The sane person's informational dilemma assessing the Biden impeachment inquiry

 The House of Representatives is opening an "impeachment inquiry" into President Biden.  Why?  The real reason is vengeance.  Stripped of pretense, this is vengeance.  The Democrats impeached Donald Trump, twice, and several members of the Republican Party admitted that they would turn around and impeach the next Democrat.  Donald Trump, who identifies as vengeance, and whose pronouns are vengeself etc., has demanded that Biden be impeached, basically because he was impeached.  Any sensible observer knew, as soon as the GOP took the House, that the probability of Biden's impeachment became 1.  For what?  It didn't matter, and no one knew.  It was merely inevitable because the Trumpiest wing of the party would demand it.  The first step is the "impeachment inquiry."  The impeachment itself will follow.  What would it take for Biden to not be impeached?  A few heart attacks, strokes, or other maladies.  That's about it.  Impeachment City, baby.  Population:  Biden.

I was asked recently, what the charges were/would be?  I honestly could not explain it.  One may note that this is a problem.  I am a political science professor, and not just one of those who proudly proclaims ignorance of American politics as a demonstration of moral/intellectual purity.  Yes, I know a bunch of those, and they are precisely as intolerable as you think.  No, this is my job.  The best I could do was blah-blah-something-something-Hunter Biden.  Who, one may note, is not Joe Biden.

At some point, there will be articles of impeachment, and I will read them.  At that point, I will be able to explain-- to the degree that the articles are explainable-- what the charges are.  The problem right now is that I would like to be able to give a coherent answer.  I read relatively widely, with the word, "relatively," doing a lot of work.  The problem is that I need to read both sane and insane materials, with limited capacity for insanity.  I will burrow into the batshit when it becomes personally or professionally important for me to be able to break down the chemical composition of said batshit, but I don't actually like doing it.  I'd rather take a nice bubble bath.  Maybe some lavender scent.  Doesn't that sound nice?

But no.  I'm a political science professor, studying American politics, in 2023.  I have to spend my professional time mucking about in the muck.  Fuck.

So here's the thing about batshit.  There is often a core which is not batshit.  The problem is the echo chamber phenomenon.  When people talk only to those of like mind, and go into a purity spiral, then not only do they have no check on their own bonkers-ness, to keep them from getting too batty, they actually wind up encouraging it.

And there's really no proper distinction between a sane person and an insane person.

I mean, there are people who are paranoid schizophrenics, and such, but a better way to think of this is that there are sane ideas, and insane ideas, and the annoying thing for those of us who want sanity is that a person is capable of holding some sane ideas and some insane ideas.  Consider the relationship between critical race theory and climate change.  Critical race theory is batshit.  Climate denialism is batshit.

I can find plenty of people who subscribe to critical race theory, while accepting climate change, and plenty of people who acknowledge the insanity of critical race theory, while denying climate change.

You see the problem?  Who is sane, and who is insane?

As a side note, at some point soon I'd like to do a post on left-wing bonkers-ness on climate change.  No, humanity is not about to go extinct because of climate change.  That is insane.  "Climate change is real, and a serious problem," is light years away from "climate change is about to wipe out the human race."

Sorry, tangent.

Anyway, the problem is as follows.  I do not inhabit fever swamps.  I take excursions into them, as professionally necessary, but only with proper intellectual survival gear, and I really don't like it.

The "impeach Biden" push from Trump and his flunkies is coming from a fever swamp, and since I have not yet needed to put on my mosquito repellent and other protective gear, I have not really paid the attention necessary to know what they're on about.  Is there any validity?  Well, there is a boy-about-to-cry-wolf problem.  They told us, in advance, that they would impeach the next Dem, which makes it hard to take them seriously now, but I cannot logically disprove corruption.  This is basically the same problem as the 2020 election, where Trump told us, in advance, that he was going to refuse to concede if he lost, and that he would claim fraud/corruption if he lost.  The boy-about-to-cry-wolf.  That doesn't disprove the claim once made, but it means one has a hard time taking it seriously.  Indeed, Trump's 2020 election claims were easily debunked, and laughed out of court, although he isn't laughing now that he's in court for not taking the court verdicts and calling it a day.  Similarly, the fact that we knew a GOP House majority would impeach any Democratic president doesn't mean the impeachment is on false claims.  It just means we view the claims skeptically because they told us in advance that they'd do it, and look for a justification for the thing they'd do no matter what.

So, I'd like to know.  The problem is that I'm not going to listen to a bunch of Jim Jordan interviews, because Jim Jordan's words have no meaningful content.

How shall I know?  The general claim is that Joe Biden did... um... something corrupt with respect to Hunter Biden.  Something about business, and... um...  I dunno.  Hunter Biden is a crook, and maybe he'll go to jail.  Daddy ain't gonna pardon him the way Trump would.  Actually, Trump would have fired any investigator who went after his kid, but Hunter is fucked, as I understand it.  He has committed a lot of crimes, which is a thing you do when you are a junkie.

Kids, don't do drugs.

Joe?

This is the informational problem of which I write.  Joe is going to be impeached for... something about Hunter's business dealings.

