Impeachable You
The Democrats in the House of Representatives are initiating an inquiry into impeaching President Trump. In practice, this means they are promising to plan to look into whether or not it would be worthwhile to move forward with the process of preparing actual articles of impeachment against Trump upon which they might eventually vote. This is Nancy Pelosi’s too-clever-by-half way of smoothing over the optics of division within her party by punting the ultimate decision on impeachment into next year, while pretending to be taking strong, unified action on the matter.
Pelosi will fool no one with this ruse, least of all the “Off-with-his-head!” faction within her party’s young blood. All she will accomplish is to ratchet the Democratic in-fighting to an even higher level of tension over the coming months, just as the party prepares to choose its presidential candidate for 2020.
In truth, I would imagine that Trump could be found legitimately impeachable if this were a more rational era of American history. But this is not a rational time. On the contrary, it is almost certainly the least rational era of American history. For evidence of this, consider that the faction within the U.S. House of Representatives pushing hardest for the impeachment of Donald Trump is comprised of full-out communists, i.e., people whose very presence within the most directly democratic portion of the legislative branch reveals the essential failure of America’s institutions, and the intellectual and moral weakness of her electorate.
I would also guess, however, that the Democrats have at least as good a chance of impeaching Donald Trump before Election Day as they have of nominating a candidate, from the current crop, who could defeat Trump in an election. This is all the more true in light of the fact that this impeachment inquiry is almost certainly going to kick up a lot of dirt about the son of the candidate who might have had the best chance of beating Trump in a head-to-head contest — that is to say, the candidate most likely to have mass popular appeal in this Trump-friendly era, i.e., a loose-lipped compulsive liar who has very little grasp of any of the issues his party pretends to care about, and therefore has the “crossover appeal” of looking like a fun, relatively harmless empty shell. This is not to say that either Trump or Biden really is harmless — Trump is a catastrophe, Biden might be at least as bad — but merely that in an era that has devolved into preferring the quagmire of pragmatic progressive populism over principled rule-of-law statesmanship, these two doddering blowhards would seem harmless to voters.
Instead, however, it seems increasingly likely that the global entertainment audience will be served up a boring repeat of 2016, with Hillary stand-in Elizabeth Warren — a cynical, crotchety harpy, albeit one who will probably collapse on camera less often than her predecessor — facing off against a reality TV demagogue who knows all the best words.
What’s on the other channels?
