Additional Tags: Road Trip, Canon-Typical Violence, A new character!, Established Relationship, Mutual Pining, Hurt/Comfort, Makeout Scene, Angst, Miscommunication, Depression, Trauma, Terrible boyfriends, POV swapping, Enemies to friends, cheesecake factory, (like actual platonic bed sharing and not “platonic” bed sharing), also not sharing a bed, haircut as a coping mechanism, Scarves As Feelings
First of all, it’s comparatively short. It’s seven pages long with a short, redacted appendix. So any Republican Congressional representative or Senator who says they haven’t read it because they’ve been too busy is lying. I read it this morning and I work full time.
Second…this really makes everything so much worse for Buttercup. So much worse. Because first of all, everything in this narrative will be instantly credible to anyone who has ever seen how this man operates. Second, what the complaint *mostly* describes is not the call itself, but the panicked scrambling of all the people who knew about it, after they realized what was happening. According to the whistleblower, there were many witnesses, none of whom thought–when this call began–that they were going to hear the President of the United States strong-arm a foreign leader into investigating a political opponent:
So the number of witnesses is one way in which this gets worse for Buttercup. The other way is the one indicated by that subheading II there: the fact that unlike Buttercup himself, everyone ELSE who witnessed this realized immediately how hideous it was and scrambled to ensure that it would go down the memory hole. What’s ironic to me about this is the contrast between the career people around Buttercup–who certainly realize that he has committed an impeachable offense in front of witnesses–and Buttercup himself, who just blithely released the transcript everyone around him sold their souls to protect. And they didn’t sell their souls calmly and in cold blood either. These people were FREAKING OUT. They were freaking out to each other, and also to the whistleblower, about what they were doing. So there are many witnesses to all of that too.
There’s more damaging stuff in here; but let me show you something truly tragic that is buried in a footnote to a very explosive section of the document:
It’s footnote 3, especially, that gets to me. “I do not know why the President associates these servers with Ukraine.” So much despondence, despair, throwing up of hands in the face of all the absurdity. Friend Whistleblower is doing their level best to create a clear and coherent narrative of the facts; but because Buttercup is involved, there are these parts of the story destined never to make sense. I mean, friend Whistleblower does sort of know where this claim came from (Whistleblower seems to be aware of the conspiracy theory) but Whistleblower simply cannot explain why this lunatic thinks that the DNC’s email servers are in the Ukraine. Logic just fails Whistleblower here, as does language, in the face of the raw insanity of this whole situation.
Buttercup, meanwhile, has just threatened the whistleblower with assassination, though of course he did it in his classic “shame if something were to happen” style, so the Republicans will claim he was merely sharing a historical anecdote with some friends.
Long ago, in the early eighties, I asked one of my high school teachers “what Nixon did that got him into all that hot water.” Buttercup is in the same water now, but it’s way hotter. He will be sweating there for quite some time.
