True story: I almost burned my house down yesterday afternoon.  My nearly fatal mistake was to put on a pot of my favorite peas to warm on the stove before sitting down to watch a few minutes of the impeachment trial.  I woke up to the smoke detector screaming about the kitchen filled with smoke.  My first instinctive thought was to wonder how someone had managed to shoot me with a tranquilizer dart within the safety of my own home.

After airing out the house, I decided that from that point forward, I'd stay on my feet to watch what might have best been described as Hollywood for ugly people.  Joe Manchin asked a pretty good question: in the past three hundred years, what has changed in the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors?  At some point in his reply, one of the president's defense counselors (I apologize for not taking notes) managed to make the point that President Clinton had actually been accused and proved to have committed criminal behavior, but Democrats and enough Republicans to prevent his removal from office decided that the chief law enforcement officer of the land could break the law with impunity, as long as the crime was related to personal indiscretions of a sexual nature.  Alan Dershowitz made a few excellent points and got a little feisty when Jerry Nadler claimed he was the only legal scholar ever to take the position that high crimes and misdemeanors ought to include actual, serious crimes like treason and bribery.  He got so passionate in his rhetoric that John Roberts eventually had to tell him to wrap it up because Mitch was ready to take their dinner break.

Before this process began, most of the speculation was that Republicans would ask questions of the Democrat managers, and Democrats would question President Trump's defense counsel.  The reality has been that each side has been playing a congressional game of tee-ball, setting itself up with softball questions to see how far its people can hit them. When one side makes a decent point, the next question is inevitably from the opposition leader and says, in essence, okay, let me tee this up for you, and you'd better hit it farther than they just did.

Kind of like a poker tell, the audience can sort of guess whether or not the question recipient likes having to answer by how his response begins.  If he smiles and says, "Thank you for the question!" he feels confident in his answer, but if he says, "I appreciate your question," the confidence isn't the same.

Major points were scored by the Republicans when it was pointed out that President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles after President Obama adamantly refused, inflicting serious damage to the argument that American national security had been threatened by Trump for refusing military aid to Ukraine.  Probably the best work was by Jay Sekulow, who hammered home that the House had rushed through the process to force this debacle into the Senate, and if new witnesses like John Bolton are brought in after the investigation phase was supposedly complete, it sets a new precedent for perpetual impeachment, where the following month, it can be a new demand for testimony from Mick Mulvaney, or whoever will give the Democrats what they think they need to justify Trump's removal.

We almost got into an argument over dinner when Adam Schiff claimed he didn't know the identity of the whistleblower and I audibly called him a liar.  (My son isn't thirty yet and has a heart, so he's still a liberal.  If he turns forty and remains a liberal, I'll start to consider myself a failure as a parent and worry that he doesn't actually have a brain.)

Alan Dershowitz hit several home runs by making analogies to President Obama.  He asked if Obama should have been impeached for drawing a red line on chemical weapons in Syria and then failing to take action when Assad used them, and if we assumed that his refusal to sell the Javelin missiles to Ukraine was a political calculation.

House manager Garcia might have cost the Democrats a crucial vote on additional witnesses when she bristled at a question from Lisa Murkowski about why the witnesses were not called by the House during impeachment and called it a "red herring."  You need Murkowski, Democrats.  Otherwise, you can turn out the lights, because this party is over.

I'm no expert on reading the political tea leaves, but my best guess is that after yesterday, you can stick a fork in the impeachment of Donald Trump, because we're done.  The deathblow might have been delivered by Senator Hawley from Missouri.  His question: "When he took office, Viktor Shokin, Ukraine's prosecutor general, vowed to investigate Burisma.  Before Vice President Joe Biden pressed Ukrainian officials on corruption, including pushing for the removal of Shokin, did the White House Counsel's office or the office of the Vice President's legal counsel issue ethics advice approving Mr. Biden's involvement in matters involving corruption in Ukraine or Shokin despite Hunter Biden's presence on the board of Burisma, a company widely considered to be corrupt?  Did Vice President Biden ever ask Hunter Biden to step down from the board of Burisma?"  

The Republican response to the question was enlightening.  When Joe Biden's staff was approached about the appearance of a conflict of interest by Ambassador Kent, staffers blew him off with the excuse that Joe was distracted by Beau's illness.

Obviously, the question exposed a major chink in the Democrat's armor protecting Joe Biden from scandal because the House manager began her response, "I appreciate the question..."

Meaning she really didn't.

As a parting aside, after typing in that well worn, familiar cliché, I had to wonder if I might be accused by some liberal of racism for typing the word "chink."  How brainwashed by political correctness and afraid of offending others by accident have we all become?

It wasn't that many years ago that I occasionally said things to offend people on purpose.

John Leonard writes novels, books, and occasional articles and blog posts for American Thinker. You may follow him on Facebook or his website (and blog, which includes the AT "rejected" pieces) at southernprose.com.