The Impeachment Farce

On this unholy day we feel compelled to offer a few choice words about the impeachment farce, the one that has moved from the House of Representatives to the United States Senate.

For some number of days Senate action will fill our television screens and obsess our media commentators. I am thus channeling a few remarks, if only to allow readers to offer their own opinions.

Who better to capture the essence of the farce than Roger Simon, screenwriter turned political analyst. Noting that Marx had said that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce, Simon captures the perfectly farcical nature of Friday’s House procession. You remember it, the one where, after watching Nancy Peloso sign the impeachment articles with a set of pens possessing her autograph, a gang of self-important mediocrities marched the papers over to the Senate.

Simon aptly describes the scene: 

But the situation is far too grave and ugly for laughter, even though the specter of Pelosi, et. al., “solemnly” marching the articles of impeachment from the House to the Senate as if they were the Magna Carta wrapped in the Shroud of Turin was straight out of Monty Python. And the construction of the articles themselves is reminiscent of the contract scene in “A Night at the Opera,” except that scene had a happy ending when Groucho and Chico gleefully ripped the idiotic document to shreds.

Correct. It was a scene straight out of Monty Python. Or perhaps the Marx Brothers… though that might give it too much credit. It was so essentially pathetic that the appropriate response should have been derisive laughter.

Simon declares that the scene shows America in the throes of a nervous breakdown. You know, the same left that is all atwitter over white supremacy, and that rails at President Trump for not saying exactly the right thing after Charlottesville, stood in stone faced silence when their favorite president, their Messiah, refused, for eight years ever to mention the threat of radical Islamist terrorism. 

Ask yourself which is the bigger threat in the world today: white supremacists or radical Islamists?

But, Simon continues, today’s left is not driven by ideas or even ideology. They do not really believe in anything, but are attempting to put together a winning coalition of grievance groups. After all, if you tally up all those who are not straight white males, you will find yourself with a large majority of the country. And thus with a coalition that cannot lose.

It would be nice if he left cared about minorities or even about women, but, truth be told, when it shrieks about racism and sexism and homophobia, it is doing nothing other than enticing members of certain aggrieved groups to go to the polls and vote Democatic. Unprincipled political hacks… but you already knew that.

In Simon’s words:

America is having a nervous breakdown—a serious, perhaps fatal one to its future. And It’s caused by the left.

Or what purports to be the left because, other than Bernie Sanders and his jejune followers, most of these people aren’t real leftists who, at least, believe in something, as wrong-headed as it is.

Many are rich people who long ago abandoned the working class—those are Trump’s people—in favor of fostering a sense of deprivation among grievance groups who have little (almost nothing historically) to be upset about.

In fact, life has rarely, if ever, been better for every one of these groups. Even the latest of these constituencies—LGBTQ—is catered to virtually everywhere.

Why do they lust after power? Simple. They are so completely full of themselves that they believe that they, and not the American people, not even American institutions, should be running the nation... and perhaps even the world. The grievance mongering is designed to usher in a new era where philosopher kings will be in charge. We saw it in President Trump's 2017 meeting with his foreign policy and military commanders. They treated him with contempt, as though he were a rube. They talked down to him and imagined that once he had understood their very own philosophically sophisticated take on world affairs, he would abandon his platform.

Need we mention, the hypocrites who are leading the march against Trump and who want to take over the government, are doing it in the name of democracy. What could be a greater farce?

The ultimate problem, Simon says, is not what Trump does or does not do. It’s all about who Trump is. In truth, the same applied to his widely revered predecessor, a man who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for being who he was, not for anything he did.

Nevertheless, it seems clear this is about the very existence of Trump, but hardly at all about what he does, which is fungible. The attacks on the substance are pro forma, as in the questioning of the recent assassination of the villainous Soleimani that, if it had been done by Obama, would have been applauded.

Obama would have been applauded and lauded and praised to the firmaments. Because, by the rules of identity politics, whatever Obama did was good. Single handedly he abolished standards of objective judgment and evaluation. Good and bad merely referred to one's membership in an oppressor group or in an oppressed group.

By extension, whatever Trump does is bad. It’s as easy as that. And it suits a political party that does not know how to think and whose constituents increasingly have lost the ability to exercise independent rational judgment.

The other side of this argument is also simple. If Trump succeeds where Obama failed, he makes Obama look bad. He shames the former president. And, I promise you, the new American left, choking on its idolatry, will never allow that. If leftists started doubting Obama their whole precious belief system would crash and burn. And we cannot have that.