Impeach, Arresting Argument, Trump Intent, Super Stacey Plaskett, Why Me?

• Those of us born during or shortly after the Truman administration will remember growing up watching comedian Henny Youngman on our black-and-white TVs. His nervous rapid-fire humor meant that, if you didn’t laugh at one quick joke, you might get the next half a second later. His most famous line was just after he was talking about his wished-for relationship with various women.
   
  

  Married for 38 years and I’m still in love with the same woman.
  If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me.

  Then came the famous line as he transitioned:

  Now you take my wife…
  … please.

  Ha ha. Get it? Okay, next line.
   
  I read a science fiction piece decades later in which the writer missed the joke, quoting thusly: “Please take my wife,” and having the boomer-aged audience laugh and laugh.
   
  Hackwhackers brings us one of the weirder moments of the Trump defense, their most arresting argument. Those of us who remember Henny will recognize:

  Now, take my client…
  …please.

• At The Onion, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-Mar-a-Lago) grows especially irritated as Trump lawyers mess up the speeches he has spent hours rehearsing with them.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson explains how the compelling narrative put forth by impeachment prosecutors became riveting as Stacey Plaskett took the platform. Her just-the-facts visual moment-by-moment presentation, using videos from the cellphones of rioters themselves, was captivating. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but Heather Cox Richardson elevates the value of those words by several quantum levels with her vivid descriptions of what we saw on our screens.
   
  One sample:

  The mocking, singsong, drawn out calls for “Nancy” from a rioter searching for the House Speaker as if he were a monster stalking a victim in a horror movie, and the angry chants to “Hang Mike Pence!” from rioters who had hung a noose from a gallows they constructed outside the Capitol, left little doubt the rioters were deadly.

• Green Eagle, does what much of the Senate and some of America does not: pays attention to the evidence about January 6 and the context of that evidence. And learns what my then-president intended to have happen.
   
• MadMikesAmerica takes a police radio broadcast during the Trump riot, accurately compresses it to its essence, and applies it to the Republican party in one cartoon.
   
• Scotties Toy Box shows a telling quote on the primary reason Republican Senators are being told they must not find Trump guilty. Think it might be constitutionality? Think again. That he is completely innocent? Au contraire, Pierre. The evidence is in some way suspect? Oh foolish mortal.
   
• As are most of us, North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz is shaken by what he has seen on screen as videos were shown of violence inflicted by Trump rioters. They injured and killed police officers and hunted for legislators to assassinate. He is also shaken by those lawmakers who are not shaken at all, those whose hearts are so deadened they are more irritated at the inconvenience generated by bothersome calls to moral accountability.
   
• nojo suggests the ugly truths we are learning from the national news about ourselves and our country goes beyond those things we care about. The hard lessons include what we discover we care nothing about.
   
• CalicoJack, in The Psy of Life, suggests the primary response each reader ought to have to what we are seeing in the Senate impeachment trial, and several ways to express that response.

• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings word of the latest conservative theory: who Pelosi and Schumer will impeach next. I confess I didn’t see that coming.
   
  Before Aunt Tildy points it out, yes I know it was probably conservative sarcasm.
   
• Cato Senior Fellow Julian Sanchez discovers the niftiest ongoing electoral conspiracy theory. Not sarcasm.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger says that, after threatening to break apart the Republican Party, Mr. Trump has backed off. After all, the GOP has already pretty much become the Trump party. But some former officials want to break away from Trump. Whether that will result in a break or a small sliver will depend on the numbers.
   
• So yes, there are conservatives who truly want to get out of the Trump valley of the shadow of death. The easiest, best lit pathway is some variation of Reagan on Democrats, “I did not leave the Republican party. The party left me.” driftglass isn’t having it. He points to a history that extends in the past through the life of any self-aware being. The party, he says has always been this way.
   
• Tommy Christopher brings the story as President Joe Biden gets all human on us during an interview devoted largely to his love affair with his wife. Then Biden gives his own personal cup of coffee to an interviewer. Try to imagine that from the last resident of the Oval, even though Mr. Trump’s movements sometimes seemed so lifelike.
   
• Fox Network, and others, are sued for billions. So Fox, by coincidence, cuts loose a very angry Lou Dobbs. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil bids a fond farewell to poor Mr. Dobbs.
   
• News Corpse attempts to answer Tucker’s Fox question (Why are Democrats so angry?) by referring to the matter-of-fact presentation of impeachment prosecutors, and asking what makes him think we are angry. The most memorable rage seems to have been displayed on January 6. And not by Democrats.
   
• Frances Langum watches Fox so you don’t have to. Brian Kilmeade goes partway to rationality with I think we have to, as a country, stop protesting every election result. That would be we. And that would be protesting, as in the peaceful, lawful, permit-obtaining, orderly pink hats of 2016 were the same as the police-killing, assassination seeking, Trump rioters of 2021. Brian helps move the narrative along with Joe Biden seem[ed] to win. Nice.
   
• As classic conservatism is being ejected from today’s Republican party, Dave Dubya poses a question about those left in: does the current American right even have an ideology.
   
• Donald Trump, angry at the scholarly 1619 Project tracking American slavery and subsequent racism, instituted a 1776 Commission that presents slavery as a bit of a bump along an otherwise enlightened history, perfect except for bothersome, unAmerican interludes caused by progressives. Historians have greeted the Trump project with a combination of horror and ridicule. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara is irritated by President Biden’s decision to revoke the Trump project. Our libertarian pundit calls the decision the Cancel America Movement. Uh huh, that’s what he calls it.
   
• Adam Smith talked about the great advantage of free enterprise 245 years ago, before it was called capitalism. People and corporations, he posited, are rewarded for what benefits the public, even if they are motivated exclusively by that reward, rather than the public good itself.
   
  I’m old, so I remember discussion by elected representatives 50 years ago about the basic problem with capitalism. Public benefits are indeed rewarded. Public harm, like environmental damage, is not penalized unless it is very narrowly directed at identifiable individuals.
   
  Iron Knee at Political Irony has discovered a new type of corporation formed in a growing number cities. B-Corporations have plus and minus incentives.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce tries to answer his own question in pain, age, and approaching death: Why me? It can be an angry question. The harsh lesson is that adversity doesn’t always happen to someone else. I wrote to offer my own thoughts
   
• In Unabashedly American, my long-time friend Darrell Michaels departs from his consistently conservative exposition to bring us beautiful images of the great state of Utah in which he makes his home.
   
• Infidel753 provides a good summary of the arguments about the existence of extraterrestrial life. As always, well considered and interesting.
   
• @momwino98 and a TikTok friend analyze a teen tune and present the friend’s daughter with a new problem. Sound included.
   
• When we envy someone who seems perfect in every way, Reductress reveals the secret that eases our pain: the turmoil that exists inside.

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