From the Washington Post's Robert Costa and Philip Rucker's "Republicans feel anxious and adrift defending Trump":
"In hushed conversations over the past week, GOP senators lamented that the fast-expanding [impeachment] probe is fraying their party, which remains completely in Trump’s grip. They voiced exasperation at the expectation that they defend the president against the troublesome picture that has been painted, with neither convincing arguments from the White House nor confidence that something worse won’t soon be discovered."
As conservative Charlie Sykes recently asked on MSNBC: Hey, Republicans, do you think things are going to get better?
"It feels like a horror movie," said, to the Post, one yearslong GOP senator.
Hollywood horror movies nearly always end with the slashing perpetrator receiving his justly applauded deserts. Yet the horrifying Trump I administration, lurking wickedly behind pretty bushes and slithering under rocks, might well stay on as the doubly sinister Trump II administration — Egads! Look out! — unless Democrats employ some moderate levelheadedness in their selection of a presidential nominee. (Yikes!)
Write Costa and Rucker: "Most GOP senators have been taking cues from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose paramount concern has been maintaining his party’s control of the chamber in next year’s election" — rather than deploring the Trumpian stench of the present and, consequently, helping to safeguard our future.
Meanwhile, treacherous It clowns like Sen. Lindsey Graham see the deodorizing impeachment inquiry as what is truly "dangerous to our country."
In seeming agreement with Graham is Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan: "Secret hearings, selective leaks. And that’s due process? In my America, that’s not due process."
Sullivan, then, was undoubtedly upset by the veritable botulinic buffet of secret Republican Benghazi inquiries and now even more upset by Attorney General Bill Barr's secretive, selectively leaking, unAmerican no-due-process investigation of everyone who helped to finger the Russia-friendly Trump, Campaign & Assoc.
Says the sagacious William Galston, a Brookings senior fellow in governance: "There’s a reason why Profiles in Courage is a very short book."
Five of (merely) eight Republican senators who initially objected to Graham's freakish resolution denouncing the impeachment inquiry as "illegitimate" soon backed off from even a hint of conscience, "leaving only [Utah's Mitt] Romney and Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska as the holdouts," note the Post reporters, who aptly festoon their story with Exorcist-like, Trumpian visages such as this:
In an unmistakable sign of just how pathetically, incompetently Trump is countering House Democrats' professional probe of his assorted iniquities, the totality of his "fight," so far, lies in the damp, dismal form of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's basement, where he "has launched a podcast that he calls an outside 'war room' for the president."
Pleads Missouri's Sen. Roy Blunt — whom I once asked on talk radio why all levels of government, in the right's opinion, are somehow exempt from inflationary effects on their revenue needs but private enterprises are not: no answer — "We need to be thoughtful about waiting for the House and whatever conclusions they reach."
Swinging back to Charlie Sykes' droll observation, however, is a Republican strategist who asks: "What else is out there? What is around the corner?"
Whatever it is, it cannot be good for this impeachable president and congressional allies' public relations, nor can it make any better the foul, fetid, swampish hellhole of Trumpism.