Today’s impeachment commentary come from commenter Humble Talent, who gets a Comment of the Day for his efforts during last week’s Open Forum. I called it an “Impeachment Edition” because I decided “Jack Being Turned Inside-Out Like That Pig-Lizard Thing in “Galaxy Quest” seemed too obscure.
HT is Canadian, but his perspective is a great deal keener on this issue than most Americans, a large number of which, I read yesterday, actually think that the House vote meant that Trump isn’t President any more.
My fellow Americans are embarrassing the hell out of me in this matter.
Here’s Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day from “Open Form, Impeachment Edition’:
What I’m having a really hard time digesting is the kabuki elements of this process.
When I was around 8 years old, my grandmother took me to her Pentecostal church, which my father referred to as “The Holy Rollers”, although I didn’t understand the reference at the time. It was fun! There was singing, and dancing, and then like 10 minutes of boring talking, followed by a couple minutes of adults talking in gibberish speak… It was a million times more engaging to 8-year-old me than the three hundred hours of “And also with yous” that I was used to (probably more like two, but it felt like 300). That is, until one of the faithful was “touched” and fell to the floor shaking. This was terrifying to 8-year-old Jeff, who didn’t understand. I thought that everyone around him had been playing too, that they were having fun. This was my first introduction to an idea: That not all people think the same way.
That idea has grown and matured over time; even when faced with the exact same experiences and information, people can come away with vastly different takes on the situation. People’s risk appetites are different, people’s tolerances are different, people’s biases are different. And so it’s important when looking at how other people are acting to try to step outside your paradigm and to try to understand what the other side is thinking. For the most part, it works; Even if I deeply disagree with someone, I can generally at least see where they’re coming from.
In these proceedings, I’m at a loss. I don’t get it. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Despite putting on airs like they’re a couple steps away from an old folks’ home, Pelosi and Schumer aren’t stupid people. (Although, I think it’s telling that they put on those airs, I think that while Republicans respond positively to sharks like Jim Jones or Devin Nunes, Democrats value a harmless, doddering quality to their candidates.) And so, I don’t understand the game plan. Impeachment as a topic seems to have imploded spectacularly in their faces; The senate won’t, and was never going to, cooperate, so they aren’t actually going to remove him. I had an inkling that they thought perhaps that they’d discover something akin to the Nixon tapes that would blow the lid off this thing, but they had to know that was unlikely, so what was plan B? I’ve said before that I thought it was a multi-year, eight-figure, taxpayer funded PR campaign, but with the artificially stated Christmas deadline for impeachment, the Democrats weren’t able to even call all of *their* witnesses, they’ve hideously understated their case, when their own witnesses weren’t blowing their own narrative out of the water. And it shows: Public perception is turning against them and pundits at CNN are losing it.
Did they know, I wonder, that this would happen if they didn’t find their smoking gun, and so decided to sewer their investigation quickly so as to get the embarrassing loss out of the way a year before the election so as to give the electorate the most time to forget that it happened? Were they pressured by an ever more bubbled base to do something in regard to impeachment? Are they just so deranged by Trump that they didn’t see this coming? I really don’t know.
To be frank, I don’t even know if they believe their own narrative. I don’t think they do, but just like 8-year-old me standing in the midst of a shaking adult while other adults gibbered around her, I don’t have any conception on Earth what the hell these people are thinking. They’ve let the masks slip a couple of times, and they seem really happy about this, but I don’t understand why. It really undercuts the whole “sad and solemn” narrative they’re attempting, but more than that, I cannot fathom what outside a visceral hatred of Trump has them so happy. It’s not a political win, it’s not a legislative win, it’s not even a polling win, this seems *really* hollow, and now they have to live with all the fallout. Is this a win for them?
Ethics Alarms 
‘That is, until one of the faithful was “touched” and fell to the floor shaking.’
I’m operating on the belief they were touched on their heads. This is by far the very worst ‘bad loser’ I’ve ever seen. I thought Gore and Nixon were the previous winners, but they have been lapped.
(past 3, nyah!)
Lovely lucid thinking, HT. Thank you. (I trust your end question was rhetorical.)
Happy Holidays!
Not entirely. I’ve never seen a political party shoot itself in the foot without some kind of payoff before, so while it seems like a gigantic SNAFU, I wonder if there’s something more to it. I mean, look at this latest development on impeachment; Pelosi is refusing to hand the verdict over to the senate until the senate agrees to do the job that they refused to do and call all their witnesses. Cocaine Mitch isn’t going to do that, so is Pelosi going to sit on it until the election? How is THAT going to spin?
But let’s say she does. One of the themes of the 2016 election was with the recent death of Antonin Scalia, whoever won the presidency was going to appoint the SCOTUS seat, and conservatives were (rightly) concerned after appointments like Kagan and Sotomayor, that might flip the court completely to a partisan progressive law factory. If the house holds impeachment until AFTER the election, a talking point will be “If Trump gets re-elected, if we can at least flip the Senate, we can still impeach the motherfucker.”
So, possibilities:
1) Pelosi is off her meds and I’ve given her way too much credit.
2) Pelosi expected these hearings to go very differently, and she’s in damage control mode.
3)These hearings basically went as planned, but her base forced her into them, and she’s trying to polish a turd.
4)These hearings went as planned, and Pelosi is playing an amazingly long game, with an uncertain future,
If the 116th Congress doesn’t act on the impeachment charges, do they die with the beginning of the 117th Congress?
As a person who was raised in a Pentecostal church, I can appreciate your wonder and confusion at what you saw. Your options are not an official poll, but I’m going with #3. I think, in addition, she is trying to play a long game, but it’s “Nowhere Road” as far as conviction and removal are concerned. So I think it’s more about doing what she can to manipulate the 2020 election.
Anyways, kudos on the COTD…it was well-deserved.