“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.” – H.L. Mencken.

I deeply regret that Mencken did not live to see and write about Donald Trump, the stellar example of the species in public life he called “Boobus Americanus.”

The impeachment trial is over.

Although the media is obsessing on the Republican Party and its continued refusal to take the trial seriously, or in many cases, even listen to the testimony.

It seems that our news media, like our former President, keep making the same mistakes repeatedly.

It’s an old story by now – will this be the moment the party stands up to Trump. No, this won’t be, and there was absolutely no reason to suspect that it would be.

Nor is this the most important issue for the country to face at this moment. How come all of us know this and they don’t?

I think we all saw what we needed to see, we are in a phase of our history where minds cannot be changed. If history is a guide, that will change one day. But it won’t be easy and it won’t be quick.

“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I appreciate the importance of politics, but I can’t sign up with the left and the right’s never-ending hysteria. I can’t make that my way of life, there are too many important and wonderful things to do. We go back and forth and back and forth in the land of failed expectations and righteous declarations.

You don’t need to be a Rhodes Scholar to know the Republican senators will not convict the most influential person in their party of insurrection and thus light themselves on fire at this point.  Especially when Trump is doing it right before their eyes.

Does any rational person in this country really believe Donald Trump will run for President again? I sure don’t. He is already twice as weak as he was a month ago. Give it six months.

Politicians are not known for committing suicide. It’s not a business for pastors, but for hustlers. The Republicans have dug their own grave, let them lie in it. For now, all they are looking for is cover to stay in hiding and out of trouble. It’s a hoax, of course.

Democrats say angry things too.

You can trust this: the very first opportunity these people have to shove a shiv in the back of our former President, they will do it if he doesn’t do it himself first. He is a significant liability for them now, and we don’t really need an impeachment conviction for that to happen.

The Washington politicians know a small army of prosecutors and federal investigators have been lining up for months to investigate his tax returns and manipulations, his payments to Stormy Daniels, the laws he bent or broke assembling his shaky real estate empire, his many sexual assaults as women.

There is really no need for the Republican Senators to jump off the cliff as the Democrats keep asking them to do. Trump will do that all by himself, as he has been doing all year.

The smart Republicans will lay low as they have been doing for four years now and bank on Trump’s fatal flaws and Father Time to clear him out. That will happen; he will die a death by a thousand cuts inside and out.

This is not a winning formula for them, and certainly not the high road, but it’s the only choice for many of those who wish to survive. Why set ourselves up for disappointment and dread when there was no other possible outcome?

The Founders were smarter than we are. In their obsession with checks and balances, they never foresaw or would have approved of political parties. That was not in their plan or their vision for the new democracy.

Jefferson and Hamilton understood the danger of political parties. By necessity, party members and ideologues become tribal and value their party more than their country.

The same thing happens with demagogues. People – mobs if you will – attach to them, not their country.

As a result, we have a dysfunctional constitutional democracy that keeps stalemating itself and blocking change and good government. Nothing gets done, everyone is frustrated and angry.

For me, the big news out of impeachment week wasn’t just the stunning videos we saw but the Zoom gathering of 120 prominent Republicans meeting to consider a new anti-Trump political party or a separate faction within the existing Republican Party.

There were a lot of influential and experienced people in that rebel group. They can make a lot of noise and bring about a lot of change.

It seems inevitable that we will see – on both sides – new political entities that will split the suffocating grip of the two-party system and offer us, at long last, some choices and some new ways to break the paralysis that has become the real legacy of the left and the right.

As Biden clings to the center, the restless young warriors on the left will perhaps do the same thing. They may form their own party or sub-party. That is already happening with Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio.

There may be all kinds of opportunities to use coalitions and options to get things done.

Trump has triggered the radical re-construction of our failing system, perhaps not in ways he wanted or imagined. His followers may soon learn who is on their side and who really wasn’t.

For all the worries about his age and clarity, President Biden has become a markedly more radical political leader than Trump himself.

Biden refuses to play the game; he is doing something no President has been able to do for years – propose and fight for bold things that will make people’s lives better.

He is a throwback to the Stone Age of American politics, where Presidents actually accomplished things through negotiation and brass and worried about people beyond the rich.

Was that all just smoke and fire, or was it real?

Trump is nothing but defeated, humiliated, and irrelevant. Biden has figured out what many people have not.

The way to make this bogeyman go away is to believe he has gone away.

