February 4, 2020--Impeachment Post Mortem

As our president once so eloquently put it, "Who gives a shit about Ukraine?"

Other countries were on his shit list, but it turned out that Ukraine would wind up in the headlines and at the center of his impeachment, which will be resolved tomorrow when the Senate votes to find him not guilty of having committed high crimes and misdemeanors. 

He will have the boys over for a beer and then jump onboard Air Force One and head south and west on his exoneration tour.

It is likely to be nauseating so I recommend pulling the plug on your TV to block out MSNBC and CNN for at least a month. It will take more than that to recover.

While tuning out I suggest we force ourselves to do an impeachment forensic to ask how we got into this mess, especially how the Dems, sorry, screwed up and helped to bring it about. How we got snookered by Trump into impeaching him so he could take advantage of the foregone conclusion, knowing, as we should have, that the disposition would be that Trump would walk. 

Trump knew that, Mitch McConnell especially knew that, and even we knew that. 

It didn't take a neurosurgeon to add up how many votes the Democrats had (51) and that the Constitution stipulates two-thirds plus one senator (67) need to vote guilty to remove a president.

So what were we up to while seeking to find grounds to impeach and try Trump?

The usual--doing all we could to show how smart we are and how stupid the Republicans are. So by any rational measure we turned out to be clever and lost while the Republicans, not interested in rational measures, proved to be stupid and won. 

Great.

We knew that at most we'd get perhaps two Republicans to break ranks and that Mitch would get all but two from his caucus. (Though I suspect Susan Collins will vote with her colleagues to acquit Trump. Mitch in return will pay her off with a couple of more Zumwalt-class destroyers to be built at the Iron Works in Bath, Maine.)

Here's how Trump did it--

He knew Dems in the House had their eyes wide open, looking for something to grab onto, anything to launch the impeachment process. Trump knew that whatever they came up with for their Articles wouldn't matter. With Mitch fulminating and twisting arms, he'd easily defeat them in the Senate and remain in office. He was gambling that getting impeached, especially for something exotic like hanky-panky in Ukraine, would sound like a witch hunt to his fervent base and assure he would be exonerated and his favorability poll numbers, like Clinton's, would rise.

Nancy Pelosi knew Trump was setting a trap and for months resisted allowing her committee chairmen and women to begin an inquiry.

Her strategy was working until Trump dangled Ukraine in front of them.

Here's how that worked--

Trump learned that there was a whistle-blower report that outlined how Trump and his senior staff were attempting to blackmail the new president of Ukraine, holding up the delivery of already approved military equipment until President Zelensky announced that he was going to begin an investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden's allegedly corrupt dealings in Ukraine.

To ensnare the Democrats, who were eager to initiate their own investigation--this one into Trump--he declassified notes of a phone call with Zelensky in which he asked the Ukrainian president to do "us a favor, though" by looking into what the Bidens were up to.

In other words he got the impeachment process going by revealing the smoking gun at the outset. That was brilliant. He turned Watergate on its head by in effect confessing up front. This released him from needing to concentrate on every aspect of the prosecution's case and thus he was free to lash out unfettered.

The Democrats took that bait and Nancy Pelosi had no recourse but to allow the inquiry. 

The Democratic House managers were well prepared and presented an open-and-shut case. The only problem was that more than half the "jurors," all the Republicans in the House, had their minds already made up and his attacks on the process were unrelenting. (For the sake of fairness, virtually all the Democrats also had their minds made up before the inquiry began.)

So it became a reality show. Something about which Trump knows more than a little.

Again, none is this is arcane or difficult to figure out. The difference is that the Dems got lost in the details of the narrative and the evidence that they unearthed and wove into their Articles of Impeachment. The Republicans ignored the evidence and didn't challenge Trump's lawyers' lies. The GOP kept their eyes on the prize--again, winning. Feeling good about our virtue, many progressives assumed our familiar role as losers in these kinds of ugly confrontations.

As disturbing as it is, it is essential to do the forensics because if we are to rescue our country from Trump and his crowd, we need to know how this happened and how we became our own worst enemies. An all too familiar phenomenon.