In these divisive times, I have purposely avoided discussing politics in this blog. I missed most of the televised Watergate hearings in the 1970s and the Clinton hearings in the 1990s, because I was attending classes or working during the day. Now that I am retired, however, I have been able to see all of the current impeachment hearings, and it has been riveting. Yesterday, US Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, provided moments of high comedy along with his bombshell revelations.
In the early 1990s, Saturday Night Live’s Phil Hartman had a recurring character that appeared in several sketches. He was called the Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer and explained that he fell into some ice thousands of years ago during an ice age, was unfrozen by scientists and sent to law school. As a personal injury lawyer, he always started his closing arguments with a statement that began, “I’m just a caveman. I know nothing of your modern world, but I do know . . . etc. etc.” It was a great character, and I think of him fondly every time I hear someone pleading ignorance of something everyone in the world understands.
If you have not been following any of this, yesterday, Sondland admitted that he helped implement President Trump’s illegal plan to use the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponents in exchange for giving them military aid that had already been allocated by both parties in Congress. This is clearly an impeachable offense, and Ambassador Sondland implicated the President, the Vice President, and his immediate supervisor, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, saying that he “was only following orders” from his bosses. This defense was reminiscent of the WWII war crime trials in which Nazi leaders argued that they were innocent because they were told to implement the Holocaust by military superiors. During his hours of testimony, however, Sondland carefully chose his words to avoid making himself appear guilty of crimes that might land him in prison. This is where the “Unfrozen Cave Man” reference came in. First, it should be noted that Sondland has never been accused of being the smartest person in the room. He obtained his crucially important position in our government because he donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration party. He is completely unqualified to be ambassador to Antarctica, let alone the European Union. When he is compared to the life-time diplomats who testified before him, this fact becomes graphically obvious. Again and again, he reminded the committee, “I am not a note-taker. I never take any notes of my meetings, and the White House and State Department have refused to give me access to any records of those meetings. If someone else testified that I said that, it must be true.” After the fifth or sixth time he said, “I don’t have any notes of that phone call; as I said, I’m not a note-taker,” I started getting a mental image of Sondland as the Cave-Man Lawyer leaning over the jury box and intoning, “I’m just a cave man. I know nothing of your modern pencils and notepads.”
The late, great Phil Hartman: