Tired Tired Nixon Moon Landing Tired

What a long day!

I don't have much in me for blogging tonight. The fragments left in my brain are the same old borderline hopeless things about impeachment and epistemic polarization as I've been writing about for a while now.

Tomorrow I drive (and drive and drive and drive) all the way up to my family in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving. I hope my car makes it. I hope I make it. Today wasn't so great on the "consuming sufficient calories" score.

In my caffeine-fueled morning, I briefly entertained a whole (smallish) book on online performance and lying. I . . . simply can't bring to mind much of a coherent assessment of that thought process right now, lol.

I leave you, then, with the weirdness of deepfakes. As you may know, Nixon's speechwriter William Safire had prepared a statement for the President to read in the event that the Apollo moon landing had ended in disaster. Some bright folks at MIT have deepfaked a video of "President Nixon" reading that statement:

Funky.

Epistemic Crises on the Run

I ignored an inner voice of conscience today. Prepping to run around the lake today (about four miles, which has been my plateau/limit for a while), I was trying to choose between things to listen to. I could continue the "Christmas Present" playlist I've been using for running workouts. Or I could hear the latest episode of On the Media, which promised a dire report on the "epistemic crisis" we face.

My inner voice groaned at the thought of the media show. Don't you know pretty much everything they'll say already? Do you really need this hit to your sense of hope and well-being? Can't we just enjoy some more Christmas music?

I chose the show, ignoring my inner voice.

And yeah, it's depressing. The episode's title says it all: "The Disagreement is the Point." The first segment, featuring Vox writer David Roberts hits a lot of the points I've been making about the impeachment hearings. It seems obvious to me and to many within the "legacy media" (neat term, better than "mainstream media," perhaps) that Trump has done exactly what he's been accused of. Heck, he and his staff have admitted it, reveled in it.

Every witness, even those that were expected to be amiable to the President, supported the same story: Trump, via Giuliani, was pursuing his on shadow diplomacy and intelligence-gathering with and in Ukraine, efforts that had as their goal not national interests but Trump's personal need to embarrass his political enemies. He delayed military aid approved by Congress to Ukraine with the understanding that this would pressure Ukraine into opening investigations into the Bidens and into (again, multiply debunked conspiracy theories about) Democratic servers. He only ended the delay and (in a call with Sondland) cried "no quid pro quo" when it became clear that the gig was up.

I find it necessary to reiterate this narrative, even if only for myself, because it seems like the facts involved just aren't apparent to everyone.

The GOP response has been largely one of obfuscation, throwing up disinformational chaff in the form of multiple (and multiply debunked) conspiracy theories about how Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 election meddling. Or that Joe Biden, not Trump, is the person who really deserves investigation (amazing how this became a pressing issue only as Biden emerges as a front-runner in the Democratic presidential primaries).

The problem here, Roberts stresses in the On the Media interview, isn't that Republicans make different conclusions based on the facts. It's that they operate from a completely different basis, a Trumpian basis, for what kinds of information should be valued. The show quotes Rep. Devin Nunes crowing that the impeachment hearings are a failure for Democrats because their ratings aren't very high. In any sane world, Roberts notes, the question of how entertaining an investigation like this would be ridiculous. Are these facts true? Did the President and the President's operatives do these things, and why?

But whether an allegation is true seems to have taken a back seat to the question of whether an allegation is damaging to my team. It's a "tribal epistemology," says Roberts. We decide ahead of time which side we're on and then represent or evaluate facts on that basis.

The Republicans don't have facts on their side here (as even many conservative writers not supporting impeachment concede). The best they can do, then, is make the process of fact-finding seem boring, overly complex, or purely partisan. They want people who aren't especially engaged with the facts of this case to dismiss the entire thing as Democratic pique. They want people to get angry at and tired of the process, the very question of whether Trump did something wrong.

And it looks like they might be succeeding.

Senator John Kennedy (Louisiana, alas), this morning asserted that "no one can know" for sure who was behind the 2016 election interference. It's the "you can't prove it's not [Ukraine]" defense beloved of people arguing for indefensible positions.

My question, aside from how to sustain some kind of hope amidst this epistemic divide, is whether I reach out to my representatives, of whom Kennedy is one. Is it worthwhile to call and leave a message? Is there any chance whatsoever that they'd listen?

Would I be "entertaining" enough to be heard?

