There’s a clear hubris to the Trump defense team’s strategy.
“White House lawyers are gearing up for a scorched-earth defense of President Trump in the impeachment trial, mounting a politically charged case aimed more at swaying American voters than GOP senators — and damaging Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, Joe Biden,” the Washington Post reports.
“Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, plan to use their time in the trial to target the former vice president and his son, Hunter… Trump’s allies believe that if they can argue that the president had a plausible reason for requesting the Biden investigation in Ukraine, they can both defend him against the impeachment charges and gain the bonus of undercutting a political adversary.”
It’s hard for the modern mind to understand the original meaning of hubris, but it’s really inseparable from the idea that you can transgress against the gods by inflating your own sense of power and control. It’s the idea that you can act with impunity and without consequences. It was often used to describe cruel behavior towards people who are powerless to fight back, but also wanton sinfulness and immorality. I think that pretty well describes the situation we have here, where the defense team thinks they are assured of an acquittal and so can focus all their time on punching the Bidens rather than defending their client.
The assumption is that this is a luxury Trump can afford and that nothing he does could change the outcome. He and his defense team may very well be right about this, but the Greeks had witnessed enough counterexamples to see the need for a term to describe a situation where things didn’t work out as planned.
Perhaps the Indians interpreted the same thing a bit differently with their concept of karma. But whether or not you believe there is some divine or ethical order to the universe, it often happens that foul deeds have negative and unanticipated consequences for the perpetrator.
In this case, Trump is on trial for misusing his office to gain a political advantage, specifically against Joe Biden. In that light, it’s particularly egregious to attack the Bidens as a central part of the defense. Some might call it “spitting in the face of the gods.” The Greeks might see it as defiance against the gods, like a challenge that invites retribution.
In a purely secular sense, this looks like overconfidence. I really do think that some Republican senators will sense this and it will give them offense. They’re being asked to eat a tremendous amount of shit, and this is a few extra and unnecessary heapings on their plate.
Rather than offer a true defense, the Trump team will use their time to compound the original sin.
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Nothing I read on the defense today stated that they bothered to rebut the facts. All character assassination and regurgitating conspiracy theories. Perfect for their audience of one. Offensive and kooky to those of us outside the RW media bubble.
The defense sure isn’t helping purple and blue state R senators with November. Sets them up for defending the indefensible, with zero support for their claim there was nothing to see. Either they come off as crooked, stupid, or lacking any sort of judgment. The attack ads are practically writing themselves. It looks like this time around we have candidates who will not shy away from calling out the R senator cowardice and groupthink.
GOP Senators taking offense? Sorry, they would piss their pants on national TV on Trump’s command. You know exactly what is happening here. What they are doing is simply utilizing the Cokie Roberts rule. Their simply talking about this shit, no matter how ridiculous, outlandish, and ungrounded in even one grain of fact it might be, automatically sets in motion the media narrative machine. The media machine then begins, not by examining whether there is one iota of credibility to anything they say, but to report it as a, “one side says this-the other says that”, narrative. As Chuck Todd so famously said, it’s not his job to call out GOP lies, that’s the job of Democrats. His job is just to act as a stenographer. Who’s to know what is true? They report, you decide! Hey, all that’s important is that it’s true to you. You have your truth, I have mine. We’re not here to pass judgement on the truth. Remember, the media decided a long time ago that the truth was fungible. They did this as a way to counteract the accusations of liberal bias. And they have been shitting their pants on a regular basis every time they are faced with reporting an obvious truth which conflicts with any desired Republican orthodoxy, regardless of the issue. What they are doing isn’t madness, it’s evil genius, and based almost entirely on proven methods.
Yep. A perfect statement of the operating dynamic. The utter worthlessness of “Your Lib’rul Media”, juxtaposed with the Rightwing Noise Machine–which most certainly doesn’t play by the rules of passive stenography, truth “balancing” and Hesaid/shesaid.
Telling the media to their faces 24/7 that they are failing the nation and its citizenry is about all the Dems can do at this point.
This could get interesting.
https://twitter.com/Teri_Kanefield/status/1221612132925460481