Consolidated News Photos/CNP via ZUMA

And so it begins. Republicans are now arguing that, sure, President Trump tried to extort Ukraine into investigating a political opponent. So what? Here is Federalist Society superstar Josh Blackman:

President Trump did not stand to receive any money or property from the Ukrainian president….Receiving a “personal political benefit” does not transform an otherwise legal action — requesting an investigation — into impeachable conduct.

Here is the Republican senator from Tennessee:

Putting conditions on foreign aid is nothing new.

Clinton did it.

Obama did it.

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) January 23, 2020

And here is the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon:

He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office….

Back in 1974, directing an “investigation” for purposes “unrelated” to lawful functions of the office produced a 28-10 vote in the Judiciary Committee for impeachment. That included six Republicans. Today, extorting an investigation from Ukraine for personal gain produces nothing but sophistry from Republicans.

It is plain to everyone that Trump’s lengthy battering of Ukraine—which went on for months and months—was not a legitimate use of his office. He never asked Ukraine to take action against corruption in general. He asked for only one thing: an investigation of Hunter Biden. That’s it. That’s all he wanted. And it was worth millions of dollars to him, far more than any ordinary illegal campaign contribution delivered in a plain black suitcase.

Here’s something I missed when it first came out a few weeks ago. It turns out that Chase Manhattan Bank was instrumental in getting the Shah of Iran admitted to the United States for medical treatment in 1979, which led directly to the Iran hostage crisis that eventually doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The whole thing was called Project Eagle and was coordinated by Joseph Reed, the chief of staff to the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller.

But that’s not all. After touching off the hostage crisis, Project Eagle was then redirected to ensuring that they didn’t get released too soon:

After the hostages were taken, the Carter administration worked desperately to try to free the captives….[But] the team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.

The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.

“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.

This is a conspiracy theory of longstanding—namely that the Reagan campaign tried to prevent the release of the Iranian hostages before Election Day 1980. But according to notes he wrote at the time, it sure sounds like Reed worked closely with Reagan’s people on exactly that. Such patriots.

Two questions for Democratic primary voters:

• Who is the Democrat least likely to be so unacceptable to center-right voters that they end up voting for Donald Trump even though they don’t like him much?
• Does this change after considering the most likely Republican campaign attacks?

The impeachment proceedings are making it more clear every day that nothing is going to change the minds of Trump voters. They just don’t believe anything that either liberals or the press say about him. So like it or not, everything hinges on the folks in the middle.

This is Palm Springs at midnight, taken from Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park. I ended up on this road sort of accidentally and just kept driving until it dead-ended at this overlook, with a lovely view of the city below. Yes, it was a dex night.

I don’t know squat about modern music, so I was a little surprised to see the latest stats on the number of women who write popular music. In short, there are hardly any:

The figures for 2019 are worse for producers (5 percent female) but a bit better for performers (22.5 percent female).

There’s more here in the full Annenberg report. I do have one comment about all this: I’ve heard of all but two of the top women songwriters but I’ve only heard of one of the men. This is mostly a commentary on my dismal knowledge of contemporary music, but I wonder why that is?

Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

Jonathan Chait says that Republicans screwed up by refusing en masse to allow the introduction of new evidence into President Trump’s impeachment trial:

The victory is Pyrrhic. Given that a vote to remove is almost inconceivable — Trump could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and all that — the trial is fundamentally an exercise in shaping public opinion about Donald Trump and his abuses of power. By voting to withhold evidence, Republicans are placing themselves in the unpopular position of abetting a cover-up.

Nah. Mitch McConnell obviously has one overriding goal here: to keep the trial short and the public bored enough not to watch it. Refusing to allow new evidence is part of that: it ensures that nobody bothers turning on their TV in hopes that something new and exciting will happen. It won’t. Since Democrats have little choice except to repeat stuff everyone knows already, what’s the point of watching?

As long as the trial is short and dull, McConnell wins. Very few people even know who John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney are, let alone whether they avoided having to testify.

This is a bobcat at the Orange County Zoo. Isn’t it adorable? Don’t you just want to reach in and scratch its chin? I do. But my mother, who once had a lion clamp its jaws down on her arm,¹ says that this would not be a wise idea . . .

¹No damage was done. The lion didn’t really want to eat her, it turned out.

John Judis is an old ’60s leftist who watched his generation’s revolution burn out and die in a furious backlash, and he’s worried that today’s generation of leftists are making many of the same mistakes. In “A Warning From the ’60s Generation,” he outlines the three biggest trouble spots he sees in today’s revolutionaries:

First, many on the left — and many more-moderate liberals as well — attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 and white working-class reluctance to support Democrats entirely or primarily to “white supremacy” or “white privilege.” They dismiss flyover Americans who voted for Trump as irredeemable — even though there is evidence that many supporters of Barack Obama backed Trump in 2016, and that many Trump voters cast ballots for Democrats in 2018.

….Second, the left is again dividing into identity groups, each of which feels justified in elevating its concerns above others….While activists focused on identity politics have, like their predecessors from the ’60s, made perfectly reasonable demands — for instance, an end to police brutality, or equal wages for men and women — they have also made extreme demands that display an indifference to building a political majority. Some have backed reparations for slavery — an idea rejected by broad majorities of the electorate, most of whom are descended from immigrants who came to America after the Civil War. Other groups have demanded “open borders,” defying a majority of Americans who think the country should be able to decide who to admit as citizens and who will be able to enjoy the rights and benefits of being an American.