When Donald Trump was first impeached, it was for a phone call in which he leaned on a foreign leader-- Zelenskyy, ironically-- threatening to cut off weapons support unless... wait for it... unless Zelenskyy announced that he was investigating Joe Biden's supposed corruption, which he wasn't, because as far as Zelenskyy was concerned, there wasn't a there there.

Yet, we have the phone call.  Trump did it.  He threatened to cut off military support, allocated by Congress, for campaign assistance from a foreign government.  We can go back and forth about whether or not that was impeachable, but Trump did it.

The second impeachment?  The 2020 election, and January 6.  There was never a fact question.  There were questions about the fact that the Senate trial took place after Trump left office, McConnell and a few others said that he could, in theory, be criminally liable but it was no longer an impeachment matter.  There was never a fact question (except among the election conspiracy theorists).  What Trump was accused of doing, he did.

In the Mar-a-Lago documents case, there is no fact question.  He is admitting everything, and merely claiming that the Presidential Records Act gives the president absolute, unilateral authority to take any document he wants, as personal property, with no check, and to ignore any subpoena, because all federal documents are his personal property if he says so.  That's not what the law says, and I doubt his lawyers will try to make that case in court because it is so far from what the law says, but the point is that there is no fact question.  Trump took the documents, he did it willfully, and that's public.  There is even a recording in which he acknowledged not having declassified at least one of them, not that classification status is relevant to the Espionage Act, but the point remains that there are no fact questions.

With the still-vague accusations against Biden, there are big(ly) fact questions.  The general accusation is that Biden used the power of the office (actually, the VP office from when he was serving as Obama's Vice President, as I understand the very vague accusations) to help Hunter Biden's business dealings.

Are there, for example, recordings of Biden leaning on a foreign leader?  A lawyer's meeting notes of that?  Not even close.  The impeachment inquiry has been established in order to try to give Congress more investigative power to search for the evidence that it would need to impeach Biden under the general charges that have been decided.

The skeptical response, then, is that they have nothing, and are trying to use the maneuver of an impeachment inquiry to empower Congress in the hope that it uncovers something, but it doesn't matter because either way, the House will impeach and the Senate will acquit amid a partisan split.

And right now, if I, as an independent who views the GOP as a conspiracy theory-driven cult of personality, and the Democratic Party as a slow-rolling identitarian disaster, simply want to know if there's a there there, what do I do?  The problem is that no evidence has been forthcoming.  I mean, no real evidence.  No Zelenskyy phone call-style evidence.  Just noise.

Might there be evidence?  Possibly.  I have no great and insurmountable personal attachment to Joe Biden.  When the Tara Reade accusations came out, I took them seriously because statistically, most sexual assault allegations are true, so by baseline statistical probabilities, I did not rally to Biden's defense.  Eventually, Reade's accusations fell apart under scrutiny, as sometimes happens, but anyone can go back and read the fact that I initially said we should take those accusations seriously.  I do not just side with Joe Biden by reflex.  I don't have a shrine to the guy in my house, and I don't treat him as a cult leader who is definitionally innocent.  It is merely that when the accusation precedes the evidence, I need a non-fever swamp source.

That's an informational problem.

Ideally, what I would like is for some non-crazy Republicans to tell me, straight up, what the deal is.

The problem is that too much of the GOP is a Trump personality cult, and hence we see events like Romney's retirement.

What I would absolutely love to hear is a full analysis from my girl, Liz.  So I did some searchin' around, and the first thing that comes up is that her hubby-- and let me tell you how heartbroken I am that Liz is taken-- works for a lawfirm that has been involved in Hunter Biden's legal defense.

Ha!

Now how do we interpret this?

If you are a Trumpist, this means that Liz, herself, is a leftist plant, conspiring with "the Biden crime family" and you can write the rest.  If you are looking to exonerate Joe, you can tell another story because the Cheneys are the paragons of true conservatism as opposed to Trump cultism.

Or, everyone is entitled to legal representation because that's how our judicial system works.  In which case, no information, and it is hard to find any actual statements from my girl, Liz, because her hubby has that connection, so shut up, Liz.  That's the ethical/honorable thing to do, and my girl does what's right.

Which may be true, but it leaves an informational void.  I wanna know what Liz thinks, and I don't know.

How about Adam Kinzinger?  I looked for any statements from him about the Hunter mess, and did not find anything in a quick search, but he had, of course, predicted that the GOP majority would just go impeachment-mad.  And here we are.

All of this means I still have an informational problem.  And that means I need to go into the fever swamps.  I don't wanna.  The problem is that there may be a there there.

Remember that Hunter's laptop actually was real.  I don't actually give a shit about it, because I don't give a shit about him.  This is all being done in bad faith.  That doesn't prove the accusations false.  It means one should view the accusations with the deepest of skepticism, but that's the informational problem.

The liar, the bullshit artist, the con artist-- they may occasionally stumble on a true statement, and that is never more important than when dealing with corruption at the highest level.

Will there be a there there?  If I had to bet, I'd bet no.  When the accusation begins in bad faith, the evidence that exists, such as it does, is wildly exaggerated, and the outcome is predetermined, bet no.

But how do you know?

Leo Kottke, "Song of the Swamp," from Greenhouse.