Trump 44 (+5)
Sanders 39

Trump 45 (+8)
Warren 37

Trump 43 (+9)
Bloomberg 34

Trump 43 (+10)
Buttigieg 33

When almost none of their candidates can even get 40 percent against a president who poll after poll shows has a disapproval rating at or near 50 percent, it’s a striking rebuke by the American public of the Democrats’ leadership.

Bear in mind that the Suffolk/USA Today poll was of REGISTERED voters. Not likely voters.

And Trump’s approval rating, according to Gallup, now sits at 46 percent, which is as high as it’s ever been in their polling.

Any intelligent, responsible elected official would see the direction this is going in and run away from it, knowing there is no legal or factual standard by which it can be justified and it’s all political.

It’s all political and yet the politics of impeachment stink. What does that tell you?

That they see Trump’s conduct as so reprehensible it has to be punished by an impeachment?

That’s horseshit, and everybody knows it. It’s provable horseshit, in that 17 of the 24 Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee had already voted for previous Democrat attempts to impeach Trump before there had even been a phone call between the President and Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky that supposedly created an impeachable offense.

This was literally a partisan kangaroo court. It has far more to do with internal Democrat politics than anything else. It has to do with the Hard Left takeover of the House Democrat Caucus and their making demands on Nancy Pelosi in return for not deposing her as Speaker.

You’ll remember that for a brief time Pelosi had publicly rebuked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “The Squad,” her foursome of moronic socialist female freshmen members of Congress, for the political damage she thought they were doing to her party. AOC’s response was pure rage, and she made threats against Pelosi’s speakership. The two met, and shortly thereafter declared there was no sunlight between them.

And it wasn’t long after that when Pelosi reversed herself and forwarded this clownish impeachment – which she had previously said was a loser and a non-starter given a lack of bipartisan support.

What this comes down to is Pelosi opting to lose her speakership in the 2020 House elections, in which the 30-something new Democrats representing Trump, or swing, districts are going to be wiped out by voters who clearly aren’t impressed either by this or the inattention to real business the time wasted with impeachment represents, over losing it now. Because make no mistake, the Hard Left inside that party, made up of socialists and identity-politics clowns who are unaccountable because they come from safe Democrat districts, demanded impeachment as the price of Pelosi’s near-term survival.

Because they believe their own bullshit, and they believe that the rest of America will agree with their move despite the clear indication we do not. And because they believe impeaching Trump will help their hapless presidential candidates in 2020.

The best thing the Senate’s Republican majority can do is to allow for the longest, most politically destructive impeachment trial possible, allowing Trump to call as many witnesses as he likes and turn the tables on the Democrats as much as he wants. From an American Spectator column yesterday…

Should there not be a hard lesson taught to these people? And should a rancid, nakedly political abuse of House power not be met with a righteous act of political comeuppance?

Of course it should.

McConnell’s wish to snuff the impeachment proceeding for the pointless and stupid political Sin of Onan that it is can certainly be justified, but we are in an age when naked political theater is what remains of statesmanship. And McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate need to understand that dragging us back to some semblance of decorum and restraint depends on punishing the lack of same by his counterparts in the House.

When your dog urinates on the rug, you rub his nose in it if you want to prevent such misbehavior in the future. And that’s what the Senate must do.

Don’t you love a farce?

Ted Cruz had this right. He said in an interview with Glenn Beck last week that President Trump is an American citizen entitled to a defense should he go on trial for his office.

“We’re going to allow the White House and the president to present their defense,” Cruz said. “I believe that means if the president wants to call witnesses, the president should be able to call witnesses.”

He went further: “If the president wants to call Hunter Biden or the whistleblower — whomever the president wants to call.”

That’s correct.

And if Donald Trump believes his defense must revolve around proving the presence of a partisan Deep State that has been attempting to sabotage his presidency even before he won the 2016 election, then by God, Donald Trump ought to be entitled to such a defense.

Even if that means Donald Trump believes he needs to call 99, or 119, or 264 witnesses — including James Comey, John Brennan, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, Joe and Hunter Biden, Loretta Lynch, Eric Ciaramella, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Page, Glenn Simpson, Bruce Ohr, Julian Assange, and Barack Obama himself.

The show must commence even — or perhaps especially — if it means that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were to request to testify. Zelensky would be the first foreign leader to testify at an American impeachment trial, and his testimony would certainly be of interest. What might he say? Perhaps that everything the House impeachment managers say is a lie, that Trump didn’t pressure him, that no aid was held up, that to date there has not been any extraordinary investigative activity done with respect to the Bidens’ corruption, though that is changing due to unrelated events taking place (namely Burisma Holdings’ CEO, who put Hunter Biden on that company’s board, having absconded with several billion dollars), and that Ukrainian actors involved with that country’s previous regime did act on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election.

Zelensky has already made public statements covering every item of the above. Should he testify, which should not be a major surprise if the trial proceeded in full, it will be the single most embarrassing spectacle a political party in any country has ever suffered.

What are the Democrats going to do then? Accuse Ukraine of meddling in the 2020 elections?

Trump is entitled to a defense even if that means the impeachment trial lasts three or even four months. That would be entirely, sorrowfully unfortunate, seeing as though it would likely be late January before such a trial could reasonably begin, and a lengthy impeachment trial would coincide with the Democrats’ presidential primaries in a way that might cause inconvenience.

Specifically, that four of their candidates — Liz Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar — are senators and would therefore be unable to take to the campaign trail. And a fifth, Joe Biden, would be unquestionably just as much on trial as Trump would be.

Such a trial would perhaps conclude in, say, early May — upon which time some 40 states will have had Democrat presidential primary contests. If McConnell were to close up the impeachment shop on April Fool’s Day, only 28 of those primaries would be held. But one can’t be certain that Trump’s full defense could be conducted in so short a time as two months. It’s much better, and safer for the future of the Republic, that a three-month impeachment trial be held in the Senate — in the interest of due process, and so forth, particularly given the questions raised on that score by the Democrats’ hasty and intemperate conduct of their impeachment circus.