Here are my observations and opinions on my select news of the day.

PELOSI’S SHOW TRIAL IS OVER, but the Speaker, exhibiting the characteristics of an old-fashioned school marm after announcing the vote on the House floor was taken Wednesday night, tried to hide a smirk.  With her lips pursed and her eyes wide open while jabbing the air with the vote count card, she quickly shushed her members from cheering. You see, Democrats were warned to avoid the bad optics of celebrating the president’s impeachment.

“The Speaker, clad in black for dramatic effect, had to shush her members not once, but twice, as some apparently refused to comply with her order to remain very, very solemn, leading to jeers in the chamber,” noted Paula Bolvard in PJ Media.

Regular readers of this site, you informed citizens of the right, will recall that it was in March that Speaker Pelosi told the Washington Post, “I’m going to give you some news right now, because I haven’t said this to any press person before.  But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country.”

However, the Speaker let the cat out of the bag last week during an appearance at Politico’s “Women Rule Summit,” when she was criticized for rushing the impeachment effort.  In her response, which I believe she wishes she hadn’t said,  Pelosi said, “Speed? It’s been going on for 22 months, two and a half years, actually.”  Oops.

NADLER A TWO-FACE, TOO – I’m sure that when Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler spoke quite eloquently in opposition to impeachment in 1988 during the Bill Clinton era, not in his wildest dreams did he think those words would be used against him.

Yet, with the election of Donald Trump, his long-time New York nemesis, Nadler pressed for the opportunity to drag the president through the mud of an impeachment inquiry as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Here are excerpts from Nadler’s 1988 statement:

“The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters as expressed in a national election.  We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our very system of government or our constitutional liberties against a dire threat.  And we must not do so without an overwhelming consensus of the American people and of their representatives in Congress of the absolute necessity.

“Their must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment substantially supported by one or more major political parties and largely opposed by the other.  Such an impeachment would lack legitimacy, would produce divisiveness and bitterness in our politics for years to come.”

NOTE TO PELOSI AND NADLER – You wanted voters to take you seriously during your earlier positions on impeachment, yet you chose to proceed, failing to recognize that not a single Republican voted to proceed with the impeachment nor the articles of impeachment.

In a late impeachment poll by Zogby Analytics released before the House vote, 67 percent of voters said they “believe the Democrats are more interested in impeaching the president as opposed to passing legislation that will help Americans.”  In a shocking sidebar, Zogby noted that 53 percent of Democrats agreed.

A show trial is intended to influence or satisfy public opinion, not assign justice. Kramerontheright believes the Speaker and her minions have failed miserably to do so.

“They lugubriously insist they’re dragging the nation through all this not angrily or vengefully but out of a profound sense of duty.  Do even their supporters believe that?  No amount of flummery can conceal their unchanging purpose of sticking it to the Orange Man.” – Hugh Gurdan, editor-in-chief, Washington Examiner

MCCONNELL STRIKES BACK – Some of you may have recognized that I have not always been a fan of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, believing that he did not always support President Trump the way I thought he should, often allowing Chuck Schumer to get the best of him.  However, he came through in spades in his Thursday morning remarks on the House impeachment vote.

I won’t review his excellent 30-minute speech covering the Pelosi-directed House proceeding, but there were a few lines about the president near his conclusion that are so similar to my views that I have shared with you, that I am excerpting it here for you:

“It is long past time for Washington D.C. to get a little perspective.

“President Trump is not the first president with a populist streak … not the first to make entrenched elites uncomfortable.  He’s certainly not the first president to speak bluntly … to mistrust the administrative state … or to rankle unelected bureaucrats.

“And Heaven knows he is not our first president to assert the constitutional privileges of his office rather than roll over when Congress demands unlimited sensitive information.

“None of these things is unprecedented.

My confidence is high that McConnell will do the right thing if the articles are sent over from the House.

HAVE YOU HEARD that while the focus has been impeachment proceedings, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expedited the nominations of 11 more federal judges?

MEANWHILE WEDNESDAY NIGHT, President Trump was met by an excited crowd during a two-hour rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, a battleground state.  “It doesn’t feel like I have been impeached,” he said as the crowd roared with approval of four more years.

“Despite the Democrat/media never-Trump vapors of the historic vote (in Washington), it was being met mostly with a shrug of the shoulders by a nation that has heard Democrats demand impeachment since before Trump took office, and every day since then,” reported William A. Jacbobson in the blog Legal Insurrection.

Thousands of voters waited in 17-degree weather as early as 4 a.m. to take part in the rally.  While the majority in attendance were most likely Republicans, some of them probably didn’t appreciate his unfortunate remark that the late Democrat Rep. John Dingell was “looking up” from his grave. It wasn’t necessary.  Even Fox News Channel reported this multiple times Thursday, including interviews with Rep. Debbie Dingell.

PLACING BLAME- As I wrote in my December 17, 2019 blog, disgraced former FBI Director James Comey is willing to simply accept the DOJ IG report that FBI submitted FISA warrants were the result of “sloppiness.”

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, however, places the blame on lower level agents, even though he and Comey signed-off on the warrants.

When CNN host Wolf Blitzer surprisingly confronted McCabe, now a CNN contributor, with the charges made by DOJ IG Michael Horowitz regarding those filings, suggesting “This is very serious misconduct on your watch,” McCabe responded, saying, “Very serious.”

After expressing obvious faux shock and horror, McCabe said that he thought proper procedures were in place to “guarantee that accurate information was going to the court. The “process in place left so much responsibility on low-level FBI agents, who made mistakes making it very, very hard for oversight to recover,” literally throwing them under the bus.

Thanks, boss.

FINALLY – Those of us in Arizona know when our Congressional representatives are doing the right things again in Washington when they get a hatchet job in the columns of the Arizona Republic’s bleeding-heart liberals.  Columnist Laurie Roberts attacked Rep. Debbie Lesko for her support of the president in the impeachment hearings. Lesko and Rep. Andy Biggs have made Arizona conservatives proud.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.