(Opinion) Here’s how I feel about the ‘impeachment’ inquiry into President Biden.
I know in my head and in my heart that this is nothing more than vulgar political accusatory theater, a depressing form of performance art with not an ounce of truth in it.
But even believing as I do, that this is just a smear tactic of MAGA republicans desirous of creating a diversion from Trump’s four indictments and 91 felony counts, I’m thinking about it at all because it concerns me.
Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Oklahoma), who chairs the Republican Study Committee, got it right quoting Gertrude Stein when he told the ‘Beast’, “If there’s no there there, then there’s no there there.”
Certain as I am that there is no there, there, the very existence of this ‘inquiry’ forces me to pay attention to it, to believe for just a fleeting second that there might be something there.
President Biden’s son, Hunter, has recently been indicted on unrelated gun charges, providing House Republicans with motivation to scrutinize the presidential level further.
Despite years of investigation and no concrete evidence, they seek to link the President to benefiting from his son’s foreign business activities.
Opined the New York Times, “In the first days of their inquiry, the House Republicans made no new requests for documents, issued no new subpoenas, demanded no new testimony, and laid out no potential articles of impeachment.
Instead, they flocked to the cameras to call Mr. Biden a liar and a crook…”
Flocking to the cameras and bombarding the media with loaded inuendo is exactly what the authoritarian playbook teaches and Trump and his puppets in the so-called ‘Freedom Caucus’ in congress practice.
They want people like me, people who would otherwise totally ignore their noise, to pay attention to it, to wonder if only for a second, if some small part of it could be true.
And they know ‘truth’ is no way part of it.
As Trump wrote on social media, the reason to impeach is because “THEY DID IT TO US”.
Once planted, the seed doesn’t go away. Fertilized by curiosity, it grows.
Remember Arthur Miller’s striking play, ‘The Crucible’, in which a group of young girls in 17th century Salem spread false accusations of witchcraft leading to a hysteria that results in the wrongful persecution and execution of innocent people.
Or closer to today, what is best known as ‘The Red Scare’ and ‘McCarthyism’ when many people were falsely accused of being communist sympathizers, leading to investigations, blacklisting, and ruined careers, even when the accusations were totally unfounded.
The easy willingness of a significant portion of the population to believe accusations and conspiracy theories is evident.
A recent CNN survey found that 63% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents still believe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
This predisposition makes it simple to disseminate unsupported disinformation and have it readily accepted by many.
I ask myself how it could be possible for a large proportion, a majority of my fellow citizens, to cling to a flat-earth narrative, ignoring the clearly documented fact that Biden won the 2020 election, and by a significant margin?
Facts appear to have become a devalued currency. The loaded question: ‘Is it true that Biden’, followed by a calumny, is an accusation without seeming to be one. But it plants the desired accusatory seed.
We are living in a dystopian universe where we appear to have become unfastened from our core values and principles.
While the majority would likely find ‘1984’s famed “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” to be more curious than prophetic, that same majority is increasingly willing to turn a blind eye towards the rule of law.
That six of eight presidential aspirants could accept to vote for a candidate convicted of a felony by a jury of his peers and look on when he takes the Presidential oath to uphold the Constitution he has been convicted of violating, could be our up-to-date version of Orwell’s “Ignorance is strength”.
Is there even a modicum of truth behind the inquiry as to whether President Biden has committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors?
Whether there is or not, the seed of accusation has been firmly planted and I cannot unhear the noise.