — it’s pretty clear he can’t help it.   There is some demon driving him to tell lies intended to make others admire him, cheer for him, like him, love him.    We might call this the mark of an empty soul, to live entirely for the falsely-stoked admiration of others, but why be judgmental?   It’s clear he doesn’t choose to lie in the strict sense, lying is a tic he can’t control [2].   It’s the same with his reflexive need to constantly “double down.”   He doesn’t know another way to react in the zero-sum game that is the high-stakes life of a glorious winner among pathetic losers.   The thought of being seen as a “loser” is a “winner” like Mr. Trump’s ultimate nightmare.

Trump is often referred to as a narcissist.   He does tend to make everything about himself, sometimes inappropriately.   He needs praise desperately.   He expressed dismay the other day that the heroic, “talented” K-9 that chased down al-Baghdadi (to “die like a dog”) was getting more credit for the death of the notorious terrorist than he was.   He told voters in Kentucky, the night before the gubernatorial election, to think of how he, Trump, would look if a Democrat took the governor’s mansion– what a bad reflection that would be on Trump.    His business pursuits while president are another example — no reason to divest himself of anything for a mere appearance, the presidency is already costing him billions, he says, the effort to selflessly make America great again while trying to simultaneously maintain and strengthen his super-profitable worldwide brand — very, very hard!

There is a strong case to be made that Trump is a Malignant Narcissist.  This is the clinical diagnosis for someone whose narcissism causes him to be destructive to others in the eternal pursuit of elusive self-love (or whatever it is that drives this type).   Malignant Narcissism is also as close to a clinical definition of evil as we will find in the psychological literature.  Somebody (probably not wearing a MAGA hat or a Read The Transcript! t-shirt)  has filled out a scorecard for Mr. Trump, based on the clinical criteria for this horrific disorder (note, I’ve located and swapped in the same checklist, without the check boxes checked, in the name of fairness to Mr. T — you can mentally tick the boxes you thing apply):

Diagnostic criteria are famously open to interpretation, so even though many of these check marks might seem justifiable in the case of Donald Trump, based on what we can observe of his personality and behavior, even though we are not trained professional psychiatrists who have personally examined the president, are we?   There is no magic formula to accurately pigeon-hole the quirks of every person who seems to be acting under the sway of some psychological disorder.   You might be more comfortable comparing the president’s behavior with the checklist on this chart, which is perhaps a little less damning:

However you slice it, if you put the president’s words and actions on the table and sort them into two piles —  Probably Good and Probably Evil —  you know which pile most of his tweets, verbal attacks, insults, accusations, exaggerations, threats, lawsuits, lies, political appointments and policies would go onto.   

UNLESS, of course (and this is HUGE): you stipulate that all this black and white dividing and knee-jerk condemning of the president’s words and actions is part of a ruthless, calculated, well-orchestrated, sinister, dark money fueled conspiracy of  powerful Never-Trumpers, haters, losers, jealous, powerless, sick, dangerous politically correct Justice Warrior cucks with a vicious ax to irrationally grind against the greatest American history has ever produced.  HOW ABOUT THAT?!   WORDS TELL THE WHOLE FUCKING STORY, DON’T THEY?    READ MY SHIRT!!!

[1] In fairness to the president, he claims that Climate Change is an anti-American Chinese hoax and that ‘heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution’ has nothing to do with anything, it’s a vicious anti-freedom Communist talking point promoted by the failing NYTimes fake news service by sick, dangerous people who irrationally hate Trump for winning, completely on his own, in 2016 (in the largest presidential landslide in American history). 

[2] Hence, any proceeding in which he is sworn to tell the truth is, inevitably,  a “perjury trap”– he has no control of his need to lie.