I’m watching the same duration of the Trump impeachment as I did of the O.J. trial: zero minutes, zero seconds. I find out more than enough from snippets on Twitter. Since impeachment isn’t my beat, I’m not obliged to slog through this farce. But I’m grateful to The Stream’s Al Perrotta, and Will Chamberlain of Human Events, for their patient analyses. We need honest, patriotic journalists parsing the details, so the rest of us don’t have to.

I won’t wade into minutiae of the trial. I really don’t care. Nothing the Democrats could prove, after all their lies and sabotage of our government’s function, should matter at this point. Removing Donald Trump from office now, after three years of Kafkaesque persecution of Trump and his supporters, would be an outrage. Any Republican who votes for it, any “conservative” who supports it, we should see now and always as an foe, worse than Ilhan Omar or Nancy Pelosi since they don’t pretend to be our friends.

Throwing Waste at the Wall to See What Sticks

The Democrats began their quest to overturn the 2016 election at 10 p.m. Eastern Time on election night. They haven’t stopped since. They have thrown every clump of feces in their cage at the wall to see what might stick. Fake claims that Russia hacked our voting machines. An elaborate, totally baseless conspiracy theory of “Russian collusion.” They drew on a corrupt investigation of all the GOP candidates, then Trump in particular, launched by Barack Obama, in a clear abuse of power which really did merit impeachment then removal. That probe trashed the Constitutional rights, and ruined the lives, of innocent Americans like Carter Page, Gen. Mike Flynn, and George Papadopoulos, among others.

We’re supposed to forget about all that now. Ignore three years of ongoing partisan sabotage. And adopt the pose of high-minded constitutionalists, when it suits the Democrats’ power-grab. It’s as if a boxer in a ring had used brass-knuckles, a switchblade, and finally a hatchet. But his opponent, fighting cleanly, successfully disarmed him. The cheating boxer doesn’t then, with his weapons gone, get to demand Marquess of Queensbury rules. Anyone who says he does is clearly on his side, and approves of his cheating.

Let me lay out the consequences that will almost certainly follow if the Senate, with the collusion of resentful, ambitious Mitt Romney or RINO Lisa Murkoswki and others, removes the president.

Does Mike Pence Want to Be President for Ten Months?

Vice President Mike Pence, a smart and honorable man, will become the sitting president. The NeverTrump elites will throw a blow-out party in the Acela Quiet Car (which can fit them all). They’ll have helped the Democrats to destroy their successful rival, whom they hate as much as any of us hated Bill Clinton. The dying GOP establishment will rise from its hospice bed to ensure that Pence gets the 2020 nomination, unopposed. They’ll speak of “party unity.” Millions of Trump voters will be outraged, depressed, disaffected. Good luck turning them out to vote in November. The kind, honest, comparatively low-energy Pence will run and lose. To whom will he lose?

To Bernie Sanders. He’s the most popular, charismatic, and likeable Democrat. He has hordes of fanatical followers. The last concerns big money Democrats had about appealing to more centrist voters will vanish, as the dispirited, zombie Republican party follows its good-hearted new Herbert Hoover to a historic landslide defeat.

Our Very Own Home-Grown Lenin

Bernie Sanders is funny, even charming. He is also apparently a Leninist. Does that sound crazy?

I can hear my inner conformist sighing and whining, “John, you just discredit yourself by saying such outrageous things. Even if they’re true. …”

What If Trump Had Done This?

Imagine if each of the following things were true of Donald Trump:

He’d spent his entire life as an alt-right activist. He’d never worked at a paying job, just lounged around on compounds of far-right groups, spinning Utopian theories. Until he found a way to get elected to public office. Then he’d praised and supported regimes like Pinochet’s, and promoted policies here in the U.S. that mirrored theirs. He’d even taken his honeymoon in apartheid-era South Africa, and appeared shirtless on film singing Boer songs in Afrikaans with far-right white separatists.

Unrepentant, as he ran for president he hired a field operative in Iowa who fantasizes about putting political opponents in camps, or even shooting them dead. When that operative’s remarks went public, Trump wouldn’t fire him or even make any comment.

Sanders’ First Five Year Plan

What conclusion would the media draw, if all that were true of Trump? Of course, none of it is. But it’s all true of Bernie Sanders. Click on the links above and see. Or listen to the latest leak of Sanders’ plans for his first days in office. The Daily Wire reports:

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) team is reportedly preparing “dozens” of Executive Orders for “President Sanders” to sign in his first several days in the White House, effectively reversing Trump Administration policies and enacting a comprehensive, socialist agenda without the advice and consent of Congress.

…

The document discusses signing executive orders that “would reverse President Trump’s policies on immigration, including an immediate halt of border wall construction, removing a limit on accepting refugees for asylum, and reinstating the Obama-era DACA program,” according to National Review.

…

“The list of potential executive orders includes unilaterally allowing the United States to import prescription drugs from Canada; directing the Justice Department to legalize marijuana; and declaring climate change a national emergency while banning the exportation of crude oil,” according to the [Washington] Post. “Other options cited in the document include canceling federal contracts for firms paying less than $15 an hour and reversing federal rules blocking U.S. funding to organizations that provide abortion counseling.”

That’s just the beginning, the first 100 days, a list of things Sanders could order on his own authority. Just imagine what irreversible changes he’d put into place with the Democratic Congress that would likely come along with his landslide. Once the borders were duly opened, how many red states would flip? Could we ever elect another pro-life president or supporter of religious freedom again? 

Better Sanders Than Trump?

What to say of Republicans or “conservatives” who are willing to risk such catastrophic policies, out of their sheer personal hatred for Donald Trump? They’re not on our side. I don’t count them as patriots. They remind me of the far-right Frenchmen in the 1930s who so hated Jewish, center-left Prime Minister Leon Blum that they’d quip, “Better Hitler than Blum.”

The French nation in 1940 was as demoralized, divided, and depressed as the GOP would be in the wake of Trump’s removal. Though the French had more tanks of higher quality, plenty of top notch planes, and a large well-provisioned army, it took just one successful offensive by the Germans for the nation to fold like a circus tent. Then the far-right had its wish. France traded Blum for Hitler. And sure enough, some far-right wing Frenchmen rushed to collaborate with him. To grab little scraps of power from the enemy of French freedom and independence.

If the NeverTrump faction gets its wish and we elect a Leninist president, will its leaders still preen that they are the voice of “prudent,” “principled” conservatism? Will Sanders even bother to seek their collaboration? I doubt it. Leninists rarely toss their useful idiots anything more nourishing than scraps.