What a pathetic, sordid spectacle at the U.S. Senate!

Rivaling the antics of Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) eating a bucket of KFC fried chicken at a scheduled May 2019 A.G. Wm. Barr Mueller Report hearing (in which Barr didn't show up), the Senate joined the harlequins of Commedia de Bologne in a grande farce, apparently serious.

The 50 Senate Democrats have long been infected with a wasting disease of the brain, which presented itself most dramatically at the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings.  That is where rules of evidence, and due process in the U.S. Constitution, were replaced by Daemonologie,  a tract written by James I on finding and prosecuting witches.

James I of England first penned Daemonologie on witches, demons, sorcerers, and assorted goblins in 1597, when he was James VI of Scotland, where he was convinced that apparitions of the occult were subverting his reign.

The most famous English witch-finder was Matthew Hopkins, who examined, prosecuted, and executed over 200 witches in East Anglia.  Hopkins penned his own operators' manual on identifying witches, The Discovery of Witches, 1647.

Hopkins was the expert in credentialing witch-finders, an academic industry soon enough visiting Connecticut before 1650, and in full fury at Salem, Massachusetts forty years later.

It would seem the House impeachment managers have taken an extreme liking to James I and Hopkins in persecuting Donald Trump.   But it may be too late.

Donald Trump already mastered Hopkins's book, perfecting a sorcerer's guile, appearing in competing realities from psychopath to Russian agent to statesman, to insurrectionist, now private citizen, outwitting Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Cotton Mather lookalike modern Witch-Finder General.

But how to explain the six Republican senators who voted to uphold the fanciful notion that the proceeding was constitutional, rather than an exercise in entertaining spectral evidence, akin to prosecuting sorcery?

Only one answer suffices.  A brain-eating toxin has invaded the Capitol.

And only one person escaped its ravages: Chief Justice John Roberts.

John Roberts, maligned and belittled for his squishy jurisprudence, this time was the only person who actually read the U.S. Constitution and abided by its words.  Only Roberts had the common sense to socially distance himself from the bonfire of insanity.

And those 44 senators who by their presence sanctioned a "vote" to quash a proceeding that would examine the existence of Donald Trump as a witch should have instead escaped with John Roberts to enjoy a cigar, and a splash of bourbon, along with a game of billiards, or a bowling tournament.