Opinion

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, wrongly identified the whistleblower who triggered the impeachment probe into President Donald Trump’s Ukraine dealings in a tweet on Thursday.

There was a moment early in the testimony last Wednesday by longtime diplomat and Army veteran Bill Taylor that was lost in the drama of everything else he had to say about Donald Trump’s attempt to extort the Ukrainian government. That was when Taylor dropped the fact that he had been on the “front line” of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia only the previous week and that on the day he was there, “a Ukrainian soldier was killed and four were wounded.”

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and her husband, conservative attorney George Conway, are not the first political couple with different views. But the others — Democratic strategist James Carville and outspoken conservative Mary Matalin, “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC — haven’t displayed near as extreme a cleavage as the Conways. And journalist Gabriel Sherman examines the Conways’ radically different views on President Donald Trump and some of the fallout this week in a Vanity Fair report.

One of the biggest problems Republicans face as they struggle to defend President Donald Trump from impeachment is President Donald Trump himself.

David French — a conservative critic of President Donald Trump — argued this week in a newsletter for The Dispatch that Republicans are “building the idiocracy, one word salad at a time” in their attacks on impeachment.

When President Donald Trump said he was planning to release the record of his April 21 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, many observers yawned. In the controversy surrounding the July 25 call, some had raised questions about Trump’s only other call with the new leader, but interest in the April 21 conversation died down as the evidence against the president in the broader Ukraine scandal became so overwhelming and damning.

New testimony from State Department employee David Holmes given to the House Intelligence Committee on Friday in closed session confirmed a previous revelation that he had overheard President Donald Trump on a phone call discussing Ukrainian investigations, CNN reported.

In the morass of conflicting and often incomprehensible Republican defenses of Donald Trump, there is just one that seemed like it might have legs — especially after Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, spoke during Wednesday's impeachment hearing. That would be the claim that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine not to strong-arm that nation's leaders into boosting his re-election campaign, but because of a generalized opposition to "corruption" in that nation. This was laughable on its face, since Trump's clear and public stance throughout his political career has been pro-corruption. But sure, it might be enough to bamboozle some Americans who don't follow politics closely and somehow missed hearing that their president is a grifter.

I wrote yesterday that political journalists’ pervasive cynicism led to some odd analyses concluding that Wednesday’s first day of public impeachment hearings had been a dull affair, and how this narrative ultimately benefited Donald Trump. The following post adds to that piece. 

Liberal and progressive pundits — and some Never Trump conservatives as well — have been highly critical of the silly, buffoonish theatrics that Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Devin Nunes of California and other far-right House Republicans brought to the first public testimony in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. But then, Jordan and Nunes weren’t trying to win over liberals, progressives or anti-Trump conservatives on Wednesday, November 13, when they aggressively attacked the testimony of two diplomats: Ambassador William B. Taylor (top U.S. ambassador to Ukraine) and the U.S. State Department’s George P. Kent (deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs). They were playing to Trump’s hardcore MAGA base, pushing emotional buttons rather than relying on substance.

There was a lot of talk on Thursday about the theater criticism of the impeachment hearings coming from some quarters of the mainstream media. Press Watch's Dan Froomkin wrote a must-read piece here at Salon taking them to task for trivializing the event and creating the impression among many people who didn't watch the live testimony that it was boring and worthless. This is another example of the media's insatiable need for drama, explaining once again how Donald Trump, a carnival sideshow act if ever there was one, wound up in the White House.

The three prime time hosts at Fox News hosts invoked conspiracy theories and lobbed personal attacks about the appearances of Democrats lawmakers participating in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump in lieu of attacking the substance of the testimony given on the first day of public hearings.