That’s what Republicans discovered when they dragged former Special Counsel Jack Smith before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing. They did so in the forlorn hope that they somehow might be able to discredit Smith and distract voters’ attention from runaway inflation, a quagmire of a war in Iran and other federal government policies that range from incomprehensible to idiotic.
The GOP senators’ hopes went unfulfilled. By the time the hearing ended, the nation’s attention was focused not on Smith’s prosecution of President Donald Trump for attempting to overturn a national election and compromising national security but instead on the moronic incompetence of U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri.
Schmitt set a new standard for blustering lunacy—and given the excesses of this absurd era, that’s saying something—by somehow thinking he could turn a photograph of Smith attending a basketball game into the second coming of Watergate.
Schmitt asserted that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks men’s professional basketball game. From there, the silly senator took a quantum logical leap and accused Smith of really being in Atlanta to conspire with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and lead prosecutor Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.
When Smith said he’d never seen a Hawks game, been to Atlanta or met Willis or Wade, Schmitt declared that the former special counsel had committed perjury and called him a “dirtbag.”
Schmitt’s celebratory dance lasted only seconds.
In short order, aided by deft questioning from U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, Smith established that the game he attended was a women’s college basketball game between Iowa (the Hawkeyes) and Maryland in Maryland because he wanted to see Caitlin Clark play. (Who wouldn’t?)
So, in real time, Schmitt established before a national audience that he didn’t know the difference between Maryland and Georgia, between college and professional basketball and, it appears, between men and women.
All in all, a stellar performance.
And one that, sadly, was to be expected—the inevitable product of the MAGA movement’s conviction that repeated accusation is the equivalent of actual evidence and the fervent belief that no conspiracy is too outlandish to be accepted before asking even the most basic questions.
I’ll admit I’ve never understood the GOP’s Trump-ordered determination to hold what amounts to legislative show trials for people who have the goods on the president’s malfeasance.
My befuddlement doesn’t spring from concern about the morality of these taxpayer-funded exercises in persecution and vengeance. I learned many years ago that most politicians view ethical considerations through prisms of self-interest, prisms that often distort the truth into unrecognizable shapes.
No, it’s the sheer stupidity of the whole enterprise that is mystifying.
We have had paranoid, vindictive and amoral presidents before. Richard Nixon, for example, had an honest-to-goodness enemies list made up of law-abiding Americans he wanted to punish for disagreeing with him politically.
Nixon, though, had the brains to do his skullduggery in the dark. He sicced the Internal Revenue Service and other, more secretive governmental instruments on those who had incurred his disfavor.
He didn’t put them on national television so that they could tell their stories—stories that were bound not to flatter him—in front of millions of people. He didn’t rent the hall, build the crowd and pay for the microphones so that his opponents could indict him before the entire country.
And he certainly didn’t send his foot soldiers out to spew tall tales that could be debunked as soon as they were uttered.
That’s because, while Nixon may have been unethical, he was a lawyer, one smart enough to avoid helping his adversaries.
Trump and his acolytes such as Schmitt aren’t that bright.
That’s why, time and again, they’ve staged events that have rebounded on them, often disastrously.
The reason’s always the same.
They seize on some stray piece of information and construct a grand and dark conspiracy upon it. Because they assume that everyone operates with the same ethical blindness and bottomless gullibility that they do, they never bother to investigate whether their original piece of information, much less the dark fantasy they’ve fashioned atop it, is in any way true.
No, they charge ahead like malevolent Mr. Magoos, cocooned by their obliviousness to fact and reality, fooling around while they careen toward disaster.
That’s what happened here.
Fool around long enough and—eventually, perhaps even inevitably—Schmitt happens.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
