I’m pretty sure the meltdown that SoS Mike Pompeo had tonight after NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly publicly handed him his right testicle in an egg cup (which, by itself will go down in the Annals of Journalistic Greatness alongside Ed Murrow’s gelding of Joe McCarthy) may well be seen as the tipping point for the demise of the grift/extortion/fraud/snakeoil/agitprop enterprise otherwise known as The 21st Century Republican Party.
This episode is so quintessentially Trumpian and GOPian (“gee-oh-PEEin’) that it should be forever deemed both the moment that un-woke America shook itself awake, and the plunge though the ice on the frozen lake that prompted that awakening.
But what prompts this essay isn’t the nature of this putative historical pivot-point itself, but rather just one small, adjacent data point that occurred to me as the fan-propelled shit was still in the process of splattering the halls of power in Washington DC:
As if anyone is looking for yet another compelling reason for the Trump Administration to keep all their henchpeople from testifying in the current Impeachment Trial, this timely, documented and disgusting disintegration of the psyche of America’s “premier” foreign service officer (whose name is at or near the top of that list of subpoenaed accomplices) may represent a category that ranks ahead of “Witness Perjury Trap” and just behind “Covering Psychopath #1’s Ass.”
New Obstruction of Congress Justification Category: “Co-Conspirator Meltdown Likelihood.”
Of course, there’s also Overriding Category #1 (which suffuses the whole list): “Rank Cowardice.”