Hopelessness in Lote Bravo

Sometimes, while hacking away at the endless and ever-renewing pile of papers to grade, I run into a student analysis that makes me re-think a play I thought I knew. I'm going to ramble through some thoughts here.

The play in question is The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis. Set in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the play tells the story of a mother, Juanda, searching desperately for her lost daughter, the 15-year old Raquel, whom she calls "el toro bravo," the brave bull. Actually, as the play starts, the audience sees Raquel dying in the deserts outside of CD, her body beaten, her hands bound. She's met there not by her mother but by La Santa Muerte, the Holy Lady of Death in Mexican Catholic culture, patron diety of sinners and desperate people. Raquel asks for release; Santa Muerte offers only presence and some comfort, telling Raquel the story of Juanda searching for her.

The play unfolds from there in nested flashbacks. We see Juanda, a malquiladora (American-owned factory) worker, appealing in vain to Pedro and Roberto, corrupt police detectives, to help find Raquel. She spills her frustration and desperation to Camille, a co-worker at the malquiladora. Camille insists that Juanda pray to La Santa Muerte, giving her an icon of Lady Death. Scandalized at first--Juanda insists she is a good Catholic--she nevertheless takes the figure.

At home, as her young sons sleep, Juanda prays to La Santa Muerte, who enters in a supernatural flash. She scorns Juanda's ignorance (the proper prayer to her involves offerings of tequila), demanding payment in exchange for Juanda's request for knowledge. Juanda promises anything. La Santa Muerte presses her:

La Santa Muerte: Are you a virgin?
Juanda: I have four children.
La Santa Muerte: Were you married before you let a man fuck you?
Juanda: I don't like you accusations or your language. It's disgusting.
La Santa Muerte: You can't even answer me honestly.
Juanda: I was...I've prayed for forgiveness. I've confessed.
La Santa Muerte: Confessed what?
Juanda: Eduardo and I did the honorable thing. We married before I was showing . . . Raquel was born in wedlock
La Santa Muerte: You're a very good Catholic woman.
Juanda: I try . . .
La Santa Muerte: I've never liked her. Your holy virgin. I've never understood why anyone prays to her. A virgin knows nothing about the sins a woman must endure for survival. Get her out of my sight.

Raquel, La Santa Muerte informs her, has prayed to the Lady Death since she was five. It's Raquel's prayers, not Juanda's that lead her here. La Santa Muerte demands the Mary statue Juanda has. She gives it. La Santa Muerte takes her into Raquel's past. We (along with Juanda) see Raquel meet a young wannabe tough, El Reloj ("the clock"), who promises her a job at the bar where he works. Both he and Raquel, Santa Muerte says before departing, pray to her.

From there, the play consists of scenes where Juanda purchases--and then steals--ever more expensive alcohol--and finally her own blood--for her ritual entreaties. Each time, La Santa Muerte shows here a bit more of Raquel's past--her growing relationship with El Reloj, her work selling her body for money, their plans to escape Ciudad Juarez, El Reloj's fear of his gang's boss. Ultimately, after an unsuccessful duel (a bullfight) with Reloj's boss (the Man in the Black Hat), Raquel is beaten. Reloj, struggling to get her away, is stopped by Pedro, the police officer who we learn is both his own father and in the service of the gangs. to spare the rest of his family from reprisal, Pedro says, El Reloj must end Raquel's life, and Pedro must end his. This happens. Pedro and Roberto then dump the bodies in the desert.

Thus we rejoin La Santa Muerte comforting the dead Raquel as Juanda enters. Cradling her daughter, she narrates a tale of her and her sons' escape over the Rio Grande into the USA.

The student's paper suggested that the action pattern for the script is pillaging the light, stealing away hope and replacing it with hard, dark, pragmatic survival. At first I objected. Action patterns in plays generally do not describe merely the starting conditions of the script; they must account for the arc of the play. The play starts in hopelessness, I said, with light already pillaged. What's left for the play to do? The student, however, argued effectively that the play takes us through that loss of hope, the replacement of idealized fantasies (the Virgin Mary) with crimes of survival and, finally, with blood. The play ends just as it began, in the desert, with a woman crooning a tale to a corpse.

It is a grim play, a play where a religion that preaches hope gets supplanted by a religion of gritty reality. "I was a naive child once," the Man in the Black Hat says as he begins to duel Raquel, "filled with dreams of escape." Juanda's ending vision, which I originally read as prophecy, now seems like a kindhearted dream, a final comfort to a daughter who died for nothing.

