Does Truth Matter?

Every American should be staggered by Adam Schiff's closing argument in Donald Trump's impeachment trial.  In his momentous and immortal speech, he states with brimming emotion, "If the truth doesn't matter, we're lost."  This is an almost unreckonable sentence.  Here is the chief House Impeachment Manager, standing before the Senate to make a cataclysmic claim.  The podium is physically small and yet the stance invites global judgement. 

Schiff is certain that his side's case is beyond reasonable doubt.  The president withheld crucial aid to pressure Ukraine.  Why?  Because he wanted our NATO ally to announce an investigation of Joe Biden, a political rival.  To smear him.  Trump, in other words, employed his vast executive power to monkey wrench the cogs of our sacrosanct electoral process.

Sadly, Schiff is correct.  Not only in rhetoric, but in substance.   The implication is beyond dire.  If Trump eludes congressional oversight, he escapes our failsafe of checks and balances.  He achieves the mantle of dictator, one who also happens to be the most powerful man in the world.

It's easy to balk at such an enormous conclusion.  Politicians will be politicians.  And yet this impeachment trial, only the third in the history of the United States, is extraordinary even among its peers.  Bill Clinton, the last president impeached, committed a sex act.  Andrew Johnson, right after the Civil War, fought to re-establish slavery despite the law.  But Trump is the first to seek out foreign aid to subvert the Constitution, something he swore an oath to protect.   

Even a casual look at Trump's behavior shows something frightening:  a rejection of the obvious for the fruits of the devious.  If Trump had wanted a serious investigation of Biden, why not ask the CIA, instead of Ukraine?  One might further inquire why the Republicans, who controlled Congress for the first two years of Trump's presidency, showed nary a spark of interest in Biden during that time.

When confronted with the above point, both the president and the GOP sidestep without agility. Indeed, clumsy is inevitable when you ignore every known fact to firebreathe conspiratorial claims--claims that mesh with Russian propaganda--and that lack even a scintilla of merit. 

For instance, US intelligence services have repeated stated that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections.  But both Trump and the GOP continue to weave webs around Ukraine.

Even more damning is what could be called "The Coincidence Con."  According to Trump's defenders, it is mere coincidence that Biden was the person singled out by our president for investigation.  The timing, they adamantly protest, is just a fluke of chance.  Trump's goal was merely to investigate corruption.  It had nothing to do with getting votes.  Nothing at all.

Adding another layer of absurdity to this response, Trump does not express any interest in corruption in the transcript where he talks to the Ukrainian president.  The word doesn't appear at all.  Trump does, however, ask for a "favor" and then goes on to push for an investigation of Biden.

The above are just specks of frost on the tip of a deep iceberg.  Throughout the procedures of the hearing and the trial, Trump's defenders have flouted logic and eschewed dignity to ballyhoo the specious and the fallacious   Some Senate Republicans have outrightly revealed that they have no inclination to be impartial. 

We know that, under established dictatorships, minions knuckle under at the threat of jail or worse.  Whatever the king or queen decrees.  Off with their heads.  But what to say about the Republican party in this cancerous moment for our country?  Why do they follow Trump when all reasonable roads lead to condemnation? 

However mysterious the failure of the GOP, while we flounder as a bastion of freedom, it shall go down in world history as a singular failure.  It presents us with a most awful scourge, a tragedy that tips a telecommunicated planet toward darkness, an indelible  exemplar of the most despicable in human beings.  

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