Ken Kesey's novel of 1962, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, became a play and then a film in 1975 starring Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, the new patient who is not mentally ill but hopes for a shorter stay than what he was sentenced to at a prison farm.

Kesey was the counter-culture hero of his day, a devotee of LSD who embraced every bit of what that term meant in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  That said, he was a gifted writer, and the book and film were huge hits for good reason.  The film was profound for the injustice and cruelty it portrayed.

Those of us of a certain age have probably not given a thought to Kesey's book or film in decades...until now.  Watching Adam Schiff's ridiculous impeachment "inquiry" hearings is like descending into the cuckoo's nest, that psychiatric realm of the lethal Nurse Ratched.  Adam Schiff is Nurse Ratched, the vicious and tyrannical head nurse of the psychiatric unit.  It's as though he has walked off the pages of Kesey's book!

The dark underbelly of the novel is the truth that she is the sickest character.  She "exercises near-total control over those in her care, including her subordinates.  She will not hesitate to restrict her patients' access to medication, amenities, and basic human necessities if it suits her manipulative whims" (Wiki).  This pretty much perfectly describes both Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.  The fictional Nurse Ratched is a vile, cruel person, the villain of the novel.  Schiff's colleagues on the Intel Committee are apparently as closely controlled as Nurse Ratched's inmates.  Not one of them has had the courage to oppose Schiff's rabid obsession to wreck the Trump presidency, tearing the country apart in the process. 

The message of Kesey's book is the contrast between the cruel insanity of Nurse Ratched and the essential humanity of her inmates.  Ratched is who came to mind watching Schiff's hearings meant to depose our president.  Schiff is nearly an exact parallel in real life, a dismal example of what the Democratic Party has become: angry, vicious, and bitter.

One does not have to have seen the film to grasp the analogy.  What most characterizes those who testified at Schiff's little witch hearings?  Indignation that their preferred candidate lost the 2016 election.  These overly self-important people should be dismissed out of hand for what they are, nasty partisans of the worst sort who love to gossip and gossip a lot.  Every one of them has sold his soul for political gain, for membership in the right club if one wants to be part of the D.C. elite.  Fiona Hill has worked with Soros, Christopher Steele, Stephen Halper, and Josef Mifsud at various times.  She is as partisan as they come despite her assertion that she is not.  So is the oleaginous Vindman, which was obvious to anyone watching.  One had to wonder why he was so fearful of an investigation into Ukraine corruption.  Sondland was a verbal mess of ambiguities and hearsay. 

Trump won the election to rid the government of exactly this type of entrenched bureaucrats, who think they control the government and foreign policy.  He should have fired the lot of them the day he took office.  Clearly, he should not have appointed Sondland to be ambassador to the E.U.  This crowd is offended by Trump's notion that as president, he is the last word on foreign policy.  The Democrats are the Deep State, in their minds superior to any Republican.  They never minded Ted Kennedy's attempt to subvert Reagan or any of the abrogations of the Constitution committed by the Obama administration.  

Until now, few of us knew or believed just how determined the Left is to invalidate the U.S. Constitution.  What Pelosi and Schiff are doing is criminal, and they both know it.  They have so little respect for the American people that they are willing to perpetrate this sham impeachment nonsense because we voters are of no concern to them. 

In Kesey's book, McMurphy is lobotomized on Nurse Ratched's orders, and his friend subsequently kills him out of love and mercy.  It is a gripping story because, as all great stories do, it pits good against evil.  Nurse Ratched is the personification of evil and the perfect fictional analogue to both Pelosi and Schiff.  They are both dangerous to all Americans, as are the Democrats who do their bidding.  That Schiff's Democrat colleagues do not reject his fraudulent case for impeachment is a sad commentary on the moral sense of these members of Congress.  Except for the two who voted against the impeachment inquiry, John Drew and Collin Peterson, they have all sold their souls for political capital.  They are, each and every one of them, a disgrace — spineless cowards who fear momentary political punishment over their love of country.

Leaks about what the Horowitz report will say are all over the map, but if the arrogant thugs who set out to stage a coup the moment Trump was elected are not charged with the crimes they committed, the American people will lose all faith in our federal law enforcement institutions, the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ.  If they are not charged with the crimes they committed, the perpetrators will be emboldened to further abuse their power against those whose political ideologies they oppose.  If they are not charged with the crimes they committed, it will mean we are officially a third-world nation run by crooks and liars and that the America we once knew and loved is over.  We will be as ruined as the cuckoo's nest.