The Price of Cynicism

Impeachment seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?

Quid pro quo, “a perfect call,” Gordon Sondland: for something that so recently loomed so large on the national stage, these sound like vague echoes from a distant past, their meanings lost in antiquity. The coronavirus pandemic has so thoroughly consumed the news cycle, and our lives, and every waking moment, that everything that came before feels like ancient history.

For that matter, even the start of the lockdown feels like a lifetime ago. It’s almost hard to imagine resuming some semblance of normalcy when the time finally comes.

But the impeachment has been much on my mind lately, because it so starkly demonstrates the stakes of what can sometimes seem like mere partisan politics, and the terrible consequences of having an immoral, unprincipled party in power.

That has never been more clear than now, amid the ceaseless soundtrack of sirens in the streets of New York, and traumatized ER doctors committing suicide, and rotting bodies abandoned in trucks, and more dead than the US suffered in the Vietnam War, with no Paris peace talks in sight.

DEADPAN AND JUST PLAIN DEAD

A month ago, when the pandemic was still fairly new and the White House was still trying out defenses for its failure to respond, Mitch McConnell auditioned…