Two weeks ago, pseudoconservative, pseudo-Republican PBS NewsHour analyst David Brooks argued the impeachment trial wouldn’t be a fair fight, that Ken Starr & Co. had no chance. Adam Schiff “will just walk all over them," because he had all the evidence. Now that Schiff has lost, Brooks is blaming the American people. On Friday night, he complained they can’t be persuaded by “evidence and facts anymore.”
DAVID BROOKS: [W]hile I say I would probably vote to remove, it would make me very nervous if we had persuaded nobody in the American public. And this body rests within the larger realm of the American public.
And maybe America is not persuadable by evidence and facts anymore. In that case, we have got a problem. But if we haven't — if the people saying he should be impeached and removed have not changed a single mind, and if there's any evidence they have gone the opposite way, and we have a society where everything is delegitimized, I think this would massively delegitimize Washington.
And maybe that's the fault of the voters, the Trump supporters, and not the fault of Washington, but it's a reality.
Brooks announced that he would both vote for Trump to be removed, and yet believes that because of the current polls, it would be a "cataclysm" for the country. (How “moderate.”)
BROOKS: If they took a vote and removed the president, with the country split, with no public minds having been made up, with, if anything, Trump rising in approval a little, I think it'd be a cataclysm for the country, and 45 percent of the country would feel it'd be a coup d'etat.
Now, how can I hold these three views logically in my head? I have no idea, but I'm telling you these three things are in my head.
He annoyed Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus by cynically arguing it doesn’t matter whether John Bolton testified, since facts don’t matter to people now. He also did that annoying thing of employing crime analogies in an impeachment with no crime: "I could see if you don't know if the — if a crime occurred, if a burglary occurred. But we know the burglary occurred. And so I'm just playing devil's advocate here. What — like, do we expect the witnesses to change any minds?"
He conceded there was no harm in Bolton's testimony. Like most liberals, Marcus was nonplussed that they would dismiss witnesses when inevitably more damning evidence against Trump was coming....just like it's always been coming since 2015.
Then, as usual, they turned to sugar-puffing the Democratic presidential race, and saw Mike Bloomberg on the rise.
At least Marcus noted "There is really a surging wing of the Democratic Party that is way left. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had just 12 percent of Sanders voters supporting capitalism....That's a really big deal. Sixty percent had a positive view of socialism."
