Roger Kimball

'No.' 'No.' 'No.' 'No.' That pretty much sums up yesterday’s testimony. 'Did you receive any indication whatsoever, or anything that resembled a quid pro quo?' Former envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker: 'No.' Devin Nunes to Tim Morrison, former NSC official: 'Did anyone ever ask you to bribe or extort anyone at any time during your time in the White House?' 'No.' This follows the responses of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the question of whether he was offered a quid pro quo: US aid in exchange for investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with the natural gas company Burisma: 'No.' Ditto Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the European Union: was there a quid pro quo: 'No.

Today marks the official beginning of the Schiff Show Impeachment Follies. It is therefore fitting that I take as my text for today’s meditation Matthew 7:5: 'Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.' What do I mean? I’ll tell you. The ostensible predicate of this spectacle is President Trump’s alleged effort to influence the 2020 election. Specifically, the allegation is that Trump made aid to Ukraine (the quid) conditional on Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden’s demand (the quo) that the prosecutor investigating a company on which his son, Hunter, sat be fired. Biden’s demand is not controverted.

Politics, said Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Among other things, that apothegm pays homage to the pressure of the impossible, since deployment of the possible tacitly acknowledges the alternative. Invocation of 'the possible' is what makes Bismarck’s mot memorable; but what gives it teeth (not to mention logical coherence) is the appeal to 'art'. The statesman displays his skill by dancing gracefully among alternatives while avoiding the potholes of mere possibility that would topple him. In this sense, Bismarck’s observation is at odds with Jesus’s claim that 'With God all things are possible' (Matthew 19:26).

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Absent the appearance of a last-minute deus (or dea) ex machina, and always keeping in mind Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics, the bookies are coalescing around the prediction that the Democratic nominee for president will be Big Squaw E. Warren, senator from Massachusetts, purveyor of authentically fake ‘Pow Wow Chow’ which experts reckon are 0.1024 percent Cherokee, the same as paleface Warren herself. It was only yesterday, it seems, that the Democratic field was teeming with candidates. Whither Spartacus Booker and his imaginary friend T-Bone? What price Kamala Harris? Who remembers Mayor Pete?

Oh no! The walls are closing in again on Trump! We’ve reached a 'tipping point.' This time, finally, at last, we have the fatal 'bombshell' that will destroy him. The testimony of Bill Taylor, Deep State apparatchik and acting Ambassador to Ukraine, has given 'devastating', 'explosive' testimony to Adam Schiff. They’ve certainly got Trump this time. An establishment lifer with deep ties to Burisma, the corrupt energy company that was so generous to Hunter Biden, has said that Trump insisted on a quid in the form of probing cokehead Hunter and his dad, Joe, in exchange for the quo of $400 million in military aid. Or was pelf the quid and the investigation of the Joe and Hunter show the quo? Our experts are working on untangling that.

I am not thinking of that scene at the beginning of Dickens’s novel where Mr Blotton says he regards Mr Pickwick as a 'humbug'. That was nice, especially when Mr Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or 'common sense'. No, no responded Mr Blotton, he had 'merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view'. Well, that’s all right then, rejoined Mr Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club. There is a lesson in there somewhere for the Democrats, but when it comes to their virulent case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, more pertinent is the episode describing the case of Bardell v. Pickwick.

Spin the magic wheel: click, click, click, click, click — click — click: Ukraine! We’re all going to Ukraine! Another week, another pseudo-scandal fomented by anonymous anti-Trump actors in the 'intelligence community' and fanned into attention-grabbing headlines by an impatient, irresponsible press. Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump administration.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. More official reports, reprimands and (probably) indictments are to come in the Great Get Trump imbroglio of 2016 to 2019. But it is not too early to begin an autopsy of the greatest political scandal in American history. The patient is dead, dead, dead, and the last doctors in the room are the pathologists. The lawyers crowding the corridor outside the operating theater are interested not in resuscitating the corpse but in distributing and gorging upon its assets.

I guess that The New York Times didn’t get the memo. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last fall. He is sitting there (officially, I mean) right now, as I write. Despite the most disgusting, ad hominem, evidence-free effort at character assassination of a Supreme Court nominee in history, the combined forces of The New York Times and other cesspool media organs like The New Yorker, bottom-feeding Senate Democrats, feminazis of various stripes, and other woke constituencies on the left, Kavanaugh made it.

Here’s a shocker: people are more complicated than the caricatures disseminated by their enemies suggest. Witness the stupefyingly rich David Koch, who together with his brother Charles, presided over a business empire worth some $115 billion. David, who died on Friday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was at one with his brother in embracing a staunch libertarian philosophy of government and also in his belief in the power of philanthropic investment. When you control a personal fortune of $50 billion, you are in a position to distribute philos to many anthropoi. This the Koch brothers did, on a breathtaking scale. A lot of their money, and a lot of money they leveraged from other conservative donors, was siphoned to political candidates of whom they approved.

If The Onion didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The self-described 'omnipotent' purveyor of current-events satire may not be (as another motto claims) 'America’s finest news source.' But it does have a good claim to the nation’s nicest anatomist of political folly (using, I hasten to add, that capacious word 'nice' not in the sense of 'kind, pleasant' but 'precise, exact, fine'). Consider this headline: 'Anthony Scaramucci talks to Bill Kristol about trying to force Trump off the GOP ticket in 2020.' Can you guess the source? If you said 'The Onion,' you would have made a perfectly rational judgment.

Someday, footage from the Democratic debates of 2019 will occupy a prized place in the comedy section of our cultural archives, just down the shelf from moldering copies of the Keystone Cops. I only caught about an hour of Tuesday’s debate, but I could tell from tonight’s performance that I could have stopped after 10 minutes. True, out of the mephitic cauldron of bubbling nonsense, an occasional bubble of sanity rose to the surface and expired in a satisfying eructation. But such little pops were emitted by the debaters of whom no one had heard of before (well, not before the first set of debates a month ago) and surely no one will hear of again.

If only his legs could reach that far, Rep. Jerry Nadler would be kicking himself now. Whose idea was it to indulge in this pathetic geriatric festival featuring antique G-Man Robert S. Mueller III? The chap who suggested subjecting us all to the five-plus hours of this Howdy-Doody show should be furloughed immediately. For one thing, the escapade probably violated the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which explicitly prohibits, inter alia, cruel and unusual punishment. Cruel the punishment certainly was, and not just to viewers. I almost felt sorry for Robert Mueller, who at 74 is clearly not the incisive interlocutor that he, by reputation, once was. 'Dazed and confused' read one Drudge Report headline. Exactly.

Well la-dee-dah. The House votes to condemn 'President Trump for his "racist comments" about four Democratic congresswomen of color.'First, I am glad that 'racist comments' was in scare quotes. Why? Because there was nothing racist about the president’s tweets inviting creeps like Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar to leave the United States if she doesn’t like it here.  Second, I wish people would give the phrase 'people of color' a rest. Everyone is a color — even, I suppose, Albinos (is that 'racist' now, too?). I, for example, am a pleasing pink. But the fact that someone is dark-skinned imparts to him no special virtue, just as the fact that someone is Caucasian saddles him with no special liability. Except, alas, that it does.