At
one point when he felt under siege by possible indictments and impeachable
offenses, the president whined petulantly, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The question
became the title of a documentary on Cohn’s life and career that made one feel after
viewing like taking a long hot shower. Cohn blithely represented a number of
high-ranking organized crime capos.
His reputation for
ruthlessness was surpassed only by his reputation for hypocrisy as a closeted
gay man who, when he worked for Senator McCarthy, had no problem trashing the
reputation of other gay men.
Now
the president has found his Roy Cohn—in Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, and
all the other Republicans in the Senate who voted to end the first ever
impeachment trial that subpoenaed no witnesses and requested no documents. As
e.e.cummings once wrote:
“A
politician is an ass upon
Which
everyone has sat—except a man.”
Women,
too—here’s looking at you, Lisa.
But
politicians do not have to be sat-upon asses devoid of principles. I don’t know about
you, but in the heroic eloquence and poise of Adam Schiff, I saw something
presidential. Maybe not this cycle, but down the road.
It
was hard to choose the most outrageous aspect of this Moscow-like show trial—McConnell’s
brazen partisanship even though he swore himself to impartiality; Dershowitz’s
cockamamie “arguments” that came right back down to Nixon’s “if the president
does it, it’s not illegal”; the general weakness of the defense’s
rationalizations of the president’s behavior; the abject, feckless refusal to
interview Bolton; or the fact that the
president’s lawyer Mr. Cipollone continued to defend the president even as it emerged
that Cipollone was in at least one meeting that made him a direct witness of
the president’s perfidy.
Polls
suggest that 75% of Americans wanted witnesses. That statistic, given myriad
other evidence that the polarization around Trump is more like 50-50, is arresting.
It suggests something hopeful about the body politic—that, unlike the Republic
senators, even for Trump supporters, basic fairness trumps mindless cultism.
Jill
Lepore, in an excellent article in this week’s
New Yorker, writes “Nothing
so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its
demolition.” The empty spectacle of the impeachment trial has the potential to
activate a lot of citizens to go to work and show cynics like McConnell the
door.
OK—on
to the ballot box. At least they can’t take that away from us . . .
can they?????