Mencken was cynical to the extreme in his observations about Democracy, but there is a lot of truth and wisdom in what he wrote.

We expect too much from politicians, and when they fail to meet our often impossible expectations, we turn on them and our own system. We don’t say “we” failed, we say “they” failed. But the core of the American experiment is that we are them

Mencken argued that it is not materialism that is the chief curse of our word, as pastors and progressives preach, but idealism. We get into trouble by taking our visions and hallucinations too seriously and unrealistically and are thus forever disappointed and aggrieved.

He argued that citizens’ wise path is to expect little from our government and not so much.  We will be wiser, happier, and free.

Mencken was rarely disappointed by politicians, he saw them as all too ordinary and weak.

The corrosive part of democracy, he argued, is that one party ends up devoting its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both sides succeed and are often right.

Our democracy thus becomes a perennial battleground, sponsors of a war that can’t end and that no side can ever win.

This isn’t working, and that is becoming clear. We’ll see just how wise and strong the people are. For my part, I ask less of politicians and more of me.

I think the founders’ best idea was the idea that power and responsibility lie in the people, not in political parties.

Public business, he wrote, must always be done by somebody. It will never be done by somebody or other. If wise and just men decline it, others will not. If honest men refuse it, others will not.

We turned our government over to a liar and an ignorant man. We got what we deserved. A wiser and more honest man has replaced him. We’ll see what he can do.

Trump is really not the right candidate for a long-lasting reign as a spiritual or religious icon.

If you count the people Trump killed by his bizarre handling of the pandemic, then he managed to break every single one of the Ten Commands while he was in office.

What he did to the Republican Party, he also did to the Christian White Nationalist Political Movement that has defined the legacy of Jesus Christ; he stripped both of any shred of the moral authority needed to lead, grow,  and inspire.

There is a gaping hole in leadership in America, religious and political. Biden is much softer than powerful leaders usually are. But that may be just the right approach for now.

Trump isn’t to blame any longer. He is already losing steam; you can tell because, after just a few weeks out of office, there is hardly any steam at all.

His Twitter account was his political heart, pumping all that blood into him every day and back out into his legions. Without it, he’s about as intimidating as a pond turtle.

It is ludicrous to keep defining the impeachment trial’s value by the number of Republican Senators who would vote against their former President. It is not useful for the pundits to continue their orgy of hand-wringing and self-righteous de-claiming.

The media was far from blameless for the Trump catastrophe, they made him the only story in the world, were then shocked by his power to inflame. I don’t see them taking a ton of responsibility for their complicity.

The Democratic Impeachment Managers did a brilliant job, legally and morally, and technically, in presenting their case. The idea is to offer a convincing record of malfeasance and worse to the American people, which is what they have done, about as well as it could be done.

2020 is a million years from 2016. As a political leader, Trump’s days are finished, although he may never permit himself to acknowledge or accept his new chapter as a disgraced loser.

I don’t really care to dance of the left and the right all of my life.

Exciting things are going on in my life and the country’s life.

None of them involve Donald Trump or his zombie Army of sad and angry lost souls. I’m eager to move on and return to life.

The Democratic Party and its followers should be pleased with themselves. They did the right thing and in the right way by executing this impeachment with so much thought and grace.

They left behind a powerful record of our country’s ugliest and most frightening confrontation with evil.

The Republicans look as pathetic, impotent, and cowardly as any political party has ever looked.

The Georgia Senate contests remind us of where this moral bankruptcy will get them.

Their big Achilles Hell is that they have become arrogant and lazy; like their revered leader, they never learn from their mistakes because they can never admit to making them.

Time to push on on behalf of the struggle to return to liberal democracy. That is useful and promising work. There must be compassion, decency, and respect for human beings.

Perhaps America will become a gentler and kinder nation again and a more moral one. It won’t be easy. Our very national soul has been stained and dishonored. Out of the ashes of January 6 can come something much brighter and more lasting.

From my remote perch, I feel that we are approaching the beginning and rebirth of something, not the end.

Joe Biden is the old and funky engine that could bring about real change. By the end of the year, God willing, the pandemic will be under control, the economy will be flourishing, people will be back to work, the conspiracy media will be in court looking over its shoulders. Trump will be meeting with lawyers every day.

He won’t enjoy being on trial.

“I fear,” wrote  Adams,” that in every elected office, members will obtain an influence by noise, not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not earning. By contracted hearts, not large souls. There must be decency and respect.”

What he said.