Impeachment: “After the Ball is Over”

Back in the 1890s, in the era of the “Gibson Girl” and straw boaters for men- back when my grandparents were small children- there was a very popular song from Tin Pan Alley called, “After the Ball is Over” whose refrain was:

“After the ball is over, after the break of morn,

After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone,

Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all—

Many the hopes that have vanished after the ball…”

                                                                                                  -Charles K. Harris, 1891

I remember my parents singing this, usually at the end of a substantially imbibed evening along with their friends, but I digress…

Anyway, the song comes to mind when I think of the aftermath of the impeachment drama taking place in the United States Senate- after the verdict is in, and after the election which follows.

That Trump will ultimately be acquitted of the charges brought by Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives is but a foregone conclusion. Whether or not the drip-drip of alleged witnesses continues to surface, whether or not witnesses are ultimately called to testify, and whether or not the Senate trial ends at the end of this week, the end of next week, or the end of next month, the President will remain in office.

Mathematically speaking, there simply aren’t enough back-stabbers, like Mitt Romney (R-UT), in the Republican caucus to reach anywhere near the threshold of two-thirds (67 Senators) to convict the President of bribery, treason, high crimes or misdemeanors, assuming that all 47 Democrats in the Senate go along with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to vote for removal.

The Republicans know this, the Democrats know this and yes, even the most biased left-leaning media all know that Donald Trump will not be convicted and removed from office…as they say in the south, “ain’t gonna happen.”

There may not even be enough votes to call for witnesses, at this point, but with a threshold requirement of only 51 Senators, the call for witnesses might happen, nevertheless. It’s of no matter…the President will not be removed, end of story…

…or is it?

You see, the real effort behind this sham of an impeachment is to overturn the results of the 2016 election, interfere with the 2020 election (by removing Trump from the ballot) and, since neither of those can happen, tarnish his re-election efforts so as to elect a Democrat, instead.

Despite what all of the polls are saying (as if any of these are trustworthy), Donald Trump is going to win re-election, and by an even larger electoral margin than he did in 2016…I will repeat this…Donald Trump will win re-election by an even larger electoral margin than he did in 2016…

Why?

Simply because all of the voters who took a chance on the unknown quantity of Trump in 2016, desperately hoping that he would do all of what he promised to do on a host of issues- the economy, trade, ObamaCare’s individual mandate, defense, unemployment, etc., have now seen a President who has delivered. Now that he has delivered on these (more often than not), all of his 2016 voters, as well as those who didn’t vote for him but now see the results of his efforts, are going to keep Mr. and Mrs. Trump at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four years. This will happen regardless of who he runs against in the fall, because the American people are not going to risk all of these successes on a member of the opposite party- regardless of which Democrat wins their nomination- Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders and, yes, Hillary Clinton. They will all lose…bank on it.

That said, Donald Trump still won’t be out of the woods on impeachment…that is unless the House of Representatives “flips” to Republicans. If Democrats were to retain their majority in the House, rest assured that they will continue to impeach the President, for however many times it takes, just to stymie his second term and stand in the way of his legislative initiatives. Some, like Maxine Waters (D-CA), have already promised that they will do just that- impeach, impeach, impeach- country be damned.

So, if the voting citizens across the 435 House districts decide that they want four more years of this “bullschiff,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, committee Chairmen Adam Schiff (D-CA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and all of the other ass-clowns who have subjected this country to three (or four) years of trying to overthrow the will of the people, will remain in place.

If however, the voters have had enough of this, Republicans will retake the majority in the House, retain their majority in the Senate, and the Democrat holdovers from bygone eras- like Pelosi and Schiff and Nadler, et al, will slip away and join the likes of Harry Reid (D-NV) into their taxpayer-funded retirements. They will choose to hang it up because they won’t abide not having the power they have had these last few years…and maybe, just maybe, the country will get back on the right track and Trump can complete his plan and promise to “drain the swamp” that is our nation’s capital.

So, “after the ball is over” and “after the break of morn,” on the 4^th of November, 2020, we’ll all know whether or not the Democrats’ “hearts are breaking“ yet again, whether or not these ill-attempts at removing the duly-elected President will continue, and we will know whether or not, as Benjamin Franklin once said, we can “keep” our Republic…

God willing.

