Perhaps they were expecting cheerleaders, pom poms, and marching bands.
As the first day of the public testimony in the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives kicked off, the White House Press Secretary’s best shot at trying to defend Donald Trump was condemning the hearings as “boring” and “a colossal waste of taxpayer time & money.”
This sham hearing is not only boring, it is a colossal waste of taxpayer time & money. Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more. @realDonaldTrump is working right now-the dems should follow his lead!
— Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 13, 2019
Of course, Democrats could easily respond that the entire Trump administration is “a colossal waste of taxpayer time & money,” given the tweet was sent by a press secretary who has yet to even hold a press conference since she assumed the position in July and that she serves a president who has spent around $110 million of taxpayer dollars on his weekend golf trips.
Apparently, a decision to portray the hearings as somnambulant was sent to all the purveyors of GOP talking points as a way to suppress viewership of the incriminating testimony by the public in the same way that the Republicans try to suppress voting in order to win elections since that description of the hearings appeared again and again in the commentary of right-wing politicos.
One Twitter user, Mike Rothschild, conveniently aggregated a number of tweets in the GOP propaganda assault for our edification.
The far right's big problem with the #ImpeachmentHearings is that they need more monster trucks and explosions to make them less boring. pic.twitter.com/dAoFlfdZNS
— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) November 13, 2019
The last stand of the Republican Spartans: your spears don't kill us because they are boring. #ImpeachmentHearings pic.twitter.com/ToWCiTykvM
— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) November 13, 2019
Despite the critique of the impeachment hearings as too slow-paced to hold the attention of adrenaline-fueled Republicans, everyone seemed to be watching them nonetheless given the running commentary they continued to present on social media — including the president who had declared that he was “too busy” to watch them, yet somehow found time to tweet about them all morning.
Anyone who was persuaded to stay away from watching the hearings missed seeing in real-time the bombshell testimony from William Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who revealed that one of his aides had overheard a call between Donald Trump and European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland in which the president pressured Sondland to get Ukraine to agree to “the investigations” into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Luckily, the media will edit all the good parts of the testimony into faster-paced sound bites that will be equally incriminating towards the president and more easily watched by even those with the shortest of attention spans before being branded “Fake News™” by Trump.
A word of caution to Republicans trying to discourage viewership of the impeachment hearings by labeling them as “boring.”
After the first day of the Watergate hearings in the Nixon administration, The Washington Post had this to say about those fateful hearings that eventually led to the president’s resignation:
“If you like to watch the grass grow, you would have loved the opening of the Senate select committee’s hearings on the Watewrgate and related capaign misdeeds.”
Boring may be in the eye of the beholder, but a slow and methodical pace can uncover some mighty incriminating details that Trump and his cronies are doing everything in their power to prevent from being revealed and to discredit once they are disclosed.
While some may find the slow pace of the hearings interminable, the boredom they inspire is nothing compared to the tedium of the prison routine that many of the major players in this scandal will hopefully be enduring once justice is served.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.