Nancy Pelosi to left-wing radical Democrats: “I told you so.”
In their febrile zeal to drag President Trump through the mud of the Washington swamp, Democrats forgot an important aspect of impeaching a president: It might work better if there was an actual crime.
Don’t worry, said Adam Schiff, an experienced railroading prosecutor. We’ll call it an inquiry. We can do it in secret, leak what we want and keep what we want away from the public.
That didn’t work out so well, because you really can’t run a game when there’s another team out there. The Republicans fought back, and the show trial disguised as a hearing began with TV cameras recording everything.
Remember, you have to actually have a crime in order to impeach. The “quid pro quo” meme wasn’t working out—partly because it was in legalese Latin, but mostly because it was a bigger nothing burger than the Mueller report.
So, they switched to charges of bribery. That’s not playing well, even though it’s not in Latin. When we think of bribery, normal people know that there has to be a gift or inducement on one side and an act or favor in return.
So, let’s see. President Trump bribed the Ukrainians with a $1 billion weapons package in return for investigating his Democrat rival, Sleepy Joe Biden.
Wait. There’s a problem. The Ukrainians (1) weren’t aware of the threat to withdraw the loan, and (2) never actually investigated Hunter and Dad.
So, are we supposed to believe that our deal maker in chief got grifted here? (Not likely.)
In any event, after the adult warnings of Nancy Pelosi that impeaching a president is a big, serious deal, she gave in to the girlish tantrums on her left flank.
Her problem was that she assigned the heavy lifting to a partisan boob, who has steered the impeachment effort into a muddy ditch. First, he held the hearings in secret. So, the Republican representatives staged a hilarious basement hearing room invasion in protest to the profound embarrassment of anyone with an ounce of shame.
Well, okay, said Nancy. We’ll go ahead and make those hearings public so Americans can decide for themselves. In the meantime, Schiff and his band of shifty staffers had already presented witness testimony. They decided to parade their favorites in public. No mystery or surprises there, folks. The Republicans were ready.
The first two public sessions were a madcap mixture of specious hearsay and a laughable political rendition of the movie Chicago number “She Reached For the Gun” starring Adam Schiff and Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch.
The Democrats have promised to parade another eight State Department flunkies and Trump Haters in front of the cameras, but the best advice would be to cut their losses and deep six this dumb stunt.
Some pundits have recommended an exit strategy before this mess spills over into the 2020 presidential primaries. Senators Biden, Harris, Sanders, and former Indian pretender Warren don’t want to have to be present for a protracted Senate trial.
The strategy is simple: pass a censure resolution as a symbolic statement of how the House Democrats feel about the president. Such a resolution probably would not get a single Republican vote, and would likely elicit the onomatopoeic version of a raspberry sound tweeted by the bad Orange Man.
In any case, it would consign this whole ridiculous process to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
