PLAYING FOR HISTORY

PLAYING FOR HISTORY

So, here's a question.

When is something so obvious that denying it becomes . . .

Impossible?

Some think the answer, at least theoretically, may be . . .

 Never.

There are whole schools of psychology founded on the notion that our perceptions are flawed. They hold that people routinely come to incorrect judgments about reality given a host of tricks our brain plays on us.

Confirmation bias. Present bias. Hindsight bias. Adversity bias. The endowment effect. The clustering illusion. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

The list is endless.

We routinely deem true what we expect is true and false what we do not expect is true.  We undervalue the future in relation to the present.  We assume that what occurred was predictable all along. We think people are happier elsewhere if the weather is better there.  We overvalue what we already have.  We ignore differences but overemphasize similarities in data.  We make the data fit our conclusions rather than have the conclusions follow from the data.

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut.  We infer reality from memory, from what we can recall.  But recall, especially recent recall,  is not necessarily reality.

So we can  get it wrong.

And it gets even worse.

Attach an irrelevant  pejorative to someone and your assessment on what is relevant declines before you even  know anything else about the person.  It works in the opposite direction too, which is why people often think handsome men or beautiful women are ipso facto smart.

That bit about "sticks and stones" your mother taught you?

 It ain't true.

Names matter. 

The only way to combat these biases, effects and fallacies, to check our heuristics so that they enable accuracy rather than distort reality, is through . . .

Evidence.

Which leads -- regular readers knew we'd get there -- to the current impeachment of Donald John Trump.

The trial of Trump started yesterday in the Senate.  He was impeached a month ago by the House of Representatives, which voted out two counts. The first accuses Trump of abusing the office of the Presidency by, in effect, bribing Ukraine's president into announcing a phony investigation of Joe Biden in exchange for a White House meeting with Trump and unlocking the military assistance money previously appropriated by Congress.  The second accuses him of obstructing Congress's investigation of his wrongdoing.  

There is a already a mountain of evidence establishing both counts -- witnesses (e.g., Lt. Col. Vindman) who recount Trump asking Ukraine's Zelensky in a July phone call to investigate Biden; the actual read out of the call produced by the White House; contemporaneous accounts from Ambassadors Sondland, Volker and Yovanovitch confirming that Trump held up aid to get his demanded "investigations"; other witnesses confirming that Ukraine knew it was being held hostage; and complete stonewalling by the White House in response to subpoenas for documents and witnesses.  No documents were provided. No witnesses were given permission to testify.  Those who did simply defied the White House.

So far, and in the face of this onslaught, not a single Republican member of Congress has broken ranks and come out against the President. Instead, there have been ludicrous claims that no "direct" evidence establishes any of the charges against Trump (false; Vindman and Sondland are as "direct" as it gets), or that the so-called call "transcript" actually exonerates him (false; "I would like you to do us a favor, though"), or that what he did was not an impeachable offense (or a crime) even if it actually happened (false; bribery is a crime; so is wire fraud; and stopping Presidents from using foreigners to obtain power was pretty much the Founders' principal reason for the impeachment clause in the first place).  

At the same time, in a turn that embraces Orwell  and Alice in equal measure, Trump's Congressional enablers have both refused calls  to hear from other witnesses who have relevant knowledge -- Secretary of State Pompeo, former National Security Advisor Bolton (who has said he can provide relevant evidence), and OMB Associate Director of National Security Programs Michael Duffy (whose email states that "POTUS" put the hold on aid to Ukraine)-- and lambasted the House for not having obtained the evidence they now refuse to demand. 

And, of course, between the time the House voted its articles in December and the Senate started its proceedings this week, even more evidence has come to light -- emails and other documents and media interviews with Giuliani's hatchet man, Lev Furman, who now tells us that "everyone" -- Trump, Pence, Giuliani, Barr, Pompeo, Bolton -- either knew or had to have known exactly what was going down.  Like David Holmes (the counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Ukraine), Furman even overheard Trump yelling about it in a phone call.

Through it all, Trump has performed to type.  He does not typically  do formal addresses, and when he does (e.g., in connection with the killing of Iran's Soleimani), he has to surround himself with generals and the Joint Chiefs to create an appearance of credibility he can't remotely pull off on his own.   His go to forum is the "rally", one of the ubiquitous venues where red-hatters and MAGA enthusiasts swoon to a President who prefers cursing to thinking while regularly channeling his inner school yard bully to the delight of assembled worshippers.  There, Speaker Pelosi is "crazy",  House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff is "pencil neck", and the 73 year-old whose real day job is tweeting pretends he is mature . . .

Or sane.

Whether all this is actually working for Trump depends . . . 

And grudge holding GOPers will love this . . .

On what the meaning of "working" is.

If it means retaining approximately 40-42% approval ratings and requiring 53 (the number of GOP) Senators to place their courage and honesty in blind trusts as they dutifully find him not guilty in the upcoming impeachment trial, then the answer is most certainly "Yes".

But if it means playing for history, for the respect or approval of all those unborn Americans who will someday read about this era and weep, for coming through this, as Jon Meacham puts it, more "Margaret Chase Smith than Joe McCarthy", the answer is . . . 

Not even close.

Remember all those biases, fallacies, effects, and  misleading heuristics.  

We have lots of ways to fool ourselves and today's GOP is using them all.  

But, at the end of the day . . .

Truth outs.

That's why they are called fallacies.

Just ask Mandela . . .

Or King . . .

Or Lincoln.

On impeachment, even John Dean will do.