This is what I didn’t really understand about the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Trump Impeachment Trial. I get that it was historic and I get that the fake-ass trial probably even got under Donny Smallhands’ paper-thin skin. But… the result was never in doubt. Democrats weren’t going to be able to magically produce votes out of thin air. No one would be able to convince Republican traitors to grow a moral code or a sense of decency. Smallhands would always be acquitted. And so that’s what happened, formally, yesterday:

After five months of hearings, investigations and revelations about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, a divided United States Senate acquitted him on Wednesday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress to aid his own re-election, bringing an acrimonious impeachment trial to its expected end.

In a pair of votes whose outcome was never in doubt, the Senate fell well short of the two-thirds margin that would have been needed to remove the 45th president. The verdicts came down — after three weeks of debate — almost entirely along party lines, with every Democrat voting “guilty” on both charges and Republicans uniformly voting “not guilty” on the obstruction of Congress charge. Only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with his party to judge Mr. Trump guilty of abuse of power.

It was the third impeachment trial of a president and the third acquittal in American history, and it ended the way it began: with Republicans and Democrats at odds. They disagreed over Mr. Trump’s conduct and his fitness for office, even as some members of his own party conceded the basic allegations that undergirded the charges, that he sought to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals.

[From The New York Times]

I think it’s Bill Kristol – the neoconservative who helped George W. Bush lie America into war with Iraq – who always says that when all is said and done on the Smallhands administration, no one will admit to having supported it. Like, a decade from now, all of the Republicans who voted for acquittal will still be in Washington, burnishing their legacies and working as lobbyists or cable-news pundits and saying that they never really supported Donald Trump. And it’s true. And it sucks.

As for Mitt Romney… yeah, I’m not a fan, but he gets a cookie for what he did here. ONE cookie.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.