It was nice to see the House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff shoot down this both siderist nonsense by CNN's Jake Tapper this Sunday when Tapper asked him if the failure to get any Republican votes to impeach Trump somehow harms the credibility of the hearings.
SCHIFF: I think what it will mean, if we decide that we cannot accept this kind of conduct in the President of the United States, and the Republicans decide that because of the president’s party or because they’re afraid of a primary, or for whatever reason they cannot vote to support impeachment, I think it will mean a failure by the GOP to put the country above their party, and it will have very long-term consequences if that is where we end up.
And if not today, I think Republican members in the future to their children and their grandchildren will have to explain why they did nothing in the face of this deeply unethical man who did such damage to the country.
TAPPER: President Nixon resigned rather than be impeached. He was never actually impeached by the House. It was going through the process and he resigned before it could happen. Do you think president Trump should resign?
SCHIFF: Well, I certainly think that he's committed the most grievous misconduct. I have no illusions about Donald Trump doing what is right or best for the country. That is never been where he's coming from. What my Republican colleagues, I think, need to -- to decide and to search their own consciences about is why was it that in the past Republicans were willing to put country first? Why were there people like Howard Baker then but not now?
I would hope that there would be Republicans who will be willing to step forward and say whatever the political consequences, if this was Barack Obama had done this, they would have voted to impeach him in a heartbeat with a fraction of the evidence. It shouldn't matter this is a Republican president. I hope to hell, Jake, if this had been a Democratic president, I would be among those leading the way and saying we need to seriously consider impeaching this president.
As Joshua Holland at Raw Story explained this week, this sort of narrative by the media is doing real damage, and it's got a lot to do with why support for impeachment isn't polling higher:
Media grades Trump and his apologists on a curve — and report they’re kind of winning the impeachment battle:
Of course, no Republicans supported the resolution. That was par for the course, yet The Atlantic’s Russell Berman declared that the party-line vote was a “win” for Donald Trump. The resolution, he wrote, “should have been the easiest for Republicans to go along with.”
After three years of Republicans’ displaying a cultish fealty to Marshal Tweeto regardless of what he says or does or how much damage to the US his erratic governance results in, it seems that many political reporters have decided that the measure of success for the Dems’ efforts to impeach Trump is whether it wins over some of his unwinnable supporters. It’s hard to imagine setting the bar higher for Democrats.
And it requires digging a trench and setting the bar for Republicans deep below ground.
As Holland discussed, we've seen countless articles over the last few weeks painting Republicans as "winning" due to the fact that their base lives in a Fox "news" bubble and the failure to penetrate that bubble means that Republican members of Congress are still standing firmly with Trump, however:
These pieces aren’t factually inaccurate. The problem is that conservatives have invested billions of dollars over a couple of decades to build an alternative information infrastructure that is supposed to be impenetrable to reality. It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and it’s ludicrous to frame the resulting disconnect as a failure on the part of Democrats.
That's exactly what the viewers were treated to with Tapper this Sunday. Until the rest of media acknowledges that Trump's base has been propagandized to the point where they're completely out of touch with reality and why, they're failing the rest of us and doing just as much damage as Fox does with segments like the one above.
