Mr. Trump, You Can't Handle The Truth

WASHINGTON – Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters on Tuesday he does not plan to read the newly released transcripts of testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, calling the entire process an illegitimate "sham."

"I've written the whole process off," Graham said, according to CBS News and The Associated Press. "I think this is a bunch of B.S."

On top of that, Graham insists on outing the whistleblower who is, by law, protected from the kind of outing Graham envisions, an exposure that would certainly endanger the whistleblower’s career, if not his/her person and family. In his own weird version of quid pro quo, Graham says the impeachment hearings cannot continue unless the whistleblower is identified. Remarkable, consistently convoluted, thinking when when matched to the president’s insistence that military aid wouldn’t flow to Ukraine unless dirt on the Bidens was offered in return. I’ll give the Rs this much: they are remarkably consistent and convoluted when it comes to threats and thuggery.

The Republican strategy is clear: bully, obfuscate, deny, misdirect, vilify, shame, impugn, and call into question patriotic motives. They wrap themselves in the flag--as if it was a cloak woven with threads of self-righteous, self-styled manifest Conservative destiny. When all other arguments fail, or when no legitimate argument is to be had in the first place, such an ignoble embrace of patriotism is the latest desperate act for Republican scoundrels.

In the climactic courtroom scene in the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men,” Tom Cruise, as Navy JAG lawyer Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, is defending two enlisted Marines charged with the murder of their Guantanamo Bay colleague, Corporal Santiago. Kaffee calls to the witness stand Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson). Kaffee believes Jessup ordered a “Code Red” disciplinary action against Santiago—Code Red being a harsh form of hazing as punishment for poor conduct. Santiago died from a too-heavy-handed Code Red treatment by the two Marines who were carrying out the Colonel’s order, and Jessup and his subordinate officers attempted to cover up the order.

Jessup’s disdain for Kaffee is palpable throughout the film. Kaffee is a smart-mouth Harvard law grad with no combat experience, and little inclination (at the beginning of the movie) to take his military service as a JAG lawyer seriously. Jessup has no patience for Kaffee. In the courtroom, Jessup is a seething mass of self-anointed justice. In one of film-history’s most notable confrontations—and the uttering of a meme that will live forever—Kaffee presses Jessup about the Code Red order.

[Nicholson] Jessup: You want answers?!

[Cruise] Kaffee: I want the truth!

Jessup: You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like "honor", "code", "loyalty". We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to! 

Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?

Jessup: I did the job that—-

Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?!!

Jessup: YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!!

Now, I’ve often attached the word “hubris’ to the attitudes of leaders and others in power who step over the line between confidence and arrogance. To the Greeks, hubris was the fatal flaw of a tragic hero, a character whose cockiness turns reckless, offending the gods with his or her “I’m better than mere mortals” stage center self-importance. The gods invariably smack down the hero with a stark and painful reminder that mortality is the lot of all humans, no matter their station in life.

As I watched the first day of the impeachment hearings, concurrently considering the past three years of inane, but perfidious actions of the president and his band of enablers, the word hubris came to mind. I mean, how almost god-like do these people think they are? But then I flashed back to Colonel Jessup’s courtroom outbursts:

“You can't handle the truth!”

“Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!”

And then I listened to Lindsey Graham’s outburst,

"I've written the whole process off…I think this is a bunch of B.S.!"

Those aren’t words prompted by hubris, because Jessup’s and Graham’s characters lack one crucial attribute: they are not heroic—tragic or otherwise.

Jessup’s lines, like those bleatings of the House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee and across the building in the Senate, and down Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House, are not spoken by a hero. They come from the mouth of a failed mortal, a character who presumes that his judgment over life and death overrides his oath as a soldier—the same oath all of us in federal service take. The same oath Senator Graham took; the same oath Ambassador Taylor took—and yet how perverted did one oath become in comparison to the purity of the other?

Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Jessup, almost gets it right when he speaks of the need for men and women of quiet valor and ultimate patience who keep the watch over our democracy. 

“I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom…You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like "honor", "code", "loyalty". We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something.”

It is true that we need our men and women in uniform to keep us safe, even when what they must sometimes do—and what can happen to them—is beyond our comprehension. That their commander-in-chief, and so many of his apologists in Congress cannot understand such service and sacrifice is appalling. Which brings me to Ambassador William Taylor.

As the son of a West Point graduate, I grew up watching “Duty, Honor, Country” inform every aspect of my father’s life—personal and professional. He and Ambassador Taylor—also a West Point graduate and combat veteran—were and are heroes. When I served on Capitol Hill and in the Executive Branch, I was privileged to meet and work alongside Medal of Honor recipients and men and women whose service in uniform resulted in terrible wounds. 

There were no Colonel Jessups among them; not one of them would have assumed a godlike role in the performance of their duties. It was their appreciation of their own mortality and the mortality of those they served that defined them. I saw much the same in Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent, sitting patiently next to Ambassador Taylor, ready to take the arrows fired from the Committee’s Republicans.

Which brings me to the sorry motives and methods of the Republicans on the Committee and elsewhere throughout the Capitol and Capital CIty. As if infected by the madness of would-be-King Donald, they are prostrating themselves at his feet, bowing and scraping, as he calls for nothing less than the heads of those innocent federal employees who dare call out Trumpus-Tyrannus for his overt and divisive profligacy.

For three years, Americans have endured the cold, mean-spirited, rudderless reign of Trump. For three years, the Republican party has marched in lock-step to Trump’s disgraceful drumbeat of dastardly disingenuity.

Now the court of public opinion is in session, and through the impeachment process, we will see a truth emerge and prevail. It will be an inescapable truth, one that already has Trump squirming away from the witness seat. 

Mr. Trump, you may try to deceive others into believing that some self-twisted version of the truth will see you through this trial, but let me assure you: a very different truth is rising around you. You are no hubris-driven tragic hero who will be cut down by the gods. You are just a tragic figure, a small mortal sadly unaware of the smallness of his mortality and the bleakness of his soul. You will not be able to handle this truth.