The whole concept of acknowledging several things to be true at once, even though each thing poses a threat to some tribe's agenda, has never been so important. Unless you're cheerleading for something other than full revelation of truth, and America's founding principles, you're acting out of fear that you're forfeiting points on the board to forces you've built up an emotional investment in holding a fixed image of.
The Left, and its political embodiment, the Democrat party, have been at this a long time. It's what identity-politics militancy is all about. Anything that can be blamed on some combination of white / male / heterosexual / Christian "privilege" can shut off any further inquiry into what's really at play in a given situation.
The Fusion GPS / Steele dossier / Mueller report crusade succeeded in getting a lot of people to see in Trump's erratic relations with foreign leaders, particularly Putin, evidence that Trump was somehow desirous of a Russian overshadowing of US global influence. (It's true that he sometimes seems not to care that his utterances stoke such a conclusion - to wit, his statement that Russia and Syria could "play in the sand" once there was no more US presence in the Kurdish area along the Turkey-Syria border.)
Adam Schiff clearly wants Trump gone by any means necessary. His over-the-top paraphrasing of the Zelensky call, his leaks and his constant preening make that clear. He's determined to see the impeachment process through to Senate conviction if he possibly can.
All that said, Trumpists would have us believe that that's the only set of developments on the national plate of any substance. That's not the case. Trumpist reaction to the statements by acting US ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council's top Ukraine expert, to the House committees involved in the impeachment inquiry has been equal parts whataboutism and character smear.
The whataboutism reflexively reverts back to the above-discussed Democrat machinations and such Obama-era figures as James Comey and John Brennan. This tack at least has a rootedness in truth to commend it, even though the truth is here being employed as a tool of distraction.
The smears of Taylor and Vindman are another matter.
Taylor's statement put the spotlight on what he called the "highly irregular" channels through which US-Ukraine relations were conducted, particularly the role of personal Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. It's worth recalling that he got that job because the previous, official ambassador, Masha Yovanovitch, was perceived to be insufficiently loyal to Trump. By July, "it was becoming clear" to Taylor that a Trump-Zelensky meeting was dependent on the Zelensky administration getting going on an investigation into Burisma, the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
And here's a glaring question: why did Taylor not hear about the July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone conversation until September 25?
For his trouble, Taylor has been called a "Never Trumper" - a term the meaning of which has morphed - especially since Trump's "human scum" tweet - from a catchall for anyone who deviates from a position of slavish devotion to an accusation of being somehow left-leaning - by Laura Ingraham, and a "deep state hack" by Bill Mitchell. Jack Posobiec accused Taylor of undermining US foreign policy. Trump himself has repeated Ingraham's "Never Trumper" charge and saying he didn't know Taylor. Mr. President, does this mean Mike Pompeo didn't consult you about appointing Taylor to the position?
In his opening statement, Vindman, a decorated Army Lieutenant Colonel, said he was so alarmed by what he heard in the Trump-Zelensky conversation that he alerted a national security lawyer.
Vindman has also testified that Ukrainian officials frequently reached out to him in confusion over Giuliani's outsized role and demands, which has earned him the accusation of being a double agent by Ingraham. Sean Duffy has pretty strongly suggested that the fact that Vindman was born in the Ukraine has tempted him to embrace dual loyalty.
It's clear that the throne-sniffers don't want us talking about the use of Trump's personal attorney to conduct a shadow foreign policy concurrent with the shifting set of figures in official Ukraine-relations roles. Their idol is clean as a whistle as far as they're concerned, and the only big stories are Adam Schiff's laser-focus zeal for impeachment and the matters with which John Durham's criminal probes concerned.
One noteworthy aspect of their mindset is that it's devoid of any consideration of how to persuade anyone outside their ranks. The closest they come is this attempt to intimidate "Never Trumpers" into silence, or joining them is slavish fealty to the tribal line, if possible. It smacks of desperation, which is not a good look for those in control of a party with increasingly wobbly near-future prospects. That party might take heed of how it participated fully into the probe of the Nixon administration circa 1973-74 and let the chips fall where they may. It meant a short-term rout, but by November 1980, a rebirth, with a true conservative standard-bearer at the helm, had been made possible.
Us "Never Trumpers" would never try to tell the Trumpists not to point out the fact that blind rage is what is motivating the Democrats. Go for it. But the time has come to acknowledge some other aspects of our present reality.
In other words, it's damn hard in late 2019 to find somebody who isn't up to his or her eyeballs in some flavor of Kool-Aid.
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