Impeachment hearings: people are concluding what they were inclined to conclude anyway

Yesterday was another grind in the House Foreign Affairs Committee impeachment hearings. Sondland in the morning, Cooper and Hale in the evening.

None of it seems to be moving the needle much. Democrats and leftist journalists and commentators are sure that the record shows a steadily mounting collection of fatally damaging evidence. Trumpists are certain that the whole thing gets proven more of a nothingburger with each new testimony. There are some outliers. Ken Starr believes there's a good chance Republican Senators will soon go to the White House for a Watergate-style intervention.

One can find public opinion polls to confirm sentiment for or against impeachment.

That's the thing, at least at this point: It looks like one big exercise in confirmation bias.

I do think that there's a good chance that Pompeo's desire to exit the administration "in one piece," as Time puts it, is a harbinger of more administration turnover. He has many years left in which to make public service contributions, and he doesn't need the taint of all this. The case of Nikki Haley is indeed curious, though. She's made her exit; there's no apparent reason for her to still be hitching her wagon to the Trump train, which really hampers her options.

I'm reluctant to make predictions, but it does kind of look like the impeachment effort will come to naught and the Very Stable Genius will face one of the collectivists who were on the debate stage in Atlanta last night. He'll take the low road, missing great opportunities to make the case for three-pillared conservatism, instead coining juvenile nicknames and harping, with his signature braggadocio, on the good aspects of the economy (and leaving the bad ones, such as the effects of tariffs on manufacturing and agriculture, out of his message). And we'll probably get four more years of chaos and embarrassment. Post-America is pretty far gone, what with the percentage of millennials who would vote for a socialist, but post-Americans can still do basic math, and the numbers for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal don't add up.

DISCLAIMER: All of the above could be proven wrong next year, or even next week.