Adam Schiff wraps up impeachment with egg all over his face
With a listing, massively failing impeachment ship to navigate back home, and news focused on Iowa, you'd think House impeachment manager Adam Schiff would want to make his grand exit closing speech with some kind of dignity.
No such luck. He went out like a nut instead, throwing out crazy talk and reminding voters that the whole thing was a cooked up plot by anti-Trump lunatics.
According to Mairead McArdle at National Review, here's Schiff's final pitch to the Senate, seeking to persuade the very tired senators up there past midnight to do what he wants and vote to oust President Trump from office.
Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) said Monday that "a whole range of utterly unacceptable conduct in a president would now be beyond reach" if the Senate acquits President Trump in his impeachment trial.
Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, said during closing arguments in the trial that "Trump could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election, or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and let Jared Kushner run the country, delegating to him the decision whether to go to war."
Like every speech Schiff gives, it's looooong:
Just his opener, that "It's midnight...," gives a portent of how bad it's going to get, because what follows sounds like the midnight ravings of a thoroughly deranged person, steeped deep in his Trump derangement and cooking up ever more fantastic bad dream scenarios.
Trump, he says (the president who tried to buy Greenland from Denmark), might just sell Alaska to the Russians if the Senate doesn't vote to oust him, so the senators had better vote to oust him.
That's the pitch now, and apparently, all he has left following his hours and hours of lecturing against Trump that succeeded only in turning the Senate against him. He tried insults. He tried blocking Republican witnesses while arguing for his own. He tried to stop Rep. Jerry Nadler from insulting more senators.
When the word came down that the Senate had no intention of calling in Schiff's new plate of witnesses, he knew that the game was up. All that hullabaloo for nothing — all he sees now is a strengthened Trump now drawing hundreds of thousands to his rallies and millions to his campaign coffers. The smart thing for him would have been to wrap up and hope no one noticed. A loser project tends to drive voters away.
Instead, he called attention to himself with the nutty claim, invented out of thin air, about Alaska, sounding like a desperate street corner barker.
He's an embarrassment — the last thing he will now be remembered for is the loony Alaska projection, product of his fevered imagination. All he's doing now is reminding voters and senators what a good idea it was to reject the Schiff show. That's egg on his face. Smart politicking, bozo.
Image credit: YouTube screen shot from NBC News.