The real antagonist, Bettis suggests, is the world itself, a NAFTA-created world of exploitative factory work and violence-ridden gang life, all for the benefit of invisible Americans. (The factory Juanda and Camille work in makes USA flags. At one point Camille catches her finger in the sewing machine and without missing a beat wraps her bloody finger in a flag so that she can keep working.)

In an interview, Bettis says she wanted to write a play that would make white Americans, upon watching it, start rooting for Mexicans to cross the border illegally--do anything to escape that world. In this, I think, she succeeds.

But I'm caught by the odd sort of hopeless hope represented by La Santa Muerte, the one everyone in the play--antagonist and protagonist alike--prays to.

At one point, a desperate Juanda steals a bottle of añejo to summon La Santa Muerte.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Shit. This añejo, this bottle…So many mouths that have tasted this have called my name. Desperation. Loneliness. And yet a lingering taste of hope. Subtle. If you didn’t know what hope tasted like you’d miss it completely.

JUANDA: La Santa Muerte…Forgive me. I…I’ve never stolen anything in my life.

LA SANTA MUERTE: That guilt just eats away at your insides, doesn’t it. You should know by now that I don’t forgive. I listen.

JUANDA: What good does that do…

LA SANTA MUERTE: Whose sin is worse. The one who sins to pay or the one who pays to sin?

JUANDA: I don’t…I don’t know anymore.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Good.

"If you didn't know what hope tasted like you'd miss it completely." 

I'll have to think more on this.

 

Times Were Tough and Mr. Rogers

Today was "Times Were Tough" day in my senior capstone class.

I assign three brief readings. The first is "Everything Is Awful and I'm Not OK: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up." (PDF Downloadable form here.) It's a one-page list of check-in questions, simple stuff like "Are you hydrated?" or "Have you moved your body to music in the past day?" These questions are paired with straightforward suggestions. "Drink a glass of water." "Find a living thing to cuddle." "Pause right now and get something small completed."

I share these with the caveat that the author isn't suggesting any of these cures depression or magically makes life better. But, I tell students, my sister the mental health counselor (the wisest person I know) could point them to people who would attest that they are alive today because they paused five minutes to drink a glass of water.

Putting a firewall between emotion and action is a big part of the second reading, a chapter from Kelly Williams Brown's Adulting: How to Become an Adult in 468 Easy(ish) Steps. The chapter is "Times Were Tough." Like a lot of Brown's book, the chapter combines practical how-to's (how to write a decent condolence note, how to share bad news) with some meta-level advice. A lot of it is a gentle lesson that the kind of things we experience as crises when we're in our late teens/early twenties turn out to be mere annoyances as we get older. The more we see and survive, the more perspective we have to separate emergencies from irritations.

One list she includes are physical health signs that qualify as medical emergencies, like a high fever, paralysis, or a seizure. I took the opportunity to add mental health emergencies. We spoke about the injustice of our cultures (and sometimes families) viewing mental health issues as somehow lesser than physical health issues.

There are differences, of course. My partner is fond of quipping that a symptom of having a broken leg is not denying that you have a broken leg. Many mental health dysfunctions, however, have as part of their awfulness minimizing or normalizing them. It's fine. It's not that big a deal. 

It doesn't help that, as my partner says, people tend to treat mental health as a matter of willpower rather than as an illness. No one tells diabetics to "just get over it" or "get right with the Lord" or "try smiling more." No, you give them insulin and other interventions.

The last reading, a new one for this class, is from Frank Ostaseksi's The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully. Ostaseksi founded a Zen Hospice in California. His book, a combination of anecdotes and wisdom teachings, can at first seem a bit like the worst kind of cliched self-help pablum. But then, just as you're thinking that, he hits you with a story of someone forgiving a mortal enemy on their deathbed. Or he tells about his story of surviving abuse at the hands of a trusted priest. Or he simply makes an observation that captures what you've always suspected.

The chapter I assigned was "Taming the Inner Critic." There Ostaseksi discusses how often the inner voice that hectors us is an unhelpful holdover from some previous (often childhood) experience. We can get awfully defensive of this critic, romanticizing it as the voice that keeps us on the straight and narrow. That defense, Ostaseski suggests, is often misguided. The inner voice more often than not isn't interested in wise discernment but in judgment, the quick and easy  castigation of all effort. It's a useful chapter for young artists (and middle-aged professors).

