{"id":38232,"date":"2019-11-19T09:32:46","date_gmt":"2019-11-19T17:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=38232"},"modified":"2019-11-19T09:32:46","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T17:32:46","slug":"the-firing-squad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/19\/the-firing-squad\/","title":{"rendered":"The Firing Squad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Republicans keep flailing wildly looking for ways to defend High Criminal Resident Donald Trump, but every time they offer a new excuse to justify bribery and extortion, truthful witnesses come forward and Democrats use their testimony to pull the Republicans&#8217; rug out.<\/font><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"1119Trump\" style=\"border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: none; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-left: auto; display: block; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; margin-right: auto\" border=\"0\" alt=\"1119Trump\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/1119Trump.jpg\" width=\"700\" height=\"394\">  <\/p>\n<p>The first week of impeachment hearings produced powerful testimony about President Donald Trump&#8217;s pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political opponents, but also a number of defensive arguments by Republicans. Unfortunately for Trump, none of them is consistent with the facts. Here&#8217;s a review of the various excuses and their flaws.  <\/p>\n<p><strong>No harm, no foul<\/strong>.  <\/p>\n<p>Republicans say that, since Ukraine eventually received the military aid that Trump withheld, and never launched the investigations he demanded of former vice president Joe Biden and Ukraine&#8217;s role in the 2016 election, there was no offense. <strong>That&#8217;s like arguing that, if an armed robber flees the bank he is holding up before getting any money, he should be excused<\/strong>. <strong>Trump released the hold on aid to Ukraine only after Congress announced an investigation<\/strong>.  <\/p>\n<p>Moreover, there was harm. The episode damaged U.S.-Ukrainian relations. Instead of supporting Ukraine&#8217;s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as he sought to fend off Russian aggression, <strong>Trump signaled to both the Ukrainians and Vladimir Putin that the United States was an unreliable ally<\/strong>&#8230;. [<em>emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Inserted from &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstimes.com\/opinion\/article\/Republicans-defense-of-Trump-is-full-of-holes-14844595.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">newstimes.com<\/a>&gt;<\/font>  <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">I shared only the first of six examples in the article.&nbsp; Click through for the other five.<\/font>  <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Rachel Maddow covered this story in two segments.<\/font>  <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=EI2q_F0OTi4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Impeachment Witnesses Explode Trump Defense, Expose Perry, Mike Pence<\/a>  <\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/EI2q_F0OTi4\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=YcqCJPpyU48\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Impeachment Spawns New Scandals Despite Democrats&#8217; Narrow Focus<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/YcqCJPpyU48\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">You might ask jus what all this has to do with a firing squad.&nbsp; The Republican Reich are forming a circular firing squad.&nbsp; Circular firing squads used to be an exclusively Democratic demesnes . No more.<\/font><\/p>\n<h1 align=\"center\"><font style=\"font-weight: bold\" color=\"#0000ff\">RESIST!!<\/font><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Republicans keep flailing wildly looking for ways to defend High Criminal Resident Donald Trump, but every time they offer a new excuse to justify bribery and extortion, truthful witnesses come forward and Democrats use their testimony to pull the Republicans&#8217; rug out. The first week of impeachment hearings produced powerful testimony about President Donald Trump&#8217;s <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/19\/the-firing-squad\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}