On congressional hearings today and yesterday
The teapot dome scandal investigations occurred to largely a public yawn. But that plausibly disengaged president was deceased and his attached cronies were successfully detached from his successor — so the public could mentally shake it off to the past. Though Harding left office with sky – high approval, the public could now retroactively lower them without accruing this to the high approval for Coolidge.
It has been a while since we have had a popular president. Not that any presidents deserve such a thing.
Currently we have something called a “January 6th committee”, by definition a partisan prosecution since it is an accounting of the issues of one party that can’t take a variant of the Harding to Coolidge move. That Cheney sits on the committee — serving a role Republicans had taken in the Watergate hearings for a public face to wash out the partisan jabs of the Democrats — gets fingered by the Trump base as a sign of her perfidy. The descriptions of the account by partisan Republicans — and for that matter some independents compelled by the suggestion — lay out the basic political challenges of the manuever. Democrats and Biden are not popular. This presents a funny hypothetical — imagine there was an assassination plot against a sitting President hatched and carried out by members of Congress. Imagine that the President had an approval rating of 30 percent in the polls. By the implication of the point made here — should any investigation of this be assumed a partisan ” wag the dog” act of misdirection, and further implication can only be done if the President had an approval rating above 60%? The other kind of amusing jab is to posit the “slick my produced tv” programming. Sure — and they would be more damned if it were shortly produced.
In a year we will enjoy the repeat of the Benghazi hearings, only this time with Hunter Biden centered stage.