I end with Mr. Rogers. One of my favorite bits of musical theatre is this clip from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, where Daniel Striped Tiger and Lady Aberlin share a duet (a beautifully constructed one, I might add). Daniel worries that he's a mistake. Aberlin assures him he's not.

Notice how Aberlin's insistance doesn't diminish or banish Daniel's fears. They sing them together. But it helps.

I didn't show that in class (I know not everyone reveres Rogers as I do), but I did share the statement that Rogers ended every show with. First he sings:

It's such a good feeling
To know you're alive
It's such a happy feeling
You're growing inside
And when you wake up ready to say,
"I'll think I'll make a snappy new day."
It's such a good feeling
A very good feeling
A feeling you know 
That I'll be back
When the day is new
And I'll have more ideas for you
And you'll have things you'll want to talk about
I will, too.

Then he says:

You always make each day such a special day for me. You know how? By just your being you. There's no one else in the whole world like you, and people can like you just the way you are.

I tell my class that, locking eyes with each of them in turn. Some of them cry.

We never get over needing to hear that, I tell them. The people around you never get over needing to hear it, either. Only say it when you can mean it. But find ways to mean it and say it to the people in your life. 

It's a good Friday.

Private PS: Lord who loves us just the way we are, Lord who follows us into the darkest places of illness, be with EW and his family.

Watching Protests

As much as I appreciate a lot of what American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher writes, sometimes the worldview differences between us just leave me befuddled.

Take his latest post, for example, "Watch the Intellectuals." He discusses a protest last night at UC Berkeley. The UC Berkeley College Republicans had invited Ann Coulter to give a talk called "Adios, America!" (presumably about immigration?). Hundreds of protesters (from a group called Resist Fascism, not representing UC Berkeley officially) showed up, met by UC Berkely police in full riot gear. The protesters attempted a human chain to prevent people going into the event. The police escorted attendees and Coulter. "Six or seven" protesters were arrested. The event happened.

Dreher is apoplectic. "Seriously," he asks, "what if a mob of white people at a major American university banded together to prevent people of color and their allies from going into a hall to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak?" He continues:

What is it going to take to fight this? It’s so exasperating how little people in this country care about the fact that left-wing mobs are taking our liberties from us, and our political leaders — including Donald Trump — are doing nothing about it. Barely even talking about it. I honestly don’t get it. We should not be living in a country where people who want to go hear a speaker have to be protected by police simply to get into the hall. You know what this looks like?

He then compares the protests in Berkeley to the Little Rock Nine, where pro-segregationists blockaded Little Rock Schools to prevent black children from entering an historically all-white school.

That comparison seems . . . stretched.

Dreher links the Berkeley event to a favored bugaboo of his: the liberal intellectual class's prejudice against conservatives:

If you think this is going to stay in Berkeley, you’re mistaken. This mob action might not spread to places outside of the coasts, but here’s what’s going to happen: those young people who join the mobs, they are going to graduate and move into the institutions of American life. They are going to carry their militant illiberalism, including their contempt for free speech and open discourse, into those institutions, and are going to do their damnedest to institutionalize them. One thing I have learned from the past few months spent studying Soviet-bloc communism: watch the intellectual class. It is a very big mistake to think that what they say and do only matters in the shadow of the ivory tower. They are the ones who produce the ideas that are eventually spread through society. If you don’t care about this stuff when it happens now, on campuses, you had better prepare yourself to be made to care later, when graduates of these campuses are setting corporate policy, or serving as gatekeepers to the institutions you want your “deplorable” kids to get into. This is not a joke.

Oy. Sometimes from members of my church or from people who know I'm a professor, I hear something like this, often framed sympathetically: things must be really tough for you right now in Universities with all that political correctness and intolerance. "Not really," I say, shrugging. We're much more stressed about precarious funding structures in this state that make student aid more difficult, teaching resources more expensive, and academic endeavors more generally difficult. I'm concerned about the fact that historical state funding for a state university is dwindling, and that the avenues open to institutions to compensate for that funding loss are unpleasant at best and unethical at worst.

The picture that people, especially conservatives, beyond the university have about what's happening at colleges and universities often surprises me. The image of a liberal-totalitarian enclave laser-focused on policing the thoughts of students just doesn't match the reality most of us who work at universities face. My life at school simply isn't taken up with politics most of the time. The mundane routines of catching up with grading, admin work, class planning, and (in my case) production work takes up the vast majority of my attention. Most of my students are too tired/busy/stressed with class and production work to worry much about who's politically correct or not.

