Good news, everyone! Last week, I was posting a lot of videos from the impeachment hearings, featuring Devin Nunes, Elise Stefanik, John Ratcliffe, Jim Jordan and others. Although the mainstream news media reporters were anxious for the Democrat witnesses to provide evidence to impeach Trump, it didn’t work out. And now independents are turning against the Democrats.

Here’s a good summary from The Federalist:

Emerson polling showed that support for impeachment flipped since October from 48 percent support with 44 percent opposing to now 45 percent opposed and 43 percent in support. Among key independents, the switch was even more pronounced. In October, 48 percent supported impeaching President Donald Trump, with 39 percent opposed. Now, 49 percent of independents oppose impeachment, while only 34 percent support it.

A new Marquette University Law School poll found that 40 percent of registered voters in the swing state of Wisconsin think that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 53 percent do not think so. Another 6 percent weren’t sure.

A new Gallup poll shows that Trump’s approval has ticked up two points since the impeachment drama began, with 50 percent of Americans opposed to it and 48 percent in support. Henry Olsen notes that Gallup polls all adults, not just registered voters, meaning that a poll of registered voters would have Trump’s job approval even higher and impeachment opposed by closer to a 52-46 margin.

Even more interesting are the numbers for black voters, who traditionally vote Democrat. The Epoch Times reports:

Both polls—Rasmussen, which usually tilts Republican, and Emerson, which is considered even-handed—came out almost exactly the same, putting Trump’s support among blacks at a surprising, almost astonishing, 34 percent. Typically, Republicans poll in single digits among blacks.

“Game Changer” may be one of the great clichés of our our time, but this would actually be one. If even remotely true, Democrats should be having a nervous breakdown. They depend more than ever on African-Americans for success in elections. If Trump were to garner even 18 percent of the black vote, he would easily win in 2020. If he had anything close to the 34 percent, it would be a runaway, a disaster for the Democrats.

So, those are good numbers for Trump. What happened at the hearings? Well, the Democrats were trying to prove that Trump had held up foreign aid to Ukraine, in order to get them to investigate why Joe Biden’s son was collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars when Joe Biden was vice president. But it turned out that no one in the new Ukrainian government thought that their aid was being held up. And that the aid was released after a short delay over concerns that the new Ukraine government was as corrupt as the last one. Once those concerns were investigated, the aid was released. And the aid included lethal defensive anti-tank weapons, something that Obama had never done for Ukraine. And there was never any investigation of Hunter Biden before the aid was released. So, there was no quid pro quo.

I posted a lot of videos showing all the admissions on Facebook, but this 1-minute video was the slam dunk of the hearing:

The mainstream media reported that Ambassador Sondland had said the exact opposite as what you see in the video above, and that’s just because they don’t expect American voters to look at the video of the hearing.

So, what did we learn from all this? We learned that Trump doesn’t like to give American taxpayer dollars to other countries. He thinks that their immediate neighbors ought to help them, not America. And we learned that Trump is concerned that we not throw money away to corrupt regimes. And we learned that far from withholding aid, Trump gave them USEFUL anti-tank Javelin missiles, something that Obama was never willing to do. And he didn’t get any investigation of any Bidens before that aid was sent.

The Federalist article notes that viewership of the hearings decreased as they went on, probably because people realized that there was no evidence there.

Media outlets did all they could to bolster Schiff’s show and ran the impeachment hearings non-stop, as if Schiff’s inquiry had a legitimacy it never quite managed to earn on the merits. But instead of viewership increasing over time, it decreased.

[…]While the argument for impeachment was difficult to understand, Democrats’ own witnesses kept making Trump’s case against “the swamp” for him. There is no question that these bureaucrats, sometimes using third-hand information, were deeply opposed to Trump, his policies, and his behavior. Their problem was that they were not elected president. In fact, they weren’t elected anything. Some of them were political appointees — a testament to the awful job Trump has done at finding personnel who can accomplish his policy goals — and other times they were career bureaucrats.

[…]In part because Schiff and his team seemed confused about what case they were prosecuting, questions to witnesses were almost always leading, but never focused on a particular or consistent goal. Conversely, Republicans kept focused during their questions, always pointing out that the witnesses didn’t actually have first-hand information, or were basing their views on their own conjecture, a shaky basis for impeachment.

In general, Republican members did a surprisingly good job on cross examining witnesses. The Democrats kept rolling out new star witnesses, and some, such as Gordon Sondland and Lt. Col. Alex Vindman had opening statements that were quite strong for Democrats. Their opening statements withered under strong GOP questioning.

I was thinking about what the Republicans should do next, and wondering whether they should vote to advance the impeachment investigation to the Senate. Democrats were able to make the hearings look bad for Trump at the beginning, before Republicans could question the Democrat witnesses.

Initially, Schiff insisted that this whistleblower testify. Schiff repeatedly demanded that testimony. That all changed the precise moment that it was revealed the whistleblower had communicated with Schiff’s staff, something both the whistleblower and Schiff had been dishonest about.

Republicans hammered Schiff about his self-serving about face, even if the media wanted to pretend it wasn’t a big deal. They also reminded him that they weren’t being allowed to call their own witnesses, ask questions, use transcripts of previous depositions, and other things that a fair proceeding would allow. It worked to their benefit.

But imagine if the Republicans were the ones calling witnesses, and they were given more time to ask questions of the leaker, the whistleblower, Adam Schiff, etc. to really find out who is behind all of this. It might be worth it to get all of this settled properly.