CT Blue

There’s an excellent article at Talking Points Memo which purports to explain:

what the rush of activity was to get Vladimir Zelensky to kick off and publicly announce these investigations. After all, during the key events the US election was well over a year away.

The article is well worth reading,and I guess in one sense there was some urgency, from the genius’s point of view, in getting the reluctant successor to a corrupt and ousted leader to confirm that he would go along with the corrupt bargain made by his predecessor. Still, it seems to me that the whole thing was needlessly rushed, and the genius would have been far better off had he waited and exerted pressure say, in September of 2020, if it proved necessary.

The only explanation for trying to take Biden down now is that the genius and his enablers believe that Biden is the probable nominee and that he represents the greatest threat to his reelection. Not being a Fox watcher, I can’t say if Fox has spoon fed this to him or not, but out here in the real world, many of us have a far different take. I’m not alone in making the argument that Biden would be one of the easiest credible candidates for Trump to beat. If the genius had any brains (is that an oxymoron? Well, not in Trump’s case.) he would be easing Biden’s path to the nomination and holding fire until Biden is the nominee, if that ever happens.

Timing is everything in another respect. Trump was looking for an announcement from the Ukraine right away, meaning it would precede the election by more than a year. There is so little substance to the story on the merits that even the New York Times would likely not give it the coverage during the campaign that it would likely give it if it was initially sprung during the campaign. The Times, like most of the mainstream media, is ever on the look out for a story it can use to pound Democrats, in order to prove its evenhandedness. Everyone knows about Hillary’s emails, for example, though the Trump Univerity story is still largely unknown. Even had a whistleblower come forward in the context of an ongoing campaign, that whistle, assuming anyone heard it, would quickly be drowned out be other campaign noise, and would certainly not generate impeachment proceedings, given the timing.

In sum: the genius should wish for a Biden candidacy and should have held fire until that wish was granted, at which time the media would have salivated at the prospect of a Biden corruption story, no matter how baseless.

There is one possible logical explanation for the undue haste. Trump’s leverage over the Ukraine consisted of the aid money. Had he demanded simply a promise to announce an investigation at the opportune time, he would have had to release the quid before he got the quo. In this case his grifter’s reluctance to trust his mark might have been well placed. The announcement might never have come. But that presumes the Ukraine would risk losing future aid, should the genius be reelected.