Third, many of these demands and strategies are accompanied by a quasi-religious adherence to special language and gestures that echo the experience of the ’60s….At the Democratic Socialists of America convention I attended over the summer in Atlanta, delegates identified themselves on their name tags, and when they spoke, by their preferred pronoun (“he,” “she” or “they”) and signaled their approval by twirling their hands. Someone who used the colloquial “guys” to refer to the audience was sternly rebuked. There were charges of “ableism” and of “triggering” due to loud talking. These kinds of moral stances are fine for a church congregation, but not for a political organization that wants to win a majority of voters. The reality is that 80 percent or more of Americans who wandered into such a gathering would think they were on another planet.

Some of this might be overblown. I was surprised a few weeks ago when I was watching a bog standard CBS courtroom drama and one of the lawyers had a conversation with the judge about her client’s desire to be referred to as “they.” CBS is the official network of heartland folks who are turning gray, so if they figure this is OK then maybe it’s not as off-putting as Judis thinks.

Nitpicks aside, though, I pretty much agree with him. His main point is that his generation tried but failed to form a broad coalition that included the white working class, and that led to Nixon, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and now Trump. If today’s generation wants to succeed where his failed, they need to show some genuine understanding that the white working class—some of it, anyway—has legitimate economic grievances that are pretty similar to those of the college-educated urban dwellers who mostly lead the Resistance. A real lefty would understand this at a very deep, gut level.

This is probably Bernie Sanders’ biggest strength: he really does want to build a wide political coalition. I think he has weaknesses that will prevent him from doing that, but he’s at least showing the way. Regardless of whether or not you like him, the rest of us should pay attention.

Pbg/PA Wire via ZUMA

Today’s big gossip news is Hillary Clinton’s interview with the Hollywood Reporter, in which she confirms that she really, really doesn’t like Bernie Sanders. “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Plus he’s a massive sexist.

That should get people talking! But really, the most important part of the interview was this:

How can the left combat Fox News?

It’s really a shame that all the people who support progressive politics and policies haven’t understood that that’s exactly the right question to ask. We do have some well-off people who support Democratic candidates, there’s no doubt about that, but they’ve never bought a TV station. They’ve never gobbled up radio stations. They’ve never created newspapers in local communities to put out propaganda. That’s all been done not just by Murdoch and Fox, but by Sinclair and by the Koch brothers and by so many others who have played a long game about how we really influence the thinking of Americans.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Fox News. The radio talkers are one thing. Drudge is one thing. Breitbart is one thing. And they all form a cohesive ecosystem that envelops the conservative movement these days. But without Fox News they have no anchor. Fox is the sun around which they all revolve.

The problem, though, is that I suspect there’s no market for a Fox of the left. MSNBC is part of the way there, and they don’t have a fraction of the influence of Fox. For whatever reason, liberals simply don’t want to spend hours each day watching Fox-style propaganda. We prefer our propaganda in the form of humor; movies and TV shows; and subtler news outlets that temper their point of view with lots of actual facts about things. A media empire of the left probably wouldn’t be a moneymaker.

There are times when I wonder how things would be different if Rupert Murdoch had simply met different people at various times in his life. It’s not as if he’s been a consistent conservative ideologue, after all. He just wants to make money. But willy nilly, he discovered that he could make money in America with conservative news, so that was that. Conservative it would be. And our country has never been the same.

Erin Scott/CNP via ZUMA

Scott Jennings, a longtime Republican political operative, writes in the LA Times today about Donald Trump: “We aren’t being willfully blind. We’re not liars or hypocrites. We haven’t abandoned our ethical standards. We do, however, have concerns about what’s driving this impeachment and whether the proposed punishment fits the alleged infraction.” Most of these concerns boil down to the fact that Democrats have disliked Trump from the very start.

Fine. Whatever. But a bit later Jennings gets to the heart of the impeachment charges against Trump:

And then there’s the matter of the Ukrainian aid. Republicans perceive Democrats as simply ignoring the long history of administrations using aid to reward or punish foreign governments for their actions.

This is it. The big difference between Trump and Biden—and everyone else—is that Trump used military aid as a way to extort a personal benefit from Ukraine. That’s the start and the finish of the whole thing. If he had used military aid as bait to get Ukraine to fall in line with American interests in one way or another, no one would have blinked.¹

But he didn’t. He used the aid as bait to get a personal favor from Ukraine: namely an investigation into an opponent in a presidential campaign. That’s as plain an example of abuse of power as you could imagine. And after he was caught, Trump didn’t apologize or promise not to do it again or anything like that. He conducted a scorched-earth attack that left Democrats with no choice but to impeach.

I should know: I’m one of them. Lots of my fellow liberals have been calling for Trump’s impeachment practically since he was elected. I haven’t. As much as I loathe the man, I didn’t think he had done any single truly impeachable thing, and I also wasn’t sure that impeachment was politically wise anyway. Then came Ukraine. I continued to think that impeachment might be politically unwise, but it took only a few weeks for the question of whether Trump’s actions were impeachable to become obvious. Of course they were. Secretly withholding congressionally-approved military aid in return for a personal benefit? Putting responsibility for this in the hands of his personal lawyer instead of US diplomats? Instructing aides to lie to Congress about what was going on? Politically wise or not, of course Trump had to be impeached over this. It would be both cowardly and a mockery of the Constitution to do otherwise.

But this all hangs on the fact that Trump’s price was personal, not national. This is the thing that I suspect hardly anyone really gets.² Investigating a campaign opponent is a personal benefit. In an autocracy, campaigns are treated as mere appendages of governing, but in democracies they aren’t. We’re a democracy.

¹Jennings tries to pretend that Joe Biden did the same thing, withholding aid to Ukraine in return for firing a prosecutor who was investigating Hunter Biden. This is simply a lie. Biden was publicly carrying out US policy which was supported by the president, the State Department, and virtually all of Europe.

²Not us political junkies, of course. I’m talking about the other 99 percent of the country.