Spectacle

Yesterday was a mental health day (I think this is now called 'self care'), spent indoors... in pyjamas, in fact ...and the morning was in front of the televisor watching the federal government make a gigantic ass of itself.

Yesterday, of course, being the public circus part of Michael Cohen's Capitol Hill round robin of committee hearings.

Fittingly, on the local NBC affiliate, it preempted Days of Our Lives. I gotta say that, while the average congressperson is a better actor than the average soap star, the plot wasn't near as coherent and nowhere near as intellectually rigorous. It was every bit as entertaining, though. On a day when I'm lolligagging or sick in bed, I'm a lot more likely to doze off to the goings-on in the fictional town of Salem than I was to the ones in the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday.

Nobody did a very good job accomplishing what were their purported goals, as Popehat blogger Ken White noted in his piece for The Atlantic last night. A quick survey of Facebook and Twitter tells me that precisely zero people had their opinions changed, as this Wired piece notes.

The actual goals of a congressional committee hearing, which is to grandstand for soundbites for the constituents back home, were about all that was accomplished. That nice, beleaguered Mr. Trump was defended and that stubby-fingered Cheetoh Jesus was savaged and everyone got some sentences they can use in the ad copy for their 2020 primary runs.
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