If We Took The Bones Out, It Wouldn't Be Crunchy, Would It?

It's hard to consider in the abstract that there would be anything more important going on than the impeachment of a president of the United States. After all, this is only the third occurrence in history, after of course Bill Clinton (for the crime of being both a gross douchebag while not being a Republican) and... uh... the... other time... to... uh... I want to say Franklin... Jefferson? I don't know.  It was before C-SPAN, so how do we know it even happened? All of history before kinescope is basically conjecture.

But even with the many, many, many options I have to watch the proceedings live instead of doing the job for which I get paid, or later catching up in a zillion zillion aggregator and reporting websites, I just can't be arsed. It's not that I'm not civic-minded. I'm as plugged in as the next guy, which I guess is not saying that much because the next guy is watching a compilation video of cats running into closed sliding glass doors. I watched the House committee hearings and testimony, as the evidence and utter obviousness of the president's guilt piled up and up and up. But this is the Senate, where you need 60+ senators to vote for conviction, where it's been clear since the initial question of impeachment was raised as a possibility that the dude who dula-ed the stillbirth of the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination was going to give this Very Important Thing exactly the same level of attention and care. The unlikely outcome of conviction and removal would require changing minds, a task made infinitely more difficult when the bodies ambulating those minds around have absented themselves entirely from the process in large numbers. If they're not going to listen, how can I be expected to?

The conclusion is foregone, even when the president says publicly that he knows he won't get busted for obstruction of justice because of the success of his program of obstructing justice. And then his loyal senators get to deny the presentation of new information and then publicly complain about the House managers' case lacking any new information. I read the summaries and stay abreast, but at this point the most that's going to come out of it is me being able to make myself giggle at the chance to use the word "abreast."

If we aren't going to get anything, can we at least learn something? We now know definitively what a bag of shit Ken Starr is, that's something. I mean, we knew, but it's like dropping a dish in your kitchen: you didn't really doubt gravity was a thing, but it's always nice to be reminded of the force of that truth.

Also, we learned Monica Lewinsky is a pretty good twitter follow.

Besides, with 45 years of life experience and perspective now, there are things I can see that are legitimately more important. Terry Jones died. The world has lost the star of the Dirty Vicar Sketch. Sometimes the stakes are real.