Jim Jordans remarks in the first day of impeachment hearings included a spiel about how this is a sad day for our country because the whistleblower is legally protected from having to divulge his identity.
After Republican Jim Jordan's monologue about how sad it is that whistleblower protections exist, Democrat Peter Welch got the whole room to laugh. CF

This afternoon, on the first day of the impeachment hearings, Trump sycophant Jim Jordan gave an impassioned little monologue for an audience of one, the wig-wearing extortionist in the White House.

It's just so unfair, Jordan said in so many words, that the whistleblower who started this all can't be outed and have his personal character ripped apart by the president. Waaaaaaaaaaah! The president will never get the chance to do that, and neither will we, Trump's henchmen in Congress. Not fair! Send a whambulance! Adam Schiff got to meet him, why not meeeeee...

That's a paraphrase. That's not an exact transcript. You want an exact transcript? OK, here it is—lovingly transcribed by me, with the generous assistance of the pause and rewind buttons on my remote control.

Here's the exact weepy speech Jordan delivered about how sad it is that the whistleblower's identity is a secret:

Only Chairman Schiff knows who the whistleblower is. We won't. We will never get the chance to see the whistleblower raise his right hand, swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth—we'll never get that chance. More importantly, the American people won't get that chance. This anonymous so-called whistleblower with no first-hand knowledge, who's biased against this president, who worked with Joe Biden, who is the reason we're all sitting here today—we'll never get a chance to question that individual. Democrats are trying to impeach the president based on all that? All that? Eleven and a half months before an election? We'll not get to check out his credibility, his motivations, his bias. I said this last week, but this is a sad day. This is a sad day for this country. You think about what the Democrats have put our nation through for the last three years. Started July 2016 when they spied on two American citizens associated with the presidential campaign. And all that unfolded with the Mueller investigation after that. And when that didn't work, here we are. Based on this [whistleblower]. The American people see through all this. They understand the facts support the president. They understand this process is unfair. And they see through the whole darn sham.

Keep in mind: It doesn't matter what the whistleblower said anymore. This whole thing got started because of the whistleblower, sure, but then the White House released a partial transcript of Trump's Ukraine call to try to discredit the whistleblower, but that blew up in their face because it didn't discredit the whistleblower—it proved the whistleblower was telling the truth! Since then, all sorts of other people have come forward with evidence that shows the whistleblower's complaint was accurate.

Anyway, after Jordan's ridiculous little monologue clearly crafted to flatter Trump (and the completely distorted Fox "News" universe), Congressman Peter Welch, of Vermont, was called on to speak.

Brilliantly, Welch used that line of Jordan's highlighted above—about the person who is the reason we're all sitting here today, the person who started it all—and used it against Jordan.

"I'd be glad to have the person who started it all come in and testify," Welch says in the video above. "President Trump is welcome to take a seat right there."

And the House Intelligence chamber breaks out into laughs as Welch points to the witness chair. They're laughing at Jordan and they're laughing at Trump. It's the only real laughter we've heard all day. And of course it's both funny and the complete opposite of funny.