Washington, The Senate, This Weekend

History Channel's biography mini-series on the 12th and the 1st presidents kept us marginally interested this afternoon.  We're unable to listen to the political talking heads any longer.  They created Trump and they are still giving him a platform.  There is no reason to debate the calling of witnesses by the House Managers any longer.  Once again, the Democrats are eating their young. 

The acquittal was inevitable.  The facts were obvious to everyone, but that didn't make a difference.  With a few notable exceptions, those who are in love with the former president are still holding a torch.  

They are not alone.  There are members of my orbit who think it's all an antifa plot to besmirch the name of their fearless leader, who are cheering their victory.  They aren't hearing Mitch McConnell's after the fact, hypocritical,  pass the buck condemnation.  They feel like they won.

What they won is debatable.  That they are celebrating a victory is terrifying.  A coup that goes unpunished is a training exercise is making its way around the interwebs.   George Washington understood that, and he didn't let optics influence his response to the Whiskey Rebellion.  He stood up for the union.

He created the institution of the presidency, stayed on to hold the union together, and left us instructions in his Farewell Address.  I read it just now.  It's eerily prescient.  

Here is what I think about what happened this weekend; he says it better than I can.  I put some in bold if you want the gist.

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Remember, they think they won.

Arguing over strategy is so beside the point.  We have a broken nation, just the way our foundingest founding father predicted.   Would that he were here now to lead us out of the morass.