Like some nightmare Greek chorus sounding dolefully from the wings, San Francisco swamp thing Willie Brown is telling Democrats they're about to go down like the Titanic in their obsession with impeaching President Trump.

In his San Francisco Chronicle column, Brown writes:

If the goal was to damage President Trump by formalizing the impeachment inquiry, it's Mission Unaccomplished for House Democrats.

If anything, the vote solidified Trump's hold on power. There were zero GOP defections, meaning we have zero drama heading into the public phase of impeachment. Everyone is pretty much in the same lanes they've been in since the Russian-collusion investigation, the obstruction of justice investigation and every other investigation.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, that gives people little reason to be glued to their screens when House committees take public testimony. The basic story — Trump pressured Ukraine to announce investigations into Democrats that would help Trump — is out there already. People know how they feel about it, and if you believe the polls, they're pretty evenly split on whether the president deserves to be thrown out of office.

The 80-something retired machine pol, who served as state House speaker and San Francisco mayor, and basically made Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Nancy Pelosi, is now like Batman trying to slap sense into Robin or else some miserable pud-knocker of his alliance.

Brown's conclusion is withering:

So the Democrats will spend the next few precious months acting out a pretend cliffhanger to which everyone actually knows the script and the ending. No plot twists in sight. Remember health care, the issue that won so many elections for Democrats in 2018? You might, but they don't seem to.

Come next year, Trump will have an impeachment victory and quite possibly a solid economy. The Democrats will have — what?

For Republicans, he could be called an odd sort of hero.

But actually, he's just a realist.  With no political turf to defend in his retirement, he's just letting the accumulated wisdom of his long political career and his finely tuned ear toward public sentiment take their course.  He has no dog in the fight.  He's just letting the Democrats know what's what, and, entertainingly for us, somehow it's always bad news.

It's not just smiling at the idea of demoralized Democrats, though; it's that he's always right.  He never seems to call one wrong these days.

He warned Democrats early to quit abusing President Trump because Trump was more popular than Democrats liked to admit.

He recognized political talent and went on to make pols such as Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Nancy Pelosi the California powers they are.  Yet his forecast on Harris, saying she'd be unable to carry the load against President Trump in the current presidential race, has also panned out pretty well.

He correctly characterized San Francisco's city government as "useless" and its voters "crazy" as far back as 2014.

He warned that Republican gubernatorial challenger John Cox was trouble for the Democrats, but Newsom would nevertheless win the governor's chair.  Spot on.

And while he was at it, he warned that none of the current Democrat lineup for president was going to cut it, that every last one of them would lose to Trump.  Fingers crossed.

All he's trying to do is slap sense into a far-left party that's gone hopelessly off the rails.  Democrats haven't screamed much about him, maybe because, being Democrats, the man is black, or maybe because he's always on the mark and his warnings have value.  Whatever the reason, it's kept him talking and, for those of us on the outside, given us a snapshot of the reality that constantly evades Democratic public consciousness.  Impeachment's a loser; that's the latest.  When Democrats get tired of losing, they might just start taking his advice.

Keep talking, Willie.  Nothing like a Greek chorus to keep the ground burning under the feet of Trump-crazed Democrats, reminding us all of their coming failures.

Image credit: Nancy Wong via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.