... Doris Kearns Goodwin, a respected, if very partisan, historian has thrown her hat in on the side of impeachment. In doing so, she told the faithful devotees of CNN that the atmosphere at the White House was worse than at any time since the 1850s, and reminded the viewers that that decade culminated in the Civil War.

She must have contracted amnesia from listening to James Comey’s recent professions of inconvenient memory lapses. The atmosphere around the White House was not so terrible in the 1850s, though the standard of leadership from presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan was poor. Goodwin cannot have forgotten the endless riots and demonstrations of the Lyndon Johnson Administration, which she chronicled capably and whose chief personality she well knew. Nor could she have forgotten the bloodless assassination of Richard Nixon, still the great feather in the caps of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, unmitigated fiction though most of the self-righteous ire against Nixon was. The waters were pretty roiled when Bill Clinton became the only president since Andrew Johnson in 1868 to be impeached and tried by the Senate....

The greatest disappointment of all, among those legions I have seen dragooned before the television cameras from the history-writing community is Jon Meacham. The last editor of Newsweek, who piloted the suicide mission of trying to keep the magazine going with nothing but opinion pieces, is a competent historian, but is now chiefly the house spokesman of the Bush family. He informed the usual cast of ciphers on CNN that it was entirely possible that the incumbent president is guilty of treason. When the singular madness of Trumpophobia grips even a fairly reputable biographer of presidents of both parties, the sickness is severe and possibly mortal to its carriers. This isn’t just those who fear eviction from the cozy world of the decaying and inept political elite, or those nauseated by Trump’s schtick; this is a substantial person levelling the most lethal of all possible allegations, betrayal of the country. There is not one scrap of evidence for such a charge.

If Trump’s enemies are so transported by their hatred, fear and revulsion, (and all can be understood up to a point), that they actually railroad a count of impeachment through the House and to the Senate, it will die, and its authors, politically, will die with it. The impeachment case against President Clinton was unjustified, but there was some question of perjury. This is just hysterical enemies talking and screaming to themselves like coyotes into a festival of death, but it is still nonsense and the death will be theirs. It is time to finish this....