ROGER KIMBALL: A tale of two quids: The Democrats have decided to weaponize impeachment.
Today marks the official beginning of the Schiff Show Impeachment Follies. It is therefore fitting that I take as my text for today’s meditation Matthew 7:5: ‘Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’
What do I mean? I’ll tell you. The ostensible predicate of this spectacle is President Trump’s alleged effort to influence the 2020 election. Specifically, the allegation is that Trump made aid to Ukraine (the quid) conditional on Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden’s demand (the quo) that the prosecutor investigating a company on which his son, Hunter, sat be fired. Biden’s demand is not controverted. He bragged about it himself, in public, at the Council on Foreign Relations.
‘I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.’
Unless you haven’t been paying attention, you know that ‘quid pro quo’ is this season’s ‘Russian collusion’. A meme that is ubiquitous but also empty. Just as in yesterday’s phrase, it’s all Oakland, at least so far as Donald Trump is concerned, with respect to any quid pro quo. You can read the transcript of the president’s call with the Ukrainian president. Read it. Then take this reading comprehension quiz: What was that call about? You get a gold star if you said if you said ‘Ukrainian corruption, especially efforts by Ukrainian figures and entities to help Hillary and hurt Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle.’
Efforts to meddle in the 2016 election: that is what the call was chiefly about. Since that effort was part of a larger concern about corruption in Ukraine, Trump also asked about reports that Biden’s son Hunter was trading on his father’s name and position to peddle influence and line his pockets.
This is a subject that Adam Schiff will be at pains to avoid airing, but do not worry. It has been, and will continue, to be aired.
If you are worried about President Trump asking about Joe Biden in his telephone call to President Zelensky, what do you make of Ukraine’s efforts to aid Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump during the 2016 election? Back before ‘Ukraine’ and ‘quid pro quo’ became memes, even Politico, no friend of Donald Trump, was frank about that reality. On January 11, 2017 before Trump even took office, Politico reported that.
Now Politico is hoping you’ve forgotten that reporting.
Meanwhile, if there was a Republican version of Code Pink, it would have flooded the hearing room with clowns. But then again, the Democrats basically took care of that themselves.