Truth: I'd not heard of these protests outside of Dreher's reporting. I'm rather more focused on the impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States. So is everyone else. There's not much out there on the Berkeley event even on Fox. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed don't mention it.

Dreher sees this as evidence that the media is left-leaning. Maybe? Or maybe it's that there's a whole lot of national-crisis-level stuff happening in DC right now, and the goings-on at a single university may not merit that much attention. Would things be different were Ta-Nehisi Coates were protested? I don't know. I kind of doubt it, though.

Look, I have no interest in defending every action by every university where something like this happens. Inevitably, you're going to find instances where something like a left-wing political correctness leads people to jerkish behavior. (You can also find instances where right-wing political correctness does this.) (Also: what makes the protesters and not the College Republicans "the intellectuals" whose tendencies Dreher warns against? How does a private protest group get to stand in for Bekeley as a whole?) There are 5,000 colleges and universities in the US. For any news about a single university, you have to divide by 5,000. At one university out of 5,000 yesterday, Ann Coulter faced protesters before getting to speak and be heard just as planned.

Forgive me if I fail to see the dire threat here.

That said, and for the record, I don't condone activist tactics that block people from hearing folk they want to listen to. A human chain to prevent people from attending Coulter's event is indeed illiberal. It also seems like a recipe for backlash. I wouldn't like it if someone were to propose blocking me from, say, going to a public library to watch drag queens read a story in public.

There is a big difference, though, between segregationists protesting the Little Rock Nine--or even hypothetical racists protesting Ta-Nehisi Coates--and a coalition of activists protesting Coulter. In the former cases, you have people objecting to people. It didn't matter who the Little Rock Nine were, only that they weren't white. Coulter, by contrast, garners protests not for who she is but for the arguments and rhetorics she makes her living off of spreading. She traffics in provocation fueled by xenophobic nationalism (which, it must be said, often accompanies and bolsters race-based bigotry). This kind of event is exactly the kind of thing that helps her brand (which is another reason, frankly, why super-protests against her have a "feed the troll" kind of counterproductivity).

People shouldn't be blocked from seeing here. But neither should her views go unchallenged.

I wonder, though, if Dreher would be mollified had the protesters simply, well, protested? If they'd shown up in the hundreds with signs and slogans--but allowed attendees in--would that still pose the intellectual threat Dreher detects? Coulter's right to expression does not trump protesters' right to expression, after all. She gets to spew her vile rhetoric to adoring crowds. But other people get to counter that rhetoric through protest. The right to free speech isn't the right to immunity from criticism or response.

Or is the mere existence of disagreement with Coulter evidence of political correctness?

Game Overs

I should be used to it now.

Every day of this impeachment inquiry, it seems like the witness utters something that to my eyes seems utterly damning to the President. I mean Well, that's the game. Time for Republicans to float Trump's resignation-level damning information comes out.

Vox agrees. "Gordon Sondland's Opening Testimony is the Ballgame," writes Zach Beauchamp. Was there quid pro quo? said Sondland, The answer is yes. I read that in Sondland's opening statement this morning and thought, surely, this is the tipping point. (I mean, even Ken Starr on Fox was wavering at one point.) Surely this is it.

But no.

Fox News quoted GOP Representative Mark Meadows that, in his view, today's testimony was "Game over" for the Democrats' impeachment hopes. Asked whether Trump ever explicitly told Sondland to withhold Ukraine funding in exchange for political favors (investigating Burisma), Sondland said no. That, Fox News suggests, was the real bombshell. No explicit request equals no wrongdoing. Game over, libs. (Not that these kind of quid pro quos ever operate explicitly, but whatevs.)

The real surprise is how surprised I am, even now. All political news is a shibboleth now. Your take on it, your conclusion about whose game is over, signals your membership in team red or team blue. Nuance isn't critical thinking or taking your time; it's disloyalty.

This shibboleth factor feels to me stronger within the right-wing media world. There's quite a bit of nuance and wiggle room, for instance, in NPR's overview today. Yeah, Sondland said there was quid pro quo, but yeah, Sondland also said he came to that conclusion gradually. It took him a while, he said, for him to get that "Burisma" was essentially code for "Biden." NPR also acknowledges some credibility problems with Sondland, problems for which he was dinged by both Republicans and Democrats. He's changed or updated his testimony three times now. He "doesn't keep notes," so his memory is iffy.

