Summary: no one’s surprise, the carefully engineered impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump in the Senate ended in the acquittal that Mitch McConnell had intended all along. The “trial,” containing absolutely none of the structural accoutrements of a real trial, such as witnesses and documentary evidence, was a rigged sham, an obvious product of an obvious conspiracy. In the meantime, in Iowa, where, was 97% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg and Bernard Sanders, with barely a tenth of a percentage point separating them, appear to be in a statistical tie after the debacle of the Iowa Democratic caucuses, an obvious clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Something is clearly wrong in Washington City, and clearly wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party and is ridiculous, anti-democratic, caucus mechanism.
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Cathedral City – February 6, 2020. The impeachment saga of Donald Trump ended not with a bang, but with the predictable whimper that all of us had expected. The impeachment “trial,” a trial bereft of any of the normal, structural accoutrements of an authentic legal proceeding, produced exactly the result that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had intended it to produce. The House managers were right to characterize the whole proceedings as a sham, lacking even the most passing resemblance to anything like a fair trial at common law.
No doubt Donald Trump and his organized crime family will take an over-the-top, repellent victory lap when Trump addresses the nation at noon tomorrow. Trump can be expected to demand criminal prosecution of one, some, or all of the House managers, to say nothing of calling full-throatedly for the prosecution of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Of course, the Trump White House is already claiming that Trump was fully exonerated in this sham “trial.” Given the partisan makeup of the Senate, acquittal was not surprising. Still, if Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans had wished to run a proceeding that might have had some appearance of legitimacy, they would have been better advised to allow for witnesses and evidence. But they did not. Because they did not allow for witnesses and evidence, they wound up foisting on the American people a spectacle, a piece of theater, “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare put it in the Scottish play, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”
Democrats, who have a sorry reputation for being unwilling or unable to unwrap the gifts the Republicans keep presenting us, should pounce on the enormous gift the Republicans gave us with this ridiculous faux trial. Not only should the Democrats use this as a campaign issue against Republicans up and down every ticket, from president to local animal control officer, but Democrats should also make sure that every Republican lawyer in the Senate is the recipient of professional misconduct charges in their jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure for various disciplinary offenses including perjury, subordination, common Barratry, and obstruction of justice. Any ordinary lawyer engaged in the kind of trial-rigging that Mitch McConnell is guilty of having engaged in would merit disbarment. Mitch McConnell be no different; he should be disbarred.
Democrats cannot afford to let this matter lie. Democrats must make this a campaign issue. Mitch McConnell comes up for reelection this November, Democrats must use every instrumentality at their disposal to replace him with Amy McGrath. Moreover, Democrats need to stop worrying about being seen to descend to the Republicans level. We can’t be sucked in to the self-defeating counsels of “when they go low, we go high.”
Instead, we must be prepared to meet the Republicans in the basement with a switchblade. We must take instead the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of hours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. Democrats can no longer afford the luxury of not fighting to the death, of not playing for keeps, of not using every instrumentality at our command, every arrow in our quiver, every round in our chamber.
Of course, while Democrats are meeting “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in the basement with a switchblade, we also need to be purging the senior ranks of the Iowa Democratic Party and stripping Iowa of its so-called first in the nation caucuses. If the impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump was hamstrung from the beginning by obvious conspiracy on the part of the Republicans in the Senate, the Iowa caucuses were a self-inflicted Democratic clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Iowa needs to scrap its caucus system in favor of a true, closed primary. It is difficult to see how the Iowa caucuses can pass even the barest of constitutional muster, representing as they do an across-the-board repudiation of the constitutionally mandated principle of one person one vote enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186.
What’s even worse about the fiascos that were the Iowa caucuses this year was the twofold baleful influence of Bernard Sanders on the caucuses. The first malign effect of Bernard Sanders on the Iowa caucuses was to insist on the addition of new complications in the caucus mechanism in the interests of “transparency,” i.e., to make it easier for Sanders and his pugnacious, belligerent, redeless, college-age millennial followers to intimidate supporters of other candidates. The second baleful action of Bernard Sanders, who as this is being written, is virtually tied with former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, was to unleash his vicious followers on Mayor Buttigieg and Mayor Buttigieg’s supporters, disseminating all manner of disinformation and hateful agitprop.
Indeed, the boorish behavior of the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters has been predictable, ineluctable, and typical. As they did in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have manifested a rather Divine Right attitude which essentially postulates that any Sanders victory is a victory for the ages, divinely preordained, and an outward and visible manifestation of Sanders’s entitlement to the Democratic nomination.
In short, Sanders and his followers have constructed an even more disturbing personality cult than that which surrounds Donald Trump. After all, cults of personality tend to be phenomena of the political right, with the possible exceptions of Iosif Visssarionovich Stalin and Mao Zedong. What makes the Bernard Sanders cult of personality so objectionable is its implicit insistence that anyone who does not subscribe to the Sanders cult is a suffering from some kind of profound moral failing.
Thus, the Sandernista agitprop and information warfare against Pete Buttigieg. Indeed, despite the insistence of Bernard Sanders and his cultists, it is more than a little bit clear that Sanders’s attacks against Pete Buttigieg contain a certain tincture of dog whistle homophobia. What is even more objectionable, particularly to those of us who happen to be gay, is how many of the Sanders attacks on Mayor Pete come from apparently self-loathing self identified homosexuals. Indeed, when one sees the social media attacks, ostensibly coming from queerfolk, but couched in the most primitive terms imaginable, one might be excused for saying to these Stockholm syndrome sisters “turn in your gay card, forthwith.”
If Bernard Sanders winds up eking out some infinitesimally narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, it is probably too much to expect him to accept that victory with any kind of grace, let alone any kind of apology to Mayor Pete. Instead, we can expect the usual finger-wagging hoarse-voiced, condescending, pugnacious lecture from Sen. Sanders concerning the awfulness of his opponent and the awfulness of his opponent’s supporters.
For in truth, Bernard Sanders has never learned the first thing about good manners or being gracious no matter whether in defeat or and victory. Bernard Sanders is, unfortunately, a left-wing version of Donald Trump.
And I think it is safe to predict that if Bernard Sanders is successful in a hostile takeover bid of Democratic Party, Donald Trump will eat him for lunch.
#neverbernie.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. After having been zealously attacked for the last four-plus years by the Young Pioneers of the Sanders left, whose jaded jargon sounds like the entrance essays of aspirants for advancement to Komsomol, he is thoroughly tired of the absurdities and bullshit of the Sanders left.
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