Better in their words…

WSJ 10/3/2019  Daniel Henninger

As the Trump impeachment narrative descends into the familiar bog of incomprehensibility, some guidance: Do not confuse Ukraine with Ukrainia.

Ukraine is a real country. Ukrainia is an imaginary place created by the national Democratic Party and the Washington press corps.

It was probably inevitable that after 2½ years of the Trump presidency, the Democrats and the press would end up in Ukrainia. For years, they have accused Mr. Trump, with some justification, of creating his own reality. Last week, they decided to create their own.

This story began two weeks ago, on a Thursday, with reports of a whistleblower filing a complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general about Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the real president of the real Ukraine. For about 48 hours, the issue was simple: Had Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter?

That Sunday, Mr. Trump said he did bring up Mr. Biden during a conversation about corruption. On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she had approved a formal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s impeachment. Then, in what became the working headline for everything else last week, “the dam broke.”

If you live in Peoria, most likely you can’t fully understand the meaning of “the dam broke.” It’s not that people in Peoria don’t know what’s going on. But like virtually everyone today, they get most of their news from screens—on cellphones, PCs or television. That isn’t how Washington gets the news.

Besides the inevitable screens, people working in Washington still get their news as they did during the Watergate scandal—from the front pages of the print editions of national newspapers.

Those front pages were once the political world’s official dam, releasing information into the world at a rate appropriate to the news of the day. Last week, that dam collapsed in an indiscriminate torrent.

The day after the White House released the text of Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Zelensky, the New York Times, under a banner headline—“Trump Asked for ‘Favor’ in Call, Memo Shows”—spread a reproduction of the transcript across the top half of the page, with six sections highlighted portentously in yellow marker. That day’s Washington Post filled its first section with an astounding 19 separate “impeachment inquiry” stories, each more or less pegged to this single transcript.

On Friday, the Times returned with another banner headline: “Complaint Asserts a White House Cover-Up.” Below that, again filling the top half of the page, is text from the unnamed whistleblower’s semi-hearsay complaint and the inspector general’s letter.

This is Ukrainia, the impeachment world inhabited by Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and the rest of Washington—a world of newspaper melodrama, nonstop talking heads and hysterical social-media posts.

It’s hard to recall the paint-by-numbers story line that presumably caused Nancy Pelosi to pull the trigger on impeachment—the notion that Mr. Trump’s raising the investigation of a political opponent in a national-security conversation with a foreign leader was an abuse of presidential power and an impeachable offense.

At long last, the Democrats believed, they had a violative Trump act the public could understand, as opposed to what the New York Times described—with an utter absence of irony—as “months of murky messaging around a confusing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.”

It is barely a fortnight since this “understandable” impeachment charge emerged and already the story line is descending, again, into deep insider minutiae and ultimately something incomprehensible to the general public.

Adam Schiff—who admitted Wednesday that the sainted whistleblower touched base with the House Intelligence Committee days before unloading the complaint against Mr. Trump—is as always carpet-bombing the administration with subpoenas. He wants Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify. He wants to depose a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and various others in the U.S. diplomatic corps no one’s ever heard of. George Papadopoulos must be in there somewhere.

Meanwhile, the real Ukrainians look like they don’t want to pursue the matter further, and that includes Mr. Trump’s predictable exhortation to investigate Joe Biden.

The Democrats will fall back on the media to keep the impeachment game going, which it will. For much of the media, its primary activity has become feeding a voracious internet, which means the most minimally relevant anti-Trump stories are reported in microscopic detail whose purpose is to hold on to eyeballs with a permanent and presumably addictive sense of dread.

Politicians like Nancy Pelosi used to be better at assessing the political importance of events, but their judgment is now being overwhelmed by the ideological frenzies of modern media, culminating in the past two wild weeks.

For more than two years, the Democrats have asked the American people to buy into a succession of Trump takedowns—Russian collusion, Mueller obstruction, tax abuse and Stormy Daniels. Now they expect voters to spend the next year living with them in Ukrainia. There has to be a limit, and this may be it.

Write henninger@wsj.com

via Democrats Lost in Ukrainia – WSJ.