Yeah, me neither, but you can't always interpret tone from written communications. Maybe everyone just misread you. It's all good-- I get your meaning.
You (and Republican voters in general) are certainly entitled to feel the way you do-- I can respect why you might, and felt similarly defensive about the unrelenting refusal by Republican lawmakers to work with Obama during his tenure. Even today, my knee-jerk reaction to most of the stuff still said about him by Republicans is that much of the venom comes from people who are uneducated, racist, etc. It's not fair for me to immediately cast presumably good people into those sorts of categories, and I like to think I ultimately bridle that instinct well, but that's how little sense their comments make to me on the surface. Most of my family falls into that camp, actually. It illustrates the giant divides between how people think in this country, and I believe the bitterness comes mainly from the inability of people to put their initial feelings/thoughts aside in the spirit of figuring sh** out for the betterment of everyone. It's really too bad.
This angle you've described-- it's interesting to think about, isn't it? I don't know, honestly, if charges like those brought against Trump weren't brought against Obama, for example, simply because Republicans didn't believe his alleged misconduct merited impeachment. You could be right. It also seems possible to me they considered some of his actions impeachable, but just lacked the courage/audacity/whatever to push the charges forward the way the Democrats have with Trump. The political environment may have been such they didn't feel encouraged by the idea of doing it-- that they perhaps stood to lose too much by doing so. I'm really stretching into hypotheticals here, because I just don't know. All I can say for certain is I am unconvinced that the charges against Trump are somehow baseless, or fall short of what the Founders might have considered impeachable. It is a little too convenient for me to swallow that there were identical concerns about Obama, and Republicans didn't take action on those equal charges because they weren't worthy of impeachment. That just feels like a somewhat thinly-veiled attempt to dismiss this whole thing with a sound bite. Despite my personal distaste for Trump, though, I am earnestly trying to remain objective, learn more from both the House Managers and Trump's defense team, and remain open so that my reasons are NOT solely partisan. I would really like to hear from witnesses and see actual evidence allowed in these hearings (I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation why none of this has been allowed), and would happily be convinced otherwise by it.
