Character

There is something comically ironic about the Dems, now in power in the House, inviting as their star witness a man who has been convicted of lying in testimony already given before congress. And then treating that man's new testimony as wholly credible.

It's also comical to listen to the man's testimony, trashing an elected president of the United States, telling us that the president is a racist, a con-man, the worst of the worst, but at the same time admitting that he worked for this evil-doer for more than a decade and only recently has found his moral compass. Gosh, what does that same about the witness? Oh yeah, the Dems would have us believe that the witness has finally achieved a higher mortal plain because he's now working with the likes of Chuck Schumer, Elijah Cummings, and Adam Schiff—puleeze!

The entire Democrat-controlled circus has the feeling of the Kavanaugh hearings, brutal and vicious, but at the same time smacking of pre-judgement and sanctimonious hypocrisy. The only difference is that the Dems took the position that this time, at least, we had to believe the man—even though the man is a convicted liar. Little if any new information was introduced—the intent was to smear Trump and then smear again.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal summarize accurately when they write:

The day was above all a reminder that Americans elected a President in 2016 who had spent decades in the sleazier corners of New York business and tabloid life. He surrounded himself with political rogues like Mr. Stone, legal hustlers like Mr. Cohen, and even brought in a Beltway bandit from central casting, Paul Manafort, as his campaign chairman for a time.

Republicans knew all this when they nominated Mr. Trump, and now he and the GOP will pay a political price as Democrats marinate in that blue past in hearing after hearing. Character does matter, especially in Presidents.

The Journal's editors are correct, character does matter, but so do results. Despite his lack of character and his poor choices of associates, Trump gets stuff done, and that "stuff" has benefited the American people in ways that the Dems understand privately, but do not admit publicly. That's why they must opt for character assassination and smears, helped along by Trump's own personal failings.

There's one more point that should made. Character does matter—on BOTH sides of the aisle. Donald Trump has character problems, but so does the leadership of the Democratic party. In the House, in the Senate, and certainly throughout the media (who are, to put it bluntly, Democratic operatives with bylines), we have seen a lost election morph into a orgy of hatred, so intense, so vicious, and so interminable, that any sense of decency or proportionality has been jettisoned.

We saw it during the Kavanaugh hearings where an accomplished and decent man was vilified in a way that would have made Joe McCarthy uneasy, and we're seeing it again now. The Dems for their part think they're on a righteous path, that using a proven liar to take down a political opponent is somehow justified. But here's their problem. The American people watched Kavanagh and were repelled by the behavior of the Dems. They're now watching the Cohen circus and have already decided that it's more of the same.

UPDATE-1:
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Jim Daws provides further commentary:

The defining characteristic of today’s Democrats is that most unattractive of human failings, hypocrisy. Since Donald Trump’s improbable election, Dems and their media mouthpieces have been demanding that the rest of us recognize the existential threat he poses to the nation. Their demands are based on a litany of accused authoritarian character traits and fascistic conduct that Trump obviously doesn’t hold and in fact never committed. The reality is the Democrats are projecting -- accusing Trump of the very outrages that they themselves practiced in their obsession to prevent and then overturn his election.

Think about it for just a second.

The only proven "Russian collusion" (however indirect) was between the Hillary Clinton campaign and a foreign operator who had the Russians concoct a provably phony dossier designed to sink Trump.

The only "obstruction of justice" occurred when Hillary Clinton destroyed 30,000 emails (think: BleachBit) after an investigation into her private server began.

The only true "threat to democracy" occurred when major operators in the FBI and intelligence services, all sympathetic to Democrats or staunch #NeverTrumpers, decided to plan a soft coup to unseat a duly elected president.

Psychological projection, anyone?


UPDATE-2
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And this assessment from Roger Simon:

The day the Democrats decided to schedule the House Oversight Committee hearing with Michael Cohen to coincide with Trump's negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi is the day the Democrats ensured the president's reelection. It was one of those rare moments of clarity you can imagine in the history books.

The Democrats revealed themselves as partisan hacks while the president was halfway around the world trying to save the lives of millions. That's not just bad timing, it's atrocious. And it has little to do with the success or failure of the talks with Kim. No one knows how that will turn out, probably not even the principals themselves. It has do with the priorities of the human race like global survival -- what a normal person should care about.

At first the consensus (at least among the talking heads) was that the hearing would outshine whatever was happening in Hanoi, but as the day wore on with no revelations that were even slightly new (Trump paid Stormy -- je suis shockay), no evidence of conspiracy with the Russians whatsoever, just tons of speculation and innuendo we have been hearing since the day Trump came down the escalator, and ended with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in some racist rant at Rep. Mark Meadows (we already knew she was an anti-Semite), we realized we were witnessing a bizarre clown show that only a CNN commentator could like.

Do the Dems honestly believe that no one would notice that their scheduling of the Cohen circus was blatantly political? Did they think that no one remembers the adage the American politics ends at our borders? Do they actually believe that their barely contained glee when Trump failed to deliver NoKo de-nuclearization, wouldn't offend many citizens?

And finally, do they think that well-informed citizens don't see the strength projected by Trump when he walked away from the negotiating table when a bad guy demanded more than Trump was willing to give ... and then compared that to Democratic President Barack Obama who delivered pallets of cash to equally bad guys (the mad mullahs) on a different continent just to make a very, very bad deal with the world's largest sponsor of Islamic terror—Iran?

Nah, TDS has blinded the Dems to reality, and now they live in a fantasy world of their own making.