Please excuse me as I start off this post on the irrelevant by asking an irrelevant question.
Political tensions over an intensifying impeachment inquiry reached fever pitch on Wednesday [Oct.23] as Republicans “stormed” a closed-door committee hearing on Capitol Hill disrupting a crucial deposition related to the Ukraine controversy – a day after devastating testimony from a key diplomat.
A group of Republican members of the House of Representatives, chanting “Let us in”, barged into a secure office suite in the bowels of the US capitol where Laura Cooper, a top Pentagon official who oversees Ukraine policy, was preparing to testify.(1)
Question:
Now that the impeachment hearings are in public session, how many of the storming Republicans have attended the proceedings?
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Throughout the public sessions, there have been repeated attempts by Republican committee members, Foxites, right-wing trolls, and Trump himself to divert attention from the substantive revelations by sworn witnesses by lobbing mostly irrelevant goofball observations, questions, and complaints about said witnesses.
Probably the goofiest of the goofy was the tsk-tsking about George Kent’s water bottle:
“Fish are not this hydrated,” [Fox] network contributor Raymond Arroyo told “Ingraham Angle” host Laura Ingraham. “It was like a medical sized water silo.”(2)
The leader of the Loony Tunes brigade attempted several diversionary ploys, one of which was to attempt to undermine an expert witness on Ukraine by ranting about her service in Somalia:
In an extraordinary step, Trump attacked Yovanovitch during her testimony. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” he wrote on Twitter.(3)
In another swipe at a witness, Mr. Bar Mitzvah suit elbowed his way into fashion etiquette by complaining about Lt. Col Alexander Vindman’s testifying before the impeachment panel in his military uniform:
The implication from the president and congressional Republicans is seemingly that Vindman, an Iraq War combat veteran and active duty Army officer, has used his dress uniform as a prop as part of a partisan performance.
But Army regulations state that "when an invitation calls for business attire, the appropriate Army uniform is the service or dress uniform." The regulations further state: "All personnel will wear an Army uniform when on duty, unless granted an exception by the commander to wear civilian clothes. "
In short, Vindman has been following US military protocol, and it would be a violation of Army regulations for him to show up to congressional hearings out of uniform.(4)
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But all of the above irrelevancies are molehills of diversion next to the Everest of slanderous innuendo directed at Lt. Col Vindman because he just happened to have made the mistake of choosing to be born in Ukraine instead of Amurrica. That, to the GOPers, Foxites, and other purebloods set off sirens warning of treason:
Alexander Vindman, the lieutenant colonel who testified before impeachment investigators in Congress on Tuesday, introduced himself in his prepared statement as an immigrant. For some of Donald Trump’s prominent supporters, this fact was enough to begin painting Vindman as a double agent, a traitor, or a spy. On “Fox & Friends,” perhaps Trump’s favorite program, Brian Kilmeade said, ominously, that Vindman “tends to feel simpatico with the Ukraine.” Fox’s Laura Ingraham suggested that Vindman was working on behalf of Ukraine from within the White House, leading her guest, John Yoo (most well known for his co-authorship of the so-called Torture Memo), to question whether these conversations amounted to “espionage.” The CNN commentator Sean Duffy, who also expressed alarm about Vindman’s loyalties, opined that Vindman “is incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense . . . We all have an affinity to our homeland where we came from. Like me, I’m sure that Vindman has that same affinity.”(5)
Vindman’s family emigrated to the US when he was three years old. He is now 44. One marvels at the idea that for 41 years, Vindman has harbored such a Rosebud longing for the national dishes of his birth land—borscht, holubtsi, and varenyky—that he would undertake treasonous acts against the country whose flag he has served under in combat.
The implication by the Trumpites that naturalized American citizens are possible traitors, fifth-columnists, or spies—by virtue of their being born outside the borders of the US—is abhorrent.
But the horror of the implication is even worse when one considers that Alexander Vindman is Jewish. It is no stretch of the imagination to see operating here the age-old anti-Semitic trope that Jews are a rootless people with no allegiance to the country they dwell in and, thus, dangerous aliens who must at best be kept under scrutiny and at worst be imprisoned, expelled, or exterminated.
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It has been my experience over the years that in a discussion or debate it is important to pay more attention to the irrelevancies that are dragged in than the actual on-point arguments. Call it: “The Relevance of the Irrelevant.” That is where the truth will be discovered.
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