Trial of the century

The trial of President Trump in the Senate on the impeachment articles preferred by the House is scheduled to begin this afternoon. Piercing the rhetorical fog, we observe that this is the Seinfeld impeachment. If the farce isn’t quite about nothing, it is the farce in which nothing happened.

Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler lead the House impeachment managers. Each in his own way gives us the impeachment case in expressive form. Send in the clowns.

Trump’s political opponents have sought impeachment roughly since the day after the 2016 election. Their efforts have come to fruition in the two articles of impeachment. The Democrats’ media adjunct has kept in ranks with impressive exactitude as it marched along with the Democrats. The rank dishonesty and maniacal partisanship underlying impeachment have made for a sorry spectacle.

The Russia hoax collapsed in the senile display of Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee on July 24. On July 25 President Trump had the congratulatory telephone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky that somehow became the subject of a complaint submitted by a fake “whistleblower.” The fake whistleblower has remained anonymous for some reason. We all know who he is, although the Democrats’ have protected his identity more zealously than our intelligence authorities protect top secret information.

For some mysterious reason we have yet to get a handle on this particular back story. The Democrats have classified it Sensitive Compartmented Information.

As the Russia hoax was a pretext for undermining Trump, the Ukraine thing is an obvious pretext for the continuation. Both episodes are shot through with such dishonesty and bad faith it is no coincidence (as the Communists used to say) that Adam Schiff has been out in front of each. The prayerful Pelosi logically tapped Schiff to conduct and direct impeachment theater in the House even though the Intelligence Committee had at best a highly questionable role to play in it.

The Federalist Papers cover the constitutional mechanism of impeachment in numbers 65 and 66. Their sobriety and prudence provide a telling contrast with the spectacle before us. The observation of Publius in Federalist 65 reads like an eternal verity: “it ought not to be forgotten that the demon of faction will, at certain seasons, extend his sceptre over all numerous bodies of men.”

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