Performative Stupidity

Dear Americans, when you elect Republican clowns (via Chris Marquette and Kyle Cheney at Politico)...

In a quest to frame former special counsel Jack Smith as a liar during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Schmitt asked him if he was in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, for an NBA basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks — amid mounting drama around the Atlanta-based criminal investigation into Donald Trump led by prosecutor Fani Willis.

The esteemed Senator from Missouri was eager and desperate to catch a prominent opponent of donald "Break All Laws" trump in a lie so he could accuse Smith of perjury, and claim another scalp for the Great Far Right Cause that he could parade around the Fox Not-News talk shows.

Thing is, Schmitt and his own staff never paid attention to the details, or did any actual fucking research.

Smith clarified that he didn’t go to that game. But he did go to a different one on the same day: He was in College Park, Md. to see the Maryland Terrapins women’s basketball team play the Iowa Hawkeyes, led by phenom Caitlin Clark, who dropped 38 points that night in a win over the Terps.

It appeared that Schmitt misinterpreted a text message reference to the “hawks” among Smith’s deputies, who discussed reserving a seat for Smith in the front row.

“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair,” the Missouri Republican asked, intimating that he was about to get Smith to perjure himself.

Schmitt tried to connect the NBA game Smith did not attend in Atlanta to Feb. 2, 2024 — the date Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney who was investigating Trump, acknowledged a personal relationship with another prosecutor on her team...

You might recall that Fulton County prosecution went down in flames due to Willis' ill-advised relationship, which was painful considering she and her office did present a lot of damning evidence trump and his allies were attempting to criminally undermine the 2020 election results.

This is due to trump - and the Republicans pandering to trump's delusions - trying to rewrite all of reality by accusing everyone else of being in on conspiracies against him when they uncover real-world evidence of trump's criminal misdeeds. There is one huge ongoing revenge plot on trump's side of things... which isn't working out because trump's lies can't fit the facts as David A. Graham at the Atlantic points out:

When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.

Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not...

No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it.

More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them...

The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes...

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post...

...The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.

Actually David, it's because trump can never admit he lost at anything, so...

Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.

In order for trump to be a winner in 2020, there had to be a massive conspiracy against him. But like the fantasies trump pushed that he was "a victim" of Democratic schemes in 2016 when he lost the popular vote and suffered an investigation into his corrupt ties to Russia, none of trump's false narratives can hold up to the scrutiny of a courtroom where facts matter. trump tried this attack back then, and his lackeys like John Durham failed to prove a conspiracy then just as they're failing today.

And yet, they need to keep pursuing these false leads to maintain the lie that it's the Democrats who are cheating bastards, not trump or the Republicans (who are). They're going to keep doing this performative bullshit until they get their scalps for display at the next CPAC rally, even as they burn everything down to get there.

Yet another reason to vote these useless Republicans out of office. Americans, please see this stupidity for what it is and get rid of it.