If you’ve been too busy to watch the televised impeachment hearings, like me, you rely on news sources to highlight what’s most important, only catching pieces. As I ate breakfast yesterday, I watched while Minority Chairman Devin Nunez ready for the testimony of Jennifer Williams, a VP Senior Aide, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who had each served under presidents of both parties. Rep. Nunez’s attacks on the whistleblower came as no surprise, as I’d tuned into Fox and learned this is their theme too.
But his repeated “False!” declarations as he listed “hysterical” mainstream reports troubled me. What evidence? Reports of John Solomon, he claimed. Who’s he? No reporter; he’s a media “executive” like Steve Bannon, with a long history of reports catching fire in far-right online news. His allegations about Ukraine and Biden in The Hill were weaponized by Giuliani and Sean Hannity. Solomon’s columns were questioned by other reporters at The Hill, and now its editor has ordered his columns be fact-checked and annotated.
Fact-checking is something you’d hope they’d do BEFORE they published. So are we in some carnival hall of mirrors? Yes. Much of it is a new virtual world owned by billionaires. So how do we find our way out?
Like Dorothy in the land of Oz, all we can do is follow the yellow-brick road—the money. In the background is news about Energy Sec’y Rick Perry’s attending Zelensky’s Ukraine inauguration, after the President and VP Pence both declined the new president’s invitation. Lower down the pecking order, Perry was one of the “three amigos.” He recommended to Zelensky his favorite trusted Texan energy consultants—who also just happened to be Perry donors—who just happened to win a 50-year drilling contract despite a lower bid than competing Ukrainians. Perry recently resigned. Adios, senor.
Another of the amigos on special assignment by the president, millionaire donor Gordon Sondland made ambassador, has been filmed explaining his business philosophy of quid pro quo, his words, claiming something for something is more useful than the usual government diplomacy. He doesn’t say useful for whom, but I don’t think he means you and me or the Ukrainians.
Two recent movies reveal how awful and laughable these generalissimos and their amigos are, their sociopathic egos a danger to themselves, as well as to us. Check out The Laundromat, now on Netflix, for its coloring in the gray details of offshore banking and shell companies’ money-laundering, exposed by Monseca’s Panama Papers. What’s not to like when Meryl Streep appears as an ordinary grandmother who cannot be stopped. Money scandals aren’t over until we say they are, she says.
Then watch The Brink on Hulu, filmed by a young woman descended from holocaust survivors. I don’t know how on earth Alison Klayman talked Steve Bannon into letting her film him for months—his ego? This film is darker, alarming even, lightened only by glimpses of a real life as grungy as any, and the rising resistance of women in 2018, defeating Bannon’s guy, Roy Moore. Their voices and our reanimated elections remind us that bombastic fake-men, impeachable bores and liars, are far from inevitable. The trail of “big stuff,” namely “big money,” marks our way out of a fantasy Oz.
