Impeachment Lite

The impeachment season just opening begins to look like a required scandalous course for citizens on how your government actually works, and as the New York Times noted this week, it will not be pretty. Not President Trump’s strong-arming the government of Ukraine to trash his enemies and get himself reelected in 2020. And not the reckless routines of a surveillance state that bends the rules to spy on people, and apparently the Trump campaign of 2016, then smear them with gossip known to be sketchy. Speaking of un-pretty: there was the Washington Post report this week that the Pentagon knew through our 18-year, two-trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan that the US had no workable strategy, and as a top general put it, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Still, finally the impeachment fat is in the fire. It’s a smaller fire than it might have been, a short bill of just two particulars: that President Trump tried to shake down Ukraine for help in Trump’s own reelection campaign in 2020; also that he’d stonewalled Congress’s investigation. It is nothing like a frontal attack on the Trump presidency—on his climate denial, say, or breaking the anti-nuclear deal with Iran, or profiteering on public office, or cruelty to migrants at the border. In the week’s news of the American empire, it could seem a smaller story than the Pentagon’s confession about our losing war in Afghanistan.