Impeachment: This and That

Former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas made a lot of news last week implicating Trump, Rudolph Giuliani himself, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, possibly someone else named Mike P., William Barr and Devin Nunes in efforts to get dirt on the Bidens from the Ukrainians by all being heavily involved and pretending to be concerned about corruption in Ukraine, but it's hardly going to matter one iota when the impeachment trial begins tomorrow.  Republicans afraid of reprisals from Trump - who, I must add, could still win the 2020 election in November - will refuse to vote for removal, and the Democrats can't even hope for a simple majority (two-thirds majority is needed for removal) that will at least make him look bad.  And Parnas, because he has been indicted for conspiring to violate bans on donations foreign nationals, will be dismissed as a dubious witness given the trouble he's been in. So far, the only people who look to come out of the losing end of all this are the Democratic senators not named Bernard by their mothers who are campaigning for their party's presidential nomination. And no one of these senators will be a greater loser than Michael Bennet.

Bennet has consistently been the most thoughtful and the least hysterical Democrat running for President in this election cycle.  No theatrics, no identity politics, no flashy slogans that say everything and promise nothing . . . all of which, of course, is detrimental enough to anyone running for President of the United States, but now Bennet has an additional burden.  The impeachment trial comes right at the moment the Colorado senator was beginning to gain traction in New Hampshire, so the trial will, more than anyone else . . . put Bennet in traction.

As a senator from Colorado, a left-of-center pragmatist, a politician with chiseled features, and an accomplished record in local urban politics (he's the former school superintendent of Denver), Bennet is sort of a hybrid of Gary Hart (who once held the Senate seat Bennet now holds) and Hart's protégé Martin O'Malley with the latter's inability to win votes.  But Bennet has one thing O'Malley never achieved in his presidential bid - respect from the press.  He's been given the sort of free media O'Malley never got, and he's made the most of it, expressing the reasons for his candidacy and explaining his policy proposals in clear, concise, mannered terms.  And the media love him for it, as his frequent appearances make obvious.  But to many voters, of course, he's just a boring white guy with a forgettable name - and someone even poked fun at him for spelling his surname with only one "t."  He already had a hard enough task at getting the Democratic presidential nomination without this trial intervening.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders seems to be benefiting from the trial's effect of keeping everything before Iowa and New Hampshire frozen in place, allowing him to coast on his lead in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly win the Democratic nomination, which could lead the Democrats to their fatal doom.  Joe Biden can benefit by having the campaign trail all to himself for the next couple of weeks, but if he's called as a witness in the impeachment trial, that could cause a change of plans.  But then, if Biden and his son are both called as witnesses, all they have to do is comport themselves in the stand and demonstrate their irrelevance to the case at hand . . . by simply answering the questions they're asked and make the Republicans look awfully silly by having called them in the first place, whether John Bolton embarrasses the Republicans or not.

I could make a guess as to how all of this turns out, but, as someone who was mocked for advocating in 2016 for a presidential candidate no one cared about, I just don't give a twit . . ..