“Blacks Don’t Own Lynching” Officially Worst Take of the Week
Cataloguing and ranking the insane, ahistorical and racist statements issued by Republican politicians in defense of the President is normally an arduous task that demands several hours of my time to determine which is the mathematical worst. Fortunately this week, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham makes the job easy by taking a racially defensive posture that lynching isn’t just a shameful period in American history in which whites forced a system of extralegal violence on black communities — but also that the term can be used by billionaire megalomaniacs to describe investigations into their crimes that they would prefer not be legal.
Graham’s comments, of course, follow an early-morning tweet from President Trump in which he compared his experience during the House impeachment probe with one of our darkest moments in American history.
Or wait. The administration is now saying that the President is not comparing what has happened to him with one of our darkest moments in American history.
Or maybe he means it literally.
I dunno. Words only have meaning if you want them to.
In any event, Trump’s use of a racially charged term to rile up his base and change the tenor of the conversation is a calculated maneuver and it isn’t a particularly new one. The media falls for it every time and so do I. But while I have you here, I might as well say a little something about this phony argument that the House impeachment hearings are unconstitutional and that the non-public nature of the process renders the entire inquiry illegitimate, acquitting President Trump of any wrongdoing in his various and blatant attempts to do illegal things.
Impeachment in the House is not a trial. The President is not entitled to a defense. Allowing Trump or his most partisan goons into the process is actually antithetical to the constitutional role the House plays in impeachment to begin with, which is to establish whether there is enough evidence to proceed to trial in the Senate. It’s more helpful to think of the House as a grand jury. Evidence is reviewed out of sight, without representation for the subject, and a vote for indictment is neither a verdict nor a sentence.
To suggest that the Democrats are conducting the impeachment probe in an unconstitutional way is laughable, but I suspect we will hear a lot about it since their other arguments are falling apart.
In any event, that is what I can do for you today. Drag you in for the whitewashing of historical brutality in the cherished pursuit of shared victimhood. Make you stay for the disingenuous attempts to turn a constitutionally protected process into a lawless power grab. If that doesn’t represent where we are I don’t know what does.