-Drew Nickell, 27 January 2020

© 2020 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

Signed and personalized editions available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com

Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2

http://www.drewnickell.com

Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2

Forty Years in the Making- Trump Responds to Iran while Democrats Dither

It was November 1979, and we were in the first semester of our third year at university, just twenty-one years of age. After two attempts earlier that year, student followers of the Imam line, who supported the Iranian revolution overthrowing Shah Reza Pahlavi, stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran taking fifty-two American diplomats and citizens hostage, and keeping them captive for 444 days, only to release them on the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth President of the United States in January, 1981.

What ultimately doomed the Carter presidency, under whose watch the takeover took place, proved to be the start of a forty-year long standoff with the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran, ruled by a series of fanatic ayatollahs. Their hate-filled doctrine of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism spilled over into adjacent countries, where the Iranian Islamist regime spread their jihadist dogma in pursuit of a twelfth imam, who would bring on the apocalypse once the entire world submitted to Islam. That is what “Islam” literally means…submission.

In financing and provisioning terrorist attacks throughout the world, the Islamist regime was opposed by the United States, but in its opposition the United States mired itself in a trap of seeking international cooperation and approval in an effort to quarantine Iran from the world’s financial community. In doing so, our foreign policy essentially waited on our nominal allies in Europe to follow suit, but the lure of Iranian oil undercut our efforts to gain such cooperation, and establish international pressure against Iran. Because they would rather continue to purchase oil from Iran, our European partners were all too eager to sign onto a flawed treaty with Iran, where the United States, under Barack Obama, transferred $1.8 billion in unmarked bills to Iran, in exchange for an unverifiable promise on the part of Iran not to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon for ten years. Never mind the fact that ever since the transfer of the cash, the Iranian regime has violated the terms of the treaty by continuing to build and operate centrifuges which enable the regime to produce weapons-grade uranium en masse.  As predicted by those who opposed Obama’s disastrous “treaty” with Iran, the money has been used to finance terrorism throughout the world and produce extremely effective IEDs, which have cost hundreds of Americans their very lives and many more their arms and legs. Amongst much scorn from the international community, as well as from the globalist/internationalist deep state apparatchiks in Washington, President Trump pulled out of Obama’s raw deal, insisting that a new agreement be drawn up that would forever ban Iran from possessing nuclear weapons, which they have vowed to use to destroy Israel and the United States.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force Commanding General Qassem Soleimani, a man only second in power to the ayatollah in Iran, has been coordinating the Iran-supported terrorist activities in adjoining Iraq and supplying these terrorists with deadly weapons used to maim and kill innocent civilians and U.S. troops, alike. Having pinpointed the general’s location at the Baghdad airport, President Trump ordered a drone strike on his position Thursday killing six, including the general and the man who coordinated the protests against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, earlier this week.

While the mainstream media and Democrats, alike, have roundly scorned the President for both launching the attack, and the fact he wisely chose not to inform Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, prior to launching the attack (the Democrats would have surely botched the attack by blabbering to the press beforehand), Trump has now served notice to the Iranian regime that the time for playing the U.S. for a fool, as they did under Obama, has come to an end. In back-channel communications with the powers to be in Tehran, Trump has promised the regime that should they choose to further escalate hostilities with the United States, they will get the war they have been seeking for four decades, knowing all-too-well that they could face obliteration should such a war commence.

Critics insist that Trump is getting mired in yet another ground war in the region, which goes against the President’s oft-stated policy of avoiding endless entanglements with no clear objective or winning strategy. That would be true under Obama’s suicidal rules of engagement, hamstringing the military in how they conduct such operations. That would most certainly be true under the constraints of the Bush(s) and Clinton administrations, who insisted on limited engagements which avoided direct conflict with Iran.

In this maelstrom, Trump realizes that the time has come to end Iranian attempts to seek hegemony over the region, now that Iran is conducting military and naval exercises with both China and Russia. While he desperately seeks to avoid an all-out war with Iran (and China and Russia, by proxy) by showing them, at long last, the consequences of their actions- both in the region and wherever they spark terrorist activities around the world, Trump is effectively putting the regime on notice that this must all stop, or else…and isn’t it about time, after forty years?

And yet, while Trump is leveraging further sanctions and military operations against the regime, like Thursday’s attack on Soleimani, the Democrats in Congress dither about an absurd impeachment farce that will ultimately fail and the promise of ever more and more hearings…

…and these are the same stooges who think they know better!

-Drew Nickell, 3 January 2020

© 2020 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

Signed and personalized editions available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com

Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2