Smog Machine

And so the long overdue trial of President Donald John Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors has at last begun. We pretty much know where it’s going to go, but if there’s one thing the past four years ought to have taught us, it’s that even the most outrageous surprises and shocks ought not to surprise or shock us. So buckle the fuck up.

Already it’s been head-spinning.

For starters, the past week saw the Senate open its impeachment proceedings with momentarily reassuring solemnity and ceremony……until one realized that this is precisely the kind of charade that the GOP wants, a veneer of gravitas and seriousness that masks the utter depravity of the highway robbery actually about to go on.

The tip off was the surreal spectacle of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham raising their right hands and swearing an oath that they would be impartial jurors, after bragging to the press (and the President, and their voters back home) that they were going to be anything but. Predictions that someone, anyone on the Democratic side would say boo in objection proved laughable.

As if to make the point, even as that farce was unfolding, last week also saw stunning new evidence of Trump’s complicity in Rudy Giuliani’s “drug deal” (John Bolton’s words, not mine), and a jawdropping TV interview in which Lev Parnas calmly implicated just about every swinging richard…