Trump’s impeachment process is a circus | COMMENTARY

Now that the House has rushed to impeach the president and the speaker spent weeks being coy about passing it on to the Senate, we have comic opera at its best. Stephen Sondheim’s most famous piece — “Send in the Clowns” — is an excellent allegory for the real-life circus now taking place inside the beltway. The famous last stanza applies: don’t bother, they’re here. Our political elite have blurred the line between reality and comedy as they assume that the impeachment has relevance.

The clowns began demanding impeachment immediately after President Donald Trump’s election. Ringmaster Adam Schiff began filling the clown car with stalwarts such as Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Al Green, Eric Swalwell, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.

We are at an historical juncture. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, 30 years of foreign policy debacles by four presidents have left us surrounded by enemies in China, Russia, Mexico, North Korea, Iran and an amorphous global Islamic ideology. Ignoring domestic problems, our cities turned violent, and California has become a dystopian wasteland.

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In Britain in 1645, France in the 1790s and Russia in 1917 venal aristocracies were overthrown. In the U.S., like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the paying customers decided to close the elitist beltway show and elected Mr. Trump to pull down the tent. Not unexpected, a cabal of elected politicians, government bureaucrats, entertainment elites and media camp followers have resisted The Donald with plots for his demise.

Mr. Trump’s sexual proclivities were exposed; he was deemed to be mentally unsound; and he is still being portrayed as a Russian agent after 3 years of investigations. Mr. Schiff’s clown crew finally manufactured an impeachable offense in Mr. Trump’s request for information from Ukraine.

The Ukraine-Russian situation is one of the most mishandled foreign policy fiascos in U.S. history. We fomented a coup to replace an elected Ukrainian president with Russian ties to one that favored EU and ultimately NATO membership. Vladimir Putin was not going to allow a NATO operation near Russia’s Sevastopol naval base so he took back the Crimea. Oblivious to the results of our actions we put sanctions on the Russians and drove them into the closest alliance with China since the 1950s.

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China surpassed the U.S. economically in 2014, and is working and on schedule to become the dominant technological power by 2030 and the dominant military and political force in the world by 2050.

The U.S. has deposed strong stable authoritarian governments in Iraq, Egypt and Libya and fomented a civil war in Syria. The results were the rise of ISIS and a massive refugee crisis.

The clowns blocked Mr. Trump’s attempts to close the borders against drug running, human trafficking and terrorists. Cartels now openly control large segments of Mexico; the central government is powerless; and U.S. citizens in Mexico are now murdered with impunity.

Opposing Mr. Trump on several issues, California has declined into something resembling a Middle Ages monarchy with a small population of wealthy royals encamped in their fortified castles along the coast from San Francisco to San Diego and massive areas of squalid encampments in the cities. The state’s energy infrastructure now rivals that of a third world country.

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With Mr. Trump’s impeachment the nation has crossed the Rubicon on political reconciliation with a high probability for elevated civil strife. He will not be removed, but he has been wounded politically. Our enemies sense the nation’s internal weakness and have been emboldened to take aggressive action against us. China, Russia and Iran conducted joint naval operations, and North Korea has resumed their ICBM development. Iranian led militias attacked U.S. facilities in Iraq, including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Mr. Trump responded by executing the head of Iran’s Quds terrorist organization. The clowns’ actions were to criticize The Donald and attempt to restrict his actions. Observing continued internal U.S. chaos and weakness, our enemies could very well escalate their actions against us, and as with the misfired Iranian missile, there will be an error in an attack on the U.S. that requires retribution. The clowns hatred of Mr. Trump and myopic focus on his removal ignore the existential threats and threaten catastrophic escalation and the collapse of our house of cards

Chuck Campbell (lochawe@verizon.net) is a retired senior vice president with Gulf Oil Corporation who lives in Woodstock.