This performance contrasts with that of career diplomats, professionals at protocol and record-keeping. The diplomats were much more immediately keen to detect irregularities in Trump/Guliani's backdoor Ukraine politics. Sondland is out of his element, a hotelier and rich guy appointed to his position by Trump thanks to his million-dollar donation to Trump. In a way, Sondland's muddy testimony is proof of what you get when you kick out the experts and bring in laypeople.

I guess he's what Trump's supporters mean when they insist that he's "draining the swamp." To me, it seems more like a hospital firing all its experienced, credentialed doctors, PAs, and nurses in favor of country club socialites who've consulted Web MD--and then being shocked, shocked! when patients start dying in droves.

But I'm just screaming into the echo chamber. Politico reported this morning that, so far as its contacts among House Republicans can see, not a single GOP member will vote for impeachment, no matter what. There's just no incentive for them to do so when Trump has a stranglehold on their constituents' support.

That's sad, really. Rod Dreher said he voted for John Bel Edwards because, though Edwards is a Democrat, he's a pro-life one. It doesn't feel like betrayal to vote for him. There's no one like that among the Democratic presidential candidates. And Trump has effectively negated everyone to his own left within the Republican party.

For Republicans, Trump is the only game in town. No wonder, then, that they're loath to declare that game over.

Unswayable

Public impeachment hearings continue this week. I caught just a bit of them this morning while on some errands, specifically the end of Rep. Jim Jordan's diatribe about this being a coup to undermine the will of the people. Real Americans, Rep. Jordan assured everyone, know that this is a sham; they see President Trump did no wrong.

The polls I see indicate that 70% of USAmericans believe that what Trump did is improper. A smaller number, however, report supporting impeachment and removal from office.

I'm more interested/disturbed, however, by a poll out from NPR/Marist. Asked whether they could imagine anything from the impeachment inquiry that would change their view on whether or not Trump should be impeached, 65% said no. Nothing would sway them.

I just wrote last week that, although I'm not especially moveable on this issue (I think he's guilty as sin of an impeachable offense), I could imagine something that might sway me. But then, maybe I just have a good imagination.

There's also the fact that, for many people, poll questions like this aren't so much about reporting one's nuanced beliefs as they are about registering sides. People know, generally, how survey results can be mobilized in favor of one or another narrative. Were I dead-set against impeachment, I'd likely say that nothing could sway me. Whether something actually could is another issue.

Were evidence to emerge, for instance, that Trump had perjured himself regarding the Russia investigation, it may become more difficult to resist impeachment--though not removal.

At least, I'd like to think so. The glass-half-empty takeaway from the NPR/Marist poll would be that people are intractably polarized on this essential issue. They live within entirely different epistemological and ideological universes where it's obvious--how can you not see this??--that they are right and the other side is wrong.

Such polarization has roots within the separate media ecosystems of the right and the left. Consider, for instance, the top headline right now on Fox News: "Morrison, Volker undercut claims of 'quid pro quo,' 'bribery,' and 'cover-up' on pivotal day of testimony." Contrast that with one of the top stories on CNN: "How Republicans' star impeachment witness turned on them."

I tend to think that the weight of evidence is stacking up against Trump here. But I can see how, if Fox and such were the only trusted sources I consulted, I'd probably double down on my resistance to impeachment. The Fox story is spiced with slights against Democrats (ex: Democrats are using "bribery" as a charge only because it's "poll-tested"), full of choice quotes from Republicans, and quite selective (judging from the fuller accounts from other news sources) in presenting what Morrison and Volker said. Integral to the Fox News journalistic ethos is not merely reportage (Here's what happened) but perspective (Here's how the other side is acting in bad faith). Well-poisoning is part of the narrative strategy.

Of course, they'd likely say the same about the main stream media (i.e., everyone beyond the Foxsphere).

Perhaps they're right, at least in part. It's not like I'm inclined to read Fox News generously. But I'd like to think that part of my reading involves looking for elements that trouble my own preconceptions. (How would I know? How would I judge this for myself?) I'm not sure that's part of the Fox's assumptions for their readers.

Inertia is a powerful drug, ideological inertia even more so.

Hard times ahead.