New right-wing defense: Trump is too incompetent to be impeached
From Media Matters
https://www.mediamatters.org/national-review/new-right-wing-defense-trump-too-incompetent-be-impeached
National Review is now seeking to advance a drastic change of strategy for Republicans in how to handle the impeachment inquiry. The conservative magazine says they should admit that President Donald Trump withhed military aid to Ukraine in an effort to pressure the country to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden — and even admit that it was wrong to do so — but claim that impeachment should still be rejected because the scheme didn’t work, anyway.
There is a major problem here, however: For it to work, countless Republicans and conservative commentators would have to reverse themselves on their previous numerous denials about the events that have taken place surrounding Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — about both whether there was a pressure campaign and whether it was wrong.
It’s a long list of people, including Fox News host Sean Hannity and legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, for example, as well as purported “news”-side personalities on the network like John Roberts, Ed Henry, and Melissa Francis. (It also includes people outside Fox, such as talk radio host and NBC News contributor Hugh Hewitt.) And then there are the congressional Republicans, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who have staunchly denied that any quid pro quo had taken place. That’s a lot of precious rhetorical work to just send it all down the memory hole. But even beyond that, the revised narrative National Review is floating still doesn’t actually work to explain what appears to have gone on.
An early sign of this stratagem came on Tuesday, when National Review contributor Andy McCarthy — a man who has demonstrated some egregious double standards on impeachment — declared during one of his Fox News appearances: “Now, should they have been asked to investigate the Bidens for violations of Ukrainian law? No. Should the aid have been dragged out after Congress passed it and the president signed legislation to give it to them? No. But at the end, I think, you know, their best defense is going to be, ‘No harm, no foul.’’’
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