Presumption

Yesterday, the Democrats trained hamsters in the media told us that Ambassador Gordon Sondland provided the "smoking gun," that he was "Trump's John Dean," that Trump was now "proven guilty" by a "first-hand witness." What they forgot to tell us is that at the end of his testimony, Sondland mentioned (under cross examination) that his "accusations" were all about "impressions" and "presumptions" and when pressed, he admitted that he had NO evidence of any wrongdoing, that Trump said to him that he wanted NOTHING from the Ukrainians (and, BTW, got nothing) and that NO ONE told him that Trump wanted a "quid pro quo/bribe." But hey, why should the media or the Dems bother with the truth.

But there's something bigger going on and Daniel Henninger comments on it:

... the Pelosi-Schiff impeachment project reveals what has gone so badly wrong in Washington. The “resistance” has degraded into an endless personal vendetta between Mr. Trump, Democrats and the media. The rest of us are onlookers to what looks like a blood feud between families in 13th-century Italy.

The impeachment diverts attention from a more important issue that sits beneath the Ukraine narrative—to wit, Mr. Trump’s distant, increasingly isolationist attitude toward the world. No matter which global problem involves already existing U.S. interests, his common denominator is to back off and let it fester.

Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s Wednesday testimony makes clear that helping Ukraine defend itself was the point of all this internal effort. That was settled Trump administration policy until Mr. Trump took to obsessing over Ukraine’s alleged involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Then he began telling everyone: “They are all corrupt. They are all terrible people. I don’t want to spend any time with that.”

This is a legitimate criticism of Trump, but it must be viewed within the context of the past 50 years. The Sondlands within the foreign policy community have been wrong at least as often as they've been right. They've embroiled us in unnecessary and damaging conflicts, they've failed our best allies and in some cases, sucked up to our adversaries. A case in point is their failure to assist the Iranian resistance (that's happening right now) as they try to depose the mad mullahs. When considering the totality of their work, they have been borderline incompetent. They fallback on their Ivy League credentials and shrug off the damage they have wrought. Trump campaigned against all that was was elected to fix it. In his ham-handed way, he's trying, and the Washington elites, along with a majority of the deep state HATE him for it.

Hence the Democrat parade of State Department and administration bureaucrats whose "impressions" and "presumptions" and "concerns" are presented as if they mean anything. They don't. They are policy disagreements, NOT evidence of wrong doing.

There is, however, one "presumption" that is fair to make. The Dems have adopted the Beria Rule—they have identified the man (Trump), and now in their own hysteria-fringed way, they will work until they've found a "crime" that fits the man.