I don’t want to say Trump’s impeachment defense lawyers weren’t very good, but I imagine even Marjorie Taylor Greene sighed and said: “Whoa. And I thought I was a dangerous, dimwitted windbag” after opening arguments last week.
Although the ex-president was acquitted, again, you have to admit his defense was wobbly at best. Trump appeared to hire and fire lawyers for his crack(pot) legal team almost casually. Far from wasting away in Mar-a-lago-ville, he watched events unfold on TV, bellowed for new talent and, by Saturday, nothing approaching justice prevailed.
Trump’s lawyers weren’t the best or brightest but you can’t really blame them. Hardly anybody likes being paid with live chickens anymore.
Since the ex-president famously doesn’t pay his attorneys, he has discovered it’s hard to find good representation. Which is how I felt for the past four years so I get the frustration. His initial feelers for finding the finest legal minds resulted in some wversion of “No” ranging from “I have to wash my hair that week” to “it’s not you; it’s us; we have ethics” to “Not even if you sent Liam Neeson to my house and he informed me he had a “very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
So, he ended up with attorneys who were less top-drawer and more Sterlite box with a warped lid. While nothing noxious oozed from their scalps, at least on Day 1, they did commit poetry—Longfellow at that, and with TEARS.
Trump, not exactly a patron of the arts, must have really hated his lawyer spouting poetry –poetry!– on billable hours’ time.
T: “Melania, what’s this guy saying?”
M: “Eeez poetry, Donald.
T: “Why?”
M: “No one knows, but we are supposed to like it.”
While he fumed and plotted to bring Matlock out of retirement, Trump was just being himself. That’s the devil we know.
It was the Republican members of the Senate who confounded me. Shown a 13-minute video of a mob of murderous morons beating Capitol cops with the business end of an American flagpole, their response could best be summed up as “Meh.”
The only possible explanation for their repugnant non-response to Jan. 6 is they wanted to stay in good with Trump’s base. Mustn’t risk offending the base or you could lose your Senate seat and fail to spend another six years of kissing Q butt, refusing to compromise for the greater good and fundraising.
When it was all over, the only surprise was Richard Burr, who is from my home state of North Carolina. Burr, a lame duck who no longer needs to suck up to the MAGA cult finally found his conscience, which had been laying idle and rusty as a busted air conditioner beside a Goodwill dumpster. Voting to convict showed us Burr recognized evil, but he didn’t speak up until he finally had nothing to lose. Not exactly heroic but better than nothing, I suppose.
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Celia Rivenbark wonders when everybody started saying “Jag-u-are” instead of “Jag-wahr.”