Impeachment vote

A measure in the House to impeach the president was voted down quite handily today with bipartisan opposition.There are some, many even, who feel that this means the Democratic party is hopeless and not representative of the will of the people and blah blah blah.

They are of course right, but not because of this specific vote. This vote was never going to pass, it was purely symbolic and a waste of time, I do believe the president will be impeached, but I do not believe that will happen before Mueller's investigation concludes, and honestly I am not sure I want it to happen earlier.

See, I want him to suffer, I want him to know things are coming to a head and all of his secrets are getting out, I want him to see his allies and family fall or turn on him one by one, his support to erode and for him to finally be left alone in the White House and dragged out to face the consequences of his actions. I know I won't get all of that, but I feel like half of it wouldn't be too greedy of me. It is also too much to hope that he ever realizes what he did wrong and why people hate him, so I will take this version of justice instead.

For that to happen though everything needs to be pulled out into the light by a party that has no political affiliation. Which means letting Mueller run his investigation, it also means not wearing out the public with random impeachment proceedings.

The thing is that right now a pretty small fraction of the American public is even thinking about impeachment, a serious push in the House to impeach, one that actually caused lengthy debate or had a competitive vote, would put the subject right at the forefront of the public conscious, talking heads will go on about the relative merits of the process or the evidence, or lack thereof, involved, and then it will pass. Then a short while later the serious impeachment proceedings might begin, with actual evidence and and FBI investigation to make public, and the populace won't care because in their mind they already went over all of this and now the president is just being picked on. It would be ludicrously easy to exonerate him in the court of public opinion no matter the evidence against him. Better to make it a big deal when there actually is a chance of something happening.

The party leadership was not wrong to try and quash this attempt, bu like I said, the complaints against the party are not wrong either. Compared to, just as an example, me, the party is about as far right as the GOP is to the Democrats right now, and even after a few election cycles with an organization that sort of has its shit together, the DNC a far too unhealthy interest in balancing attracting the left wing and tacking to the center, which pretty much scares everyone away. They are the only organization we have to offset the GOP so they still get the support of those of us who want to slide the countries descent into madness, but to say they represent the will of the people is incorrect at best, they represent big money as always, just, most of that money benefits from being perceived as nice while the GOP donors gave up even trying long ago.

I know the party adopted a very liberal platform last convention, and that is encouraging indeed, but in practice they haven't really shown a ton of interest in pursuing that platform either, making it increasingly clear that it was just another ploy.

Not saying we should dump them, not without a clear other option on the national scene, but they can't really be the long term solution either, not in their current form, the only problem is we have to survive the short term first.