In the latest installment of All the President’s Weasels, the political burp known as Gordon Sondland tried to cast himself as more of grandiloquent belch.

Sondland points the finger at Trump – and damns others for good measure Read more

Based on his earlier cameo appearances, you might have thought that Trump’s ambassador to the European Union was a shallow, vainglorious sycophant who was desperately solicitous to cozy up to his shallow, vainglorious boss.

In that regard, you would be correct. However, Gordon would now like to correct your correctness, much as he would very much like to refresh the record about his previous sworn testimony, in line with his refreshed memory, which was only partially correct.

First of all, Gordon wants you to know that he was raised by Holocaust survivors to be – in his own words – “humble, hard-working and patriotic”.

This humble, hard-working public servant is hard to square with the Gordon best known as a political donor in search of a plum ambassador posting, who chased every other Republican candidate’s favor before settling on the ultimate winner of this reality TV presidency.

It’s also hard to square with the Gordon who testified to the House intelligence committee for the rest of the day on Wednesday.

You see, Gordon is not one of the little people who remembers the pesky details of an impeachable enterprise like attempting to corrupt a foreign leader with American military aid. “I am not a note-taker, nor am I a memo writer. Never have been,” he said with a smug smile as wide as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

“My job requires speaking with heads of state and senior government officials every day. Talking with foreign leaders might be memorable to some people. But this is my job. I do it all the time.”

It is plainly unreasonable for this humble friend of world leaders to be expected to keep up with all the facts. Especially when the White House and the state department refused to give him access to his own emails, which our poor hobnobbing ambassador called “less than fair”.

Fairness is such a quaint concept when you’re working for the mob and some of them are getting busted by the Feds.

But it could help explain his previous testimony and texts, including his earlier assertions that there was no quid pro quo tying Ukraine’s desperate need for US military aid to Trump’s desperate need for Ukraine to announce a sham investigation into the Biden family.

“In the absence of these materials, my memory has not been perfect,” Gordon lamented. That was shortly before he perfectly remembered that the entire family of Trump cronies were perfectly looped into the loopy plan that national security advisor John Bolton memorably called the “drug deal” that Gordon was cooking up.

That barfing sound you can hear is the noise of a thousand Republican talking points being ejected from Fox News anchors

At this point of the weasel’s sworn falsehoods, it seems churlish to return to the Latin liturgy that is supposed to protect a saintly president from an entire coven of Democratic devils. But what the hell: Gordon made us do it.

“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question,” said our simple ambassador. “Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’ As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.”

That barfing sound you can hear is the noise of a thousand Republican talking points being forcefully ejected from the stomachs of a small platoon of Fox News anchors. It’s OK, Steve Doocy of Fox News. We know you said this whole quid pro quo thing was “off-the-rails wrong” on Donald’s favorite breakfast show. But that was before you knew that Donald had actually done it.

Before anyone on Team Trump could say that Gordon made them do it too, our humble public servant held them all in a warm and heartfelt embrace. There were his emails and texts to secretary of state Mike Pompeo, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and half a dozen of their flunkies. It was especially charming to know that Pompeo’s assistant prints out his emails so he can respond to them.

Almost as charming as Gordon’s now infamous phone call to Trump from a Kyiv restaurant when he told his boss that the Ukraine president loved his ass.

“It sounds like something I would say,” said the humble ambassador, as he chortled out loud. “That is how President Trump and I communicated. A lot of four-letter words. In this case, three letters.”

Impeachment hearings: Sondland says quid pro quo was pushed by Giuliani and ordered by Trump - live updates Read more

Gordon looked a lot more pleased with himself than the stony-faced man who was interrogating him: Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman, who built his prosecutorial career sending mobsters and conmen to jail.

The chortling soon ended when Goldman turned to the most definitive description of the Ukraine shakedown/drug deal: the White House partial transcript of the call between the man masquerading as the US president and the man newly elected as the Ukraine president.

That’s the one where the Ukraine president asked for Javelin missiles, but the American president asked him “to do us a favor” first. That favor involved talking to Rudy Giuliani about a whole bunch of conspiracy theories about the 2016 election, the Democratic National Committee email server and Robert Mueller, and – oh yes – the Biden family.

In Gordon’s humble version of history, he was one of the self-styled “three amigos” including the formerly respectable national security official Kurt Volker and the never-respectable energy secretary Rick Perry. These three good amigos, these three musketeers for America, were joined by a dark character who corrupted the whole undertaking.

“We weren’t happy with the president’s directive to talk with Rudy,” Gordon said. “We did not want to involve Mr Giuliani. I believed then, as I do now, that the men and women of the state department, not the president’s personal lawyer, should take responsibility for Ukraine matters.”

That would be all the men and women of the state department, except for the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was somehow cut out of every one of our Gordon’s many emails and messages about his work in her country. Which is not yet a member of the European Union, where he was supposed to park his rear end.

It may be a matter of hours before we learn that Rudy was unknown to Donald and went rogue with this whole military aid thing.

In actual fact, the three amigos were not corrupted by Rudy or even Donald. This Faustian pact was the product of their own vanity: the notion that they could do some good, wield some power, by facilitating the fraud and corruption spraying out of the Oval Office.

Donald Trump is right: this is a sham impeachment process.

Not because he wrote it all down in LARGE ALL CAPS on notes that he read to the press at the White House on Wednesday. But because he said it all out loud to the Ukraine president back in July. All the witnesses and testimony, all the depositions and cross-examination, are designed to shoot down the latest nonsensical excuse for that call. But the phone call, and the corruption it describes, still stands.

The late John McCain used to say there was no higher calling than to serve a cause greater than self. He surely had in mind people like Lt Col Alexander Vindman, the decorated war hero who came to the country as a child immigrant, and served in this sleazy White House with a greater sense of American values than any of its political appointees.

But for Gordon and Donald, McCain was so obviously wrong about national service. There is, in fact, an even higher calling in government: serving themselves as greatly as possible. For Donald, that has led directly to this moment of his own impeachment. For Gordon, it has led to this pathetic moment of his own public humbling.