Impeachment theatrics defy logic
Moose, huge lumbering creatures with the bulk of mid- sized elephants, can prance and scamper though thick woods and alder- matted terrain as if they were fields of willows and dandelions. God designs the creature for the task, I suppose.
But I wonder if the Creator gave thought to the birth of any creature who could, even at a mild pace, wander through the contradictious, tangled and weedchoked path to the Democratic leadership’s grand impeachment theatrics of this week? The denouement of this grand assault on the American polity (which is how I view it) is strange on the way to being full on crazy. If there are threads of logic to the entire threeyear carnival, keener eyes than mine must find them; and if anyone, anywhere can make sense of Nancy Pelosi’s final and ultimate manoeuvre, reach the Nobel Prize Committee — have them melt all their medals, for all their awards, and fashion one huge medallion, and give it to that person.
First, I will repeat the assertion I made earlier this week. You cannot move from an accusation that the president of the United States sought and obtained the co-operation of the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin as the predicate of your attempt to remove him from office, carry that for three years as an absolute ground for getting rid of him, and then turn on a dime and downshift to vague and trivial charges of abuse of power and obstruction of a Democratic Congress. And do so without some full and honest account of why you abandoned allegations of Russian collusion — a treasonous and unprecedented perfidy — so abruptly, as if the two and a half years of obstruction and investigation, once it fell utterly apart, simply didn’t matter anymore.
It reminds me of the Judge Kavanaugh circus. There were accusations of “train rape,” literally charges that the young Brett Kavanaugh supervised and participated in gang rapes of young women. Next to being a serial killer, could any charge be more grave? The accusations came by way of malicious hustler/ lawyer Michael Avenatti ( currently himself facing charges of fraud and theft). When the vicious absurdity was exposed and dismissed, the press and the politicians almost on the very next day walked away from it as if it never, ever happened. You accuse a nominee to the Supreme Court of your country of being a gang rapist and “snap” within 24 hours it disappears from public comment and official memory.
For three years, three years of talking points, endless TV shows and panels, a blizzard of investigations, newspaper articles and editorials, there was nothing else to say about Donald Trump — from those seeking his impeachment — other than that he was Benedict Arnold redux, a tool of Vladimir Putin, the Manchurian candidate in real life. And then Robert Mueller, the big dog of all the investigations, reports — nah, nothing here. No collusion, no one in the Trump campaign, not Trump — zilch.
The sun rises on a new day and suddenly it’s bribery, or Ukraine, or a telephone call. The impeachment train carries on. Everyone who wanted him gone, who salivated at the very thought, was wrong, wrong on the massive allegation that a U. S. president was under the thumb of a Russian autocrat.
No mind. We have other stuff. Nothing quite so juicy as a quisling in the White House mind you. How so serious a matter as impeachment could jump from a three-year narrative of darkest intrigue to a whole new framing in mere days remains unexplained. It is a dark tangle.
And now this week, when Madam Pelosi and her comrades stagger into the actual impeachment vote — with no Russia, no Ukraine — and having a majority in the House finally get their long- wished for, “historic” articles of impeachment passed, what happens? The eyes of the world are upon her. She carries the vote. Stage one of impeachment has been completed. Well, Speaker Pelosi at the very summit of her triumph then inexplicably, staggeringly, incredibly announces she is not going to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate!
The latter part of this process was all done in hurry and haste because to delay impeachment, to leave Trump in office, was a threat to “national security;” it was a nation- saving emergency to proceed with all possible efficiency. The country was facing “existential” concerns. She wins Impeachmas. And then, bizarrely, without missing a beat, she announces she’s not going to send them to the Senate just now. She’s going to stall the proceedings. There is the Christmas break. Perhaps in January — perhaps, as she responded to one question on Thursday — perhaps not at all. She obstructs the procedures, laid out in the revered Constitution, for this highest of actions, and effectively nullifies all the assertions of urgency and national peril that underwrote the whole impeachment drive. What is this?
Has anyone checked Mount Rushmore lately? Are those stone guardian faces of heroic presidents past turned inward in shame? Are their hands covering their eyes in disgust? Check out the Memorial? Is Lincoln still sitting, Moses-like, in his great marble chair, or has be left the building in hopelessness and disdain over how the great offices of government have become so tawdry?
THE SUN RISES ON A NEW DAY AND SUDDENLY IT’S BRIBERY, OR UKRAINE, OR A TELEPHONE CALL.