American politics has become so unserious a business that it’s hard to know when to take it seriously anymore.

Because of the line of work I’m in, my inbox fills daily with screaming emails from hacks of both the left and right persuasion about that latest outrage of the other side. These screeds are so predictable they are hardly worth reading. They come with the tone of shock and awe, and the suggestion that some swing-district representative might just be the anti-Christ or at least a really bad guy. The senders generally want money.

The same nonsense plays out at a higher volume somehow on cable news and social media. Everything is URGENT, and the future of the republic is at stake.

The only sane response to this sort of thing is cynicism if you have to participate in it and completely tuning out if you don’t. I’ve recommended the latter to a lot of people who seem close to a nervous breakdown over a freshman congresswoman from New York they’ve never met or a Senate majority leader now midway through his fourth decade in office. "Do you garden," I ask.

The problem with all of this is that there are times when American politics is urgent and serious, and we need to pay attention. So much nonsense flows through our media these days it can be hard to know when those times are.

Let me proffer that this is such a time, and if you have wisely tuned out, it is time to tune back in.

Look, no one is more skeptical about impeachment than I am. I rolled my eyes through the persistent low-hum of impeachment talk about presidents George W. Bush (WAR CRIMINAL!) and Barack Obama (BIRTH CERTIFICATE!).

I even thought the whole Bill Clinton affair went well afield, though I’m more than willing to recognize that his own low character put him in the place he took us.

This business with President Donald Trump is a different matter, and one that we need to treat with the deepest seriousness.

Democracy is a fragile thing. It depends first on the acknowledgment that we all can’t win all of the time. It requires us to live together in political peace even when things don’t break our way.

To exist in this manner, we absolutely must accept that our internal political differences are just that — ours. And when the elections are over, we accept the results and we work together — sometimes in opposition, sometimes in unity — to govern a complex and plural nation.

The question about what the president did with Ukraine is one that we must answer. There is sufficient information, from the president’s own words, to deserve greater investigation.

To draw a foreign power into our elections, to attempt to use a foreign government to undermine a political rival is deeply un-American. It is undemocratic. It puts at risk our long experiment in governance in this country.

The terrible mistake we can make as citizens is to begin to believe all of the noise, to begin to believe what the screed emails and social media poison shout about the other side, to begin to believe our rivals here are worse than what is beyond our borders.

America remains singular as a nation leading the world in the expansion of freedom and self-rule. We remain the high example of the peaceful exchange of power, of the agreement that the majority will govern with the consideration of the minority, of the insistence that disagreement and dissent are part and parcel of representation.

What is critical now is to try to see through the deep and obscuring political fog into the truth of the matter. If the president did indeed attempt to use a foreign power to attack a domestic political rival, nothing could be more serious and we need to pay attention.

Rudolph Bush is deputy editorial page editor for The Dallas Morning News and director of journalism at the University of Dallas.

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