Peak Cillizza

How much more Cillizza could this be? The answer is none — none more Cillizza:

This was history, yes. Six hours of open debate split between the two parties in advance of a vote that would make Donald Trump only the third president ever impeached by the House.

But it was also a telling glimpse of where our politics is — and a glimpse into what it will look like for the near future. 

As soon as one Republican would finish slamming the articles of impeachment as a product of a Democratic Party that has never been able to get over its loss in 2016, a Democrat insisting that Trump had knowingly sought to pressure a foreign power for his own benefit would begin.

It felt like watching two different movies at the same time. There was lots of talking, lots of accusations and no listening. And most of it just seemed like noise, noise, NOISE.

The only thing the two sides ever seemed to agree on was that this was a big day in Washington (and the world) — and that there would be long-lasting consequences from how each of them voted. Republicans repeatedly warned Democrats they could kiss their House majority goodbye in the 2020 election. Democrats told Republicans that history would judge them very poorly for their support of a corrupt President.

The Point: This was Washington at its absolute worst. A real low point for a congressional body that has seen a lot of them over the past few years.

As I wrote a few days ago, there are three ways of interpreting a straight party line vote to impeach: The impeaching party is corruptly impeaching a president who doesn’t deserve it; the anti-impeachment party is corruptly protecting a president who deserves to be impeached; or, the question of whether to impeach or not is genuinely difficult, and the straight party line vote illustrates the distortions of partisan thinking.

Cillizza is too incoherent to come right out and say that he believes the third view is the correct one, but that’s more or less what this sort of plague on both your houses nonsense adds up to, if you think about it, which I don’t recommend doing.

This is going to be the standard line about the impeachment of Trump taken by the mainstream media, because the alternatives are either claiming it’s clear he doesn’t deserve to be impeached, which requires a level of delusion or dishonesty that’s too much for anyone this side of Fox News et. al., or admitting that the Republican party is totally corrupt, which is Against the Rules of the Game.

. . . I just got up and read the comments to this post, and then read Cillizza’s “article” again, and realized some things:

(1) The Grinch. JFC.

(2) I was way too charitable when I tried to extract something like an idea from what he was writing. There’s no idea there. It’s a book report that goes:

MY BOOK REPORT BY CHRIS CILLIZZA

People were talking a lot and saying different things and it was loud and I didn’t like it. I am paid millions of dollars to give you my opinions on politics, but I have none to give about the biggest political story of the decade, too bad so sad, guess what I got paid anyway hah hah. This was my book report and in conclusion America is a land of contrasts.

THE END