And in the end...

            

     ...the hate you take/Is equal to the hate you make.
     Because, really, that's all the right wing nut job Republicans have besides lies that are the complete reverse of the facts. And they proved it once again in more ways than one in today's impeachment hearing.
     They hate the facts, they hate the truth, they hate democracy itself, they hate the Constitution, they hate the Democrats and they hate YOU unless you get 100% from your news from Trump's Twitter feed (which is, arguably, no more accurate than the men's room wall at Trump Tower or RNC HQ).
     They showed their hatred when ranking member Doug Collins began a loud, sour diatribe that didn't defend Trump so much as inform voters as to why they shouldn't vote Republican in 2020.
      They showed their hatred when Matt Gaetz began yelling so loudly that Chairman Nadler had to practically give him a juice box and relegate him to the "kid's table." He also said he wanted Adam Schiff to testify. (They actually put his picture on the back of a fake milk carton on a poster they'd had commissioned and put within sight of the CSPAN cameras.)
      They showed their hatred when Louis Gohmert began screaming about the Democratic defense counsel Daniel Goldman bribing his way onto the testimony table then screaming some more about how he was going to impeach Joe Biden.
      They showed their hatred when a right wing Infowars host who'd called for Obama to be lynched briefly broke up the proceedings before getting arrested.
      And so forth and so on. If their idea is to exhaust the American public who are watching the impeachment proceedings into giving up and do so with lies and unending bitterness, well, considering the lack of intelligence of their base, it just may work.
      Hatred, lies, confusion, all the things that didn't help us win our independence from Great Britain and did not contribute one bit to a unique national Constitution that for two centuries was a marvel in the world. The thing is, some of the impeachment critics may be correct in criticizing the process of the hearings and their narrow focus.
      And by "critics,", I don't mean the usual suspects like Gaetz, Jordan, Meadows and Gomer, people who probably smear their fecal matter on their bathroom tiles into likenesses of Ronald Reagan but thoughtful critics such as Common Dreams' Jeffrey Isaac who asked who the audience is supposed to be for these hearings?
       It's a good question. Isaac made some pretty good points. Furthermore, he even could've mentioned that the narrow legal focus and legalese is obviously one of the reasons why such a large segment of the population isn't paying the slightest attention to the impeachment proceedings. We don't feel as if these are being carried out for our benefit. The audience for these hearings has to count because without popular consensus, the impeachment process will just come off as looking like a hollow partisan exercise, which, as with the GOP in the 2000 general election, could wind up costing them dearly next year.
        And that just fuels the right wing's conspiracy theories.
        However, that doesn't make the inquiries any less legitimate and necessary.
        Such as various flacks echoing Trump that the IG's report on the FBI's role in investigating the Trump's campaign's role in colluding with Russia was based on partisan politics or not (They did not, the IG concluded), which, you would think, give an instant fresh coat of Teflon on people like James Comey and Lisa Page.
         Instead, the right wing has fanned out like Danny DeVito's penguins all across our national-sized Gotham City and brazenly told the 99.999% of us who haven't read every page of Horowitz's report the opposite of what it did, in fact say. That's because Republicans are counting on the factual illiteracy of their and Trump's base to believe their lies when, in fact, the opposite of what they say is true.
          So, in the end, this is all the Republicans have- Hatred, head-shaking, lies, partisan bitterness about process, conspiracy theories, bluster. And Trump has backed them into a corner or, more accurately, dragging them over a cliff. If they look like they're riding his coattails, they're really pulling on them because they don't want Trump or any of them to go over the cliff's edge.