Some mornings, the scripts write themselves. This was one of those mornings.
CNN's New Day had a panel of Jeff Toobin, Dancin' Dave Gregory, and Mary Katherine Ham as the token winger, to talk about the burning issue of the day: How do all those House investigations look?
Not whether the president of the United States is a crook, the head of a criminal enterprise, siphoning bribes through the White House, or even whether he's a Russia asset. Nope, it's always about how it looks from the Beltway.
Mary Katherine Ham (who's a Townhall winger but was married to an Obama aide who got killed in a bike accident, so everyone's nice to her) said it looked like the House was moving the goal posts.
Toobin argued, "You can hardly criticize the Democrats for saying, wow, maybe we should look into whether there's bank fraud and insurance fraud since no one knew that before."
Dancin' Dave agreed. He said the same Republicans refused to do any kind of oversight with Trump, but "I seem to remember the standard of Republicans when they were in an oversight capacity on Benghazi or lots of other things going back to the Clinton administration where everything got an airing. Everything was legitimate. So we're going to do that, too. I think Mary Katharine is right, that the question is how the public absorbs ought of this because I do think the president is potentially strengthened by all of this, by it being overly broad, by looking like Democrats are simply after the president, it will depend what they find and ultimately this is why Mueller is so important, what he finds."
Because, as we know, everything is bad news for Democrats! And far be it from Dave to remind viewers that all that Republican oversight on Benghazi was an actual dog and pony show. After all, we're not his real audience.
"Mary Katharine, I mean, do you see this as just tit for tat, well, Republicans did this and now Democrats run the House and they can do this, or do you see it as Jeffrey pointed out, that new things are coming to light. Not just Michael Cohen, there's the Jared security clearance, abuses of power. new things are coming to light. What do you want Democrats to do, sit on their hands when these things are revealed?" Alysin Camerota asked, looking skeptical.
"I think that is part of it and that can be a legitimate part of it, but, for instance, when you're talking about Nadler, you're talking about Warner who was part of the Senate Intelligence committee investigation who was doing things the right way, both are talking about things that Mueller has covered. Mueller has all the information," she said.
"He has, I think, better information than they're going to have and it makes me wonder what the point of all this is or what the point of the Mueller investigation was and why we had to protect it so fiercely which I was on board for -- if, in fact, they think they already have all the goods on this and they are going to do a different investigation if the answer from Mueller, it seems, might not be the one they wanted. That is what that reads like, not the other stuff, that could be a separate issue, but on the issue of collusion? Yes, that is what that looks like, it looks like goal post moving."
To people who are paid to see it that way, I can see why she says that.
But of course there's a larger purpose to all these hearings. The Dems can't openly organize for impeachment until there's general acknowledgement among the public that Trump did Really Bad Things. Just like with the Watergate hearings! (Remember, Nixon did get reelected after those hearings, but his political and public support fell apart shortly into his second term.)
This is going to take a long time.
And I can't believe Ham is too stupid to understand that, so I have to believe this is just another cable-TV reality show, where white people say stuff about how other white people might think.
It can't be only about the way things look. It can't. There are really bad things happening, and Democrats are laying groundwork in their attempt to stop them. That's the real story. Dancin' Dave and Mary Katherine Ham should talk about that, instead of making inside jokes.
