I’ll be damned if I know what to write about anymore. Donald Trump is just raving these days, both online and off, and a few minutes ago he practically melted down in public while the president of Finland stoically stared into his hands. Meanwhile, his secretary of state is flatly stonewalling Congress and—unless I’ve missed someone—not a single elected Republican is willing to even mildly criticize Trump, let alone support an impeachment inquiry.
Do the details even matter anymore? I suppose they do—or, more accurately, they might eventually. Maybe there’s some limit that even Fox News can’t quite spin away. Maybe.
In the meantime, just remember this: Joe Biden went to Ukraine in 2015 to demand that they crack down harder on corruption. That included investigations of Burisma, the energy company where his son sat on the board. In the real world, this is uncontroversial. Everybody agrees this is what happened. But in Foxland, Biden went to Ukraine to make sure they stopped investigating Burisma. It’s a jaw-dropping fantasy, but thanks to the conservative media machine it’s now gospel for a huge chunk of the country.
And why shouldn’t it be? As a friend asked me—sincerely, I think—if all this stuff he hears on Fox is wrong, then why are they saying it? All I could do was shrug. Because they lie, I told him, and that ended the conversation. He quite reasonably took this as evidence that I was a hopeless partisan hack. But what else is there to say? It just goes to show the power of straight-up lying, repeated 24/7. How do you fight it?
