Not all kamikaze attacks succeed.

Kudos to Mitch McConnell for a good job of Senate leadership. Note that he precisely and economically corralled just the 51-49 vote needed to end the nonsense not as a tie or requiring Chief Justice Roberts to vote. Mitt Romney was permitted to thumb his nose at Trump to avenge previous Trump insults, and Susan Collins also got to vote wrong in order to propitiate all those members of her Down East constituency who threaten to burn her farm and strew her fields with salt if she should fail to vote like a democrat in crunch situations.

John Bolton is a Yale classmate of mine, with whom I used to be mildly acquainted. I tend to suspect that what happened was: some liberal hack at the NY Slimes was reading through the advance copy of Bolton’s book and pounced with avidity on some crumb that appeared to support democrat fantasies of Trump pressuring Ukraine President Zelensky. I run into liberals leaping wildly to self-gratifying conclusions and misreading texts all the time.

I think it would have served them right, if McConnell had agreed to subpoena old John Bolton for them, because I suspect JB detests those democrats about as much as I do, and my own theory is that Bolton would, however he may feel about Donald Trump, take great pleasure in delivering testimony completely adverse to everything the democrats wanted. There’d be Adam Schiff and Jerome Nadler with egg all over their faces.

Fun as that particular denoument might have been, I will concede that Mitch McConnell did the country a favor by moving more quickly to bring all this disgraceful nonsense to a quicker conclusion.

Make no mistake. This episode represents an unseemly, utterly irresponsible, completely reprehensible piece of pure political theater. The charges brought against Donald Trump were nothing but subjective nonsense. There was never the slightest iota of possibility that this impeachment would succeed in removing Trump from office. There was never going to be a two-thirds vote to remove this president in a Republican-majority Senate with a good economy and an absence of strong public support.

The whole thing was nothing but an exercise in fantasy and spite, undertaken without decent regard for due process, or the precedent they were setting, or the injury to the Constitution, simply to feed raw meat to their deranged and radical left-wing base. The democrats even proceeded in this utterly unethical and destructive course despite the massive and disastrous self-harm it inevitably entailed.

The democrat party was already in the unhappy position of having to try to defeat a successful, popular incumbent without any strong viable candidate. The current democrat field is a professional political operative’s nightmare: superannuated, crazy radical, personally repulsive, and/or amateurish and preposterously under-qualified. Why not distract the public from the presidential campaign with an impeachment circus to focus on instead? That’s bound to help. Especially when the impeachment fails, the whole thing blows up in the democrat House majority’s faces, and the public is irritated and made angry.

A famous passage from Sophocles’ Antigone is commonly rendered in English as: Those whom God would destroy, He first makes mad.

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HT: Vanderleun.

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