Cohen, Trump, Truth And Lies

       You don't find swans in a sewer.
                                    Variously attributed


       With scattered exceptions over the years, congressional hearings have earned a reputation for combining bad theater and bad government. Nowhere among the exceptions was the hearing of the House Oversight Committee with turncoat Trump lieutenant Michael Cohen.
      The show was a show indeed.  Political hams pitched televised woo to voter blocs they favor or fear. On the Republican side, a good deal of effort was aimed at making Cohen look venal. Given his undisputed corruption, this could be called the defamatory equivalent of trying to gild a lily, but politicians famously relish license in their use of air time.
       Cohen's debatable veracity is a valid concern, of course. Also valid is this essential: Criminal informants necessarily will have moved in the world of criminality. It's inherent the transaction. Cohen's world of criminality was the Donald Trump orbit. He functioned there for years, and found the environment hospitable to his values.
       In the hearing, Republican Congressman Mark Meadows returned a performance that charity would call colorful in the extreme.  His North Carolina district went for Trump by nearly 30 points in the 2016 election.  Giving Meadows generous benefit of the doubt, we can imagine him saying that voters are entitled to get what they want, and that the voters of his district have said they want Trump.
      This formulation has a measure of merit if voters are voicing informed choices. But their prospect of doing so is dimmed by shills who peddle claptrap in support of Trump's audacious lies.
       Case in point: The border-wall wrangle, where the crisis is phony, the remedy specious and the emerging governance constitutionally grotesque. There is no genuine need for any of it -- only Trump's need to lather up loyalist support against the wave of political and legal trouble rolling his way. The president is willing to go to ultimate extremes to save his skin, and he knows that he likely must.
       Thus the Republican vision of leadership: Major policy based on calculations of how much double-talk the public will believe. Within this contempt for principle is a telling contempt for the voters themselves.  Today's Republican leaders will not be counted among the class of their party's history. They display their individual reasons for embracing  deceit as a core ethic of governance: Lack of character, lack of judgment, lack of talent. They are together in displaying a lack of due respect for the people they supposedly serve.