A lot of folks are peeved at Nancy Pelosi for saying she's not interested in impeaching Donald Trump. I don't think they should be. It reminds me, as so many things these days do, of something that happened in the run-up to the impeachment hearings about Richard Nixon. A man named Thomas "Tip" O'Neill was the House Majority Leader then. There were a number of people who could have screwed up the removal of Nixon had they not done their jobs properly and O'Neill was one of the main ones.
There were Democrats aplenty who wanted to impeach Nixon A.S.A.P. but for a time, O'Neill was an obstacle. His skill as House Majority Leader was that he could count votes better than anyone and he knew how and when to proceed when he didn't have them. One by one, irate Democrat Congressfolks would try to get a vote on impeachment and O'Neill would block them. The evidence was not all in, the case had not yet been built and the votes were just not there.
His logic was that if an impeachment vote was taken prematurely, it would fail and Nixon would be vindicated. Later, when maybe the case was stronger and a vote might have passed, the Republicans would say, "This is old news. We already voted on it and you lost!" It could have killed the momentum of a better-timed effort.
I dunno if that's what Pelosi is thinking right now but she is real good at counting votes.
In a more speculative vein, I had a thought last night about George and Kellyanne Conway. As you know, he's a big shot Republican lawyer and she's Trump's devoted adviser and spokesperson. He tweets that Trump is mentally ill and must be removed from office. She goes on every cable show that will have her and insists Trump is great and good and sane. Trump has taken to calling him "a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!" So you have to think it's got to be fun, fun, fun at the Conway house.
But maybe things aren't what they seem. I may be dead wrong about this but, hey, not knowing what's going on is no reason these days not to post on the 'net. Mr. Conway is a pretty sharp guy and I'm seeing a big "What If?" here. What If Kellyanne has become convinced that Trump is just as looney and dangerous as her hubby is saying? Maybe her special access to Trump has convinced her of this and it's why he's become outspoken about it.
What If they've jointly decided to play a sort of Good Cop/Bad Cop game to bring him down?
What If they jointly decided that the best thing they could do — for the country and her career so she doesn't go down with Trump — would be for her to stay in Trump's good graces? She can always turn on him later…and it might be more effective then. In the meantime, she can maybe nudge him away from some of his more awful ideas while she gathers info, acting like a kind of self-appointed mole.
We're getting a ridiculous number of leaks from inside the White House that Trump said this crazy thing or voiced that unhinged whine. Maybe she's a main source of this kind of info. Maybe she and her spouse are conspiring to keep the public informed about the dangerous guy in the Oval Office: She observes the insanity, he reports it out. And one day, she'll reveal that she has thought for some time Trump was a liar with serious instabilities and she just stayed in his circle to be a witness to what was going on there and to try to help her country.
Yeah, this is a wild speculation but I'm not sure it makes any less sense than the notion that the Conways could remain a couple when each thought the other was helping destroy America. Imagine if in 1992, the deputy campaign manager for George Bush's reelection campaign started sleeping with the chief strategist for the Bill Clinton campaign…
Oh, wait. They did. Forget I said anything.