Fox News contributor likens Trump's Ukraine plot to a traffic violation
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From the November 19, 2019, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered Overtime
ANDREW MCCARTHY (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I think Ken hits the nail on the head by distinguishing inappropriate from impeachable. Inappropriate is what we heard again and again today. And I -- now that we've been through this for a number of days, I feel like we're spending hours trying to inflate something that, if I can go back to the parlance of my upbringing, is a venial sin and trying to turn into a mortal sin or a cardinal sin.
You know, we started out with Adam Schiff at the beginning of the proceedings -- and I just think this is worth remembering. He characterized the conversation between the presidents, Trump and Zelensky, as the following. "I have a favor I want from you, though, and I'm going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent. Understand?" Now, that's a very telling parody, because I think what it suggests on the part of Schiff is if we had something that was actually like that, where President Trump had been asking not just to have an investigation of something that warranted investigating, but where he was actually asking him to make up political dirt on an opponent, to manufacture it out of whole cloth, that would be something that would be tremendously serious.
Except we don't have anything like that. And I thought, to bookend it, here's how Chairman Schiff ended today: He talked about this transaction yet again, this discussion, and responding to the point that nothing actually happened here -- in the sense that the Ukrainians got their aid, they didn't have to promise to investigate Biden. Chairman Schiff said, "This is no less odious because it was discovered and stopped." That's preposterous. Of course it's less odious because it was discovered and stopped. Even if you accept -- which I'm not necessarily sure that this is true -- that if they have pushed for investigation of the Bidens, which is something that probably ought to be investigated, that that would have been something that was utterly inappropriate, we don't even have that. We basically have the Democrats, continuing from the beginning to this very point, groping for a theory of why something that is along the lines of a traffic violation is an impeachable offense.