A Lou Dobbs Guest Compared Trump's Very Normal Letter to the Gettysburg Address
Before we kick things off, here and elsewhere on Impeachment Day, let's catch up on what happened in a New York court room on Impeachment Eve. As my colleague Charles P. Pierce wrote yesterday, the unholy web of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's questionable associations now includes a Ukrainian oligarch tied to past corrupt regimes and Vladimir Putin. For some reason, that guy—Dmytro Firtash—sent the wife of Giuliani's indicted associate, Lev Parnas, a "loan" of $1 million shortly before Parnas was arrested. Parnas used to work for Firtash (who has also been indicted on bribery charges in the U.S.), and was Giuliani's co-ratfucker in Ukraine. You may remember Parnas also paid Giuliani half a million bucks via his company called, and this is real, "Fraud Guarantee."
But OK, back to the other circus. The House of Representatives has begun proceedings as it prepares to vote on the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, American president. His Republican allies are trying to stall and delay the process, and otherwise make it so annoying that people tune out. They're rolling out the Catch-22s, starting with the Bipartisan Catch: impeachment is only legitimate if it's bipartisan, but there are no conditions under which Republicans will back impeachment. There's also the Witness Catch: we must hear from direct witnesses, whom the White House is blocking from testifying.
All this arrives on the back of the president's Very Normal Letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, late on Impeachment Eve, in which he embarked on a five-plus-page tirade that did not exactly assuage concerns about his cognitive state. Most people reacted to this in a manner to which we've all grown accustomed: some mix of horror and morbid bemusement. It was not so on the president's favorite teevee channel—well, his second-favorite teevee channel, the Fox Business Network. That's where Lou Dobbs, the fashy Benjamin Button, hosts a show, and boy did his guests love the Very Normal Letter.
Don't forget that in a recent poll, 53 percent of Republicans said Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. 47 percent backed the guy who won the Civil War and ended slavery and kept the Union together. No wonder we're now subjected to this comparison. Sure, Trump's addled screed about how his impeachment is worse than the Salem Witch Trials is exactly like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a profound meditation on the American Idea in the wake of one of the great tragedies in our nation's history. It's in moments like this one that the nihilism of these people really shines through. They don't actually give a shit. It's a political movement built on low-quality trolling.
The best part, however, is that Mr. Simone's praise for the letter has a Freudian flavor, in that although it's clear he's trying to make the point that it's a response to a smear job, that's not quite what he says: "It is a masterpiece. It is the Gettysburg Address of smear job, false accusations. What a response, it's a historical document." There certainly are a lot of false accusations therein, and the people it targets—say, Pelosi or Rep. Adam Schiff—would probably call it a smear job. More than anything, though, it's certainly historical. All of this is.
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