Getting at the truth shouldn’t be this hard. Tom Friedman, The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, compares it to catching a Frisbee.

Say what?

Yep. In today’s column, Friedman asks: “Why would an innocent man, and a jury interested in the truth, not want all the evidence out and all the witnesses to testify? Wouldn’t you if you were innocent?”

Friedman recalls a 2012 speech by Andrew G. Haldane, an economist at the Bank of England, who argued for keeping one’s message simple. Why are dogs better than humans at catching a Frisbee, he asked. To catch a Frisbee, one must consider several physical and atmospheric factors, including wind speed and Frisbee rotation. Dogs have no problem mastering it, though, because they instantly grasp the obvious: Run at a speed so that the angle of gaze to the Frisbee remains roughly constant.

Simple.

Friedman argues that to remove Donald Trump from the presidency, “swing voters — the independents, suburban women and moderate Republicans who delivered the House to the Democrats in the 2018 midterms — need to understand just how much this president is ready to put himself above the law,” then vote to return their country to sanity.

The impeachment trial probably won’t accomplish this overnight, Friedman writes, “but it will strike some average, fair-minded Americans as just not right and give them another justification — for themselves, for their friends and for their families — to swing away from Trump in the presidential election.”

We understand that Trump, Republicans, Fox News and talk radio all will make a lot of noise with lies and distractions. Just cut through all of that, Friedman suggests, by repeating that one, simple question: Why would someone who is innocent work so hard to hide the evidence claimed by his accusers? Just keep asking that, again and again. No need to complicate it. Just catch the Frisbee.

Thank you, Tom.