Deeply Stupid

Christopher Bedford offers a blistering commentary on recent events in D.C.:

It’s been an ugly fall in Washington. Wet, dreary and deeply stupid. ... despite Wednesday’s long-expected [impeachment] vote and the media cheer group accompanying it, this is going terribly for the Democrats.

There’s a willful suspension of belief at work in the capital city. Self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution make excuses for sloppy spying on a major candidate for president. Men who compare themselves to those at Valley Forge shift seamlessly from allegations of urine-soaked escapades to collusion with the Kremlin, from the Kremlin to Ukraine, and finally from quid-quo-pro to bribery to obstruction, with stopovers on NFL anthem protests and insults to “The Squad.” The speaker quotes the deceased Elijah Cummings in wondering, “When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked, in 2019,” did we impeach Donald Trump?

Media commentators in Washington and New York read D.C. bedtime stories about a majority of Americans backing their efforts– a statistic you would have to spend nearly all your time in New York or D.C. to remotely believe. When polls don’t fit that worldview, they’re discarded. “I don’t believe that poll for one second,” CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin balked when CNN political director David Chalian showed declining enthusiasm for a impeachment in a network poll. “David, that poll is wrong. Just because I said so.”

After the Robert Mueller Russia fiasco, it takes willful stupidity to think that a solid majority of Americans ever wanted to see this impeachment go through over a country some of them might recognize from a Risk game.

And now, as if to add an exclamation point to the rank hypocrisy and deep partisanship that has been in evidence since the Democrats began their impeachment push, House leader, Nancy Pelosi, has decided that she'll delay passing article of impeachment to the Senate for a trial. Recall that the Dems kept telling us the the House proceedings must be rushed because the 2020 election was "in jeopardy" if Trump remained in office—as outrageous a claim as they could possible make, given their proven, fact-based actions to subvert the 2016 election. Now, everything must slow down until the Dems—who did everything possible to make their impeachment investigation partisan and deeply unfair—now have the chutzpa to demand fairness from the GOP. This is not going well for the Dems.

UPDATE:
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Roger Kimball presents us with an entirely different view of Nancy Pelosi's words on impeachment:

I am so glad that Nancy Pelosi has finally come to her senses and declared — on the floor of the House no less — that impeachment is ‘a hatchet job on the presidency’. Yes, that’s right. The House, said Pelosi, is ‘not judging the president with fairness, but impeaching him with a vengeance’. Nicely phrased! The whole circus, she said, violates ‘fundamental principles that Americans hold dear: privacy, fairness, checks and balances’. Go, Nancy! Not only that, the impeachment process is taking place only because one party is ‘paralyzed with hatred’ of the president, and until they ‘free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer’. I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, Pelosi was right again that the spectacle of impeachment is ‘about punishment searching for a crime that doesn’t exist’.

SCREECH!! The needle goes scudding across the vinyl disk: wrong impeachment!

That was Nancy Pelosi in 1998 when a Democrat was being impeached, not Pelosi in 2019 when a Republican is in the dock. As recently as last March, Pelosi insisted that impeachment had to be reserved for the most serious sorts of crimes and required bipartisan support, as was the case in history’s two previous impeachments, that of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and that of Bill Clinton in 1998.

Well, no. In neither case were the crimes serious enough nor was support bipartisan enough. Neither impeachment should have happened.

The GOP made a horrific mistake when they attempted to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998. Sure, Clinton was a dog, sure, he perjured himself, but NO, he did not deserve to be impeached for a bone-headed sexual dalliance. I thought so then, and I think so now.

It is interesting, however, how fluid politicians can be. Now that the Dems are performed an even more egregious "hatchet job on the presidency," Pelosi and her minions are cheering them on. In Pelosi's words, the house has ‘not judg[ed] the president with fairness, but impeach[ed] him with a vengeance.’

I suppose you could argue that what goes around, comes around, and that the GOP deserves this for its Clinton debacle two decades ago. That may be true, they may deserve it ... but the country doesn't.