It seems as appropriate to begin this posting with the following point as any: Nearly all the leading candidates for the '2020 Democrat presidential nomination called for the impeachment of Brett Kavanaugh on a basis of exactly zero evidentiary merit. (Those who find Christine Blasey Ford's accusation against Kavanaugh remotely credible are either stupid or dishonest, or both. You have to ignorantly or willfully disregard the sworn testimony of Ford's friend Leland Keyser, and you have to believe that it's even remotely likely that Ford and Kavanaugh would ever be at a gathering together. The Democrats insisted that Ford be given a national hearing for her not-believable story.) These include: Mayor Pete, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren. Warren is even on record for saying that other, even more ridiculous accusation against Kavanaugh (namely Swetnick's serial-drugged-gang-rape story which crumbled the moment she was interviewed on TV about it), were "credible." Democrat operatives calling themselves journalists fanned the flames of hysteria surrounding these accusations.
By the very epistemic nature of such things, I simply cannot trust such people to carry out some kind of judicial proceeding in good faith, and so the upcoming(?) Senate trial of Trump is tainted by the participation of the likes of Sanders and Warren (and also Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Mazie Hirono, Chuck Schumer, and I'm sure numerous others who either said Ford should be believed that Kavanaugh should be impeached). [Edit: such people seem to be either not very bright because of how oblivious they are to how bad this makes them look, or they do know how outrageous their behavior and rhetoric are and yet they still think they can get away with it. We already know how Demorats behave when one of their own is accused of sexual misconduct and where they stand to lose power if the accusations are pursued with the same zeal they pursued Ford's et al. The evidence of their having squandered all intellectual and moral credibility just keeps on piling up without end, doesn't it.]
And it's most likely going to be tainted coming from both sides of the aisle, if the House Judiciary hearings are any indication. Here's basically what happened in that hearing: Democrats and their witnesses presented an abundance of evidence that Trump acted improperly in Ukraine, notwithstanding that Ambassador Sondland says Trump wanted "no quid pro quo" (apparently as it relates to military aid, but not in connection with a White House meeting for the Ukrainian president). Republicans were mostly reduced to repeating 4 talking points (which a Democrat witness, the majority counsel for the House Intel committee, would rebut repeatedly but which didn't stop Republicans from continuing to raise them), and complaining about process. (One thing that doesn't look good for Trump is the timing of the release of Ukraine aid funds. The GOP keeps saying that the aid was released without the "quo" of announced investigations by Ukraine. They typically don't mention that it was released once the whistleblower complaint (or, shall we say, metadata about that complaint) become known to the President. If you think the timing of the aid release is irrelevant, your cognition may be poisoned by partisanship.)
Those process complaints are also legitimate. House Intel chair Adam Schiff, for one, is a scumbag who has, among other things to date, released metadata on journalist John Solomon's phone calls, for no good reason and evidently for the sake of punishing a political opponent - the very same kind of abuse of power he's accusing Trump of. Anyone who thinks Schiff is something other than an obviously partisan scumbag may also be a partisan scumbag.
And now comes the Horowitz IG report about the FBI's clear-cut misconduct in its process for securing a FISA warrant on Trump associate Carter Page. (This is before the DOJ's John Durham, who has more investigative capability than Horowitz, comes back with whatever additional dirt he finds....) All of a sudden, it's Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who appear very incurious about this FISA abuse. PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: If, e.g., ommitting 17 key facts from the FISA application (the inclusion of which probably would have meant denial of the application) doesn't constitute FISA abuse, THEN WHAT WOULD? The philosopher's job is to differentiate between and integrate among instances, so that unlike instances aren't improperly grouped together and like instances are properly grouped together. Hence that philosopher's question. And another PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION:
Turn the tables, and it's Republican operatives misleading the FISA court about a Democrat presidential campaign, or a Democrat president applying levers of power to get a foreign government to investigate a prominent Republican. QUESTION: Do we have any reasonable expectations that the two sides would be operating as they do? Would the Republicans want to drill all the way down to the suspect if not clearly abusive practices of the Republican operatives? Would Democrats be repeating the same already-rebutted talking points and making every effort to explain away a political motivation for what the Democrat president was doing?
No, there is no such reasonable expectation of such un-partisan honesty.
It appears that the Democrats aren't really curious or concerned about what the Comey FBI was up to. They don't care that, from the beginning, the FBI operation in question (Crossfire Hurricane) apparently met the lowest threshold they could possibly meet to justify such an operation. That there are 17 "errors" of omission in their first (successful) FISA application -- all of the errors somehow magically going against Trump -- doesn't appear to cause even suspicion among the Democrats. (But remember, Ford's accusations against Kavanaugh are to be considered credible enough to hold up his confirmation so that she could be heard, and Leland Keyser is to be disregarded.)
Here's something for both parties to (honestly) consider and/or (dishonestly) evade: Both Biden and Trump failed to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interests. Biden's answers (so far) about his son's involvement in a Ukraine energy company (despite apparent lack of any relevant qualifications - a point I haven't seen Biden & allies push back on) are to the effect of: "My son didn't so anything wrong." Uh, it's about whether Joe Biden did anything wrong with this apparent conflict of interests (Joe being the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine).
Likewise with Trump: He can point to an apparently legitimate motive on his part - to root out corruption in places like Ukraine, including or especially if it involves abuses of power by American officials - but his opposition is pointing plausibly to dual motivations: Fighting corruption and going after a political opponent. If Trump's corruption-fighting motivation is the guiding one here, then by the same token he should want to avoid the appearance of corruption on his own part since the target of his putative corruption-fighting is a leading political opponent. Maybe both motivations are involved, but, well, there's the appearance of a conflict of a kind between them. Maybe both motivations are involved, but it's the Dems who focus on only one of them, and the GOP who focus on only the other of them. Again, partisan scumbaggery by both sides.
What an intellectually unserious circus, huh?
Here's another loser of an argument, coming from the GOP side: Impeachment and/or removal would be divisive without overwhelming bipartisan support. The whole point of the impeachment inquiry (which should be an honest one, based on a curiosity to know all the relevant facts and credible explanations) is to find out whether bipartisan support is warranted. Are they in effect saying they wouldn't be moved by the evidence?
(Is it any wonder that philosophy and philosophers are basically absent from our politics? The questions they ask are too effective at exposing partisan hypocrisy, selective (in)curiosity, and the all-too-shitty arguments they employ on a whole range of subjects.)
PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: Presumably, the GOP would be willing in principle to impeach and/or remove a GOP president if the actions involved were bad enough. QUESTION: What is their threshold for "bad enough"? We already have some idea of the Democrats' threshold, in the case of Kavanaugh (which means they are willing to get pretty scummy for the sake of a partisan smear job). This is a useful question to ask of many a rank-and-file Trump supporter whose belief system in this area may be akin to that of a cult (where Trump is the savior fighting for them against the Swamp - which is indeed part of the truth).
PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: This time for the Dems: What makes Trump's behavior "bad enough" but not President Clinton's, for which he (Clinton) was determined unfit to practice law?
Can any of these folks answer these questions without looking like they're doing bad-faith mental gymnastics?
PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: Is there any notable or prominent politician right now who isn't obviously tainted by partisan cognition? (I.e., does the philosopher have any serious opportunity available to differentiate among today's politicians along these lines? Or does all the available integration/induction go in the "they're partisan scumbags" direction?)
