{"id":1315110,"date":"2019-09-28T23:48:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-29T05:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/parker-column-democrats-show-me-the-message\/"},"modified":"2019-09-28T23:48:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-29T05:48:00","slug":"parker-column-democrats-show-me-the-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/parker-column-democrats-show-me-the-message\/","title":{"rendered":"Parker column: Democrats, show me the message"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WASHINGTON \u2014 We long ago established that Donald Trump is a bad guy. We\u2019ve multiple times said, \u201cThis is it. They\u2019ve got to get rid of him.\u201d So what\u2019s so new and awful that the president of the United States must now be impeached?<\/p>\n

Maybe a lot; maybe not so much.<\/p>\n

The Department of Justice has already determined that Trump, in soliciting a favor from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky \u2014 asking him to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter \u2014 didn\u2019t break any campaign finance laws. As far as we know \u2014 thus far. A rough transcript of the conversation between the two world leaders confirms the asking of a favor, but a full version \u2014 and any clearer quid pro quo inference \u2014 hasn\u2019t been made available.<\/p>\n

Trump had suspended nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine prior to his call and, according to the whistleblower complaint, Zelensky was at some point told that a meeting with Trump depended on his willingness to \u201cplay ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

This approach seems inherently corrupt, as American norms go. But does it break any laws? Trump skates so close to the edges of illegality in nearly everything he does that it\u2019s almost impossible to believe he\u2019s still skating.<\/p>\n

But would Trump at his most clueless pursue such a reckless course of action without checking the legal boundaries? Surely, after two years of investigation into potential collusion between Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin, he would steer clear of a potentially criminal maneuver. Or, is corruption so widespread in the White House, as suggested by the whistleblower, that the president felt he could do whatever he wanted? After all, former special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to find sufficient evidence of a conspiracy with Russia.<\/p>\n

Apparently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided there\u2019s enough there-there to pursue an impeachment inquiry, even knowing that the Senate likely won\u2019t confer its imprimatur. There simply aren\u2019t enough votes in the Republican-controlled Senate to see an impeachment through, as was similarly the case following the then-Republican-controlled House impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998.<\/p>\n

To most minds, Trump\u2019s alleged appeal to a foreign government for political help in the 2020 election is far more egregious than Clinton\u2019s lies under oath about \u201csexual relations\u201d with an intern. It\u2019s obviously wrong on its face to solicit foreign interference in an American election, but that\u2019s not precisely what Trump did with Zelensky. Rather, during the July 25 call, he asked Zelensky to investigate whether Biden tried to intercede on behalf of his son, Hunter Biden, during a Ukrainian corruption investigation of a gas company that included the younger Biden on its board of directors.<\/p>\n

The answer seems to be \u201cno.\u201d According to multiple reports, the investigation into the gas company had been dormant before then-Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine if the country\u2019s prosecutor general didn\u2019t resign.<\/p>\n

But, Trump, the master of messaging, has managed to connect Joe Biden\u2019s name to Ukrainian corruption, even if there\u2019s no evidence to support it. Biden has dismissed the allegations as a \u201csmear,\u201d which seems accurate. For his part, Zelensky told Trump in July that he would appoint a prosecutor general to look into the Biden matter. But at a joint press conference in New York Wednesday, the Ukraine president said Trump had not \u201cpushed\u201d him to do anything.<\/p>\n

While Middle America mutters economy-economy-economy, Washington and the media will busy themselves the next several weeks with the impeachment drama. This is not to dismiss the importance of Trump\u2019s dubious overtures to Ukraine nor his endlessly offensive, corruption-smelling conduct. Everything he does and says carries the whiff of wrongdoing. But legality and ethics are separate entities, a distinction well understood by the wicked and the shrewd.<\/p>\n

It would seem for now that we\u2019re in the early phase of a political match-up between Biden and Trump in which the message \u2014 not the good \u2014 usually wins. Trump knows this in ways Democrats don\u2019t, which is always his advantage. As the late GOP chairman and ruthless political operative Lee Atwater once told a political science student: Unless you can sell your message in two minutes at a truck stop, it was either wrong or wouldn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

For now, the Democratic Party message is still in the bottle.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Parker\u2019s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 We long ago established that Donald Trump is a bad guy. We\u2019ve multiple times said, \u201cThis is it. They\u2019ve got to get rid of him.\u201d So what\u2019s so new and awful that the president of the United States must now be impeached? Maybe a lot; maybe not so much. The Department of Justice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 21:48:28","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}