This is what trying to make a case when you don’t have one looks like.

Retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz gave what may be the most persuasive case against impeaching President Donald Trump while in the well of the U.S. Senate on Monday evening.

Speaking as a representative of Trump’s defense team, the lifelong liberal Democrat urged senators to not “let the feelings about one man, strong as they may be, cause irreparable damage” to the fate of other presidents. “Passion and fears of the moment must not blind us,” he pleaded.

Before Dershowitz took the lectern before the Senate, there was considerable debate about an obviously strategically-timed leak of information from former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s unpublished book.

Dershowitz had an answer to the New York Times’s leak in which Bolton believed the worst about President Trump’s delay of aid to Ukraine, saying it was “inconceivable” to the founders that a quid pro quo was an impeachable offense.

As I’ve been saying right along: EVEN IF TRUMP ACTUALLY DID EVERY SINGLE LAST THING THEY COMPLAIN ABOUT, THERE’S STILL NOTHING REMOTELY CRIMINAL ABOUT ANY OF IT. The one and only thing this man is actually guilty of is trying to do what he was elected to do. “Quid pro quo” conditions on foreign aid, is it? One of the reasons his supporters voted for him is because he said he hoped to eliminate whacking great gobs of foreign aid ENTIRELY.

So riddle me this: if investigating the obvious corruption of a manifestly corrupt politician like Senile Uncle Gropey and his odiferous offspring is to be off the table just because he’s running for office yet again, to whom does that new standard apply? Is it just Gropey & Son? All Democrat-Socialist grifters and goniffs? Can we expect the same hands-off consideration for Republican office-seekers too? Is this sweet little break for all politicians, or just state level and up? Is it for presidential aspirants only?

It’s a basket of bollocks, is what it is. To wit:

When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for a seat on the US Supreme Court, not only did the GOP have a clear majority in the Senate and, thanks to Harry “no, really, it was an exercise band not a gay escort that knocked my eye loose” Reid there was no filibuster to contend with, but Kavanaugh seemed an smart, doctrinaire, and squeaky clean conservative. Everyone expected the left to attack his opinions, but there were no skeletons here.

Then came the accusations by fabulist Christine Blasey Ford about an incident that took place in high school (she couldn’t provide an exact time or location) when she was sexually assaulted by a young Kavanaugh. Close on the heels of that allegation, a woman named Deborah Ramirez claimed Kavanaugh, while a college student, had waggled his penis in her face. Then we were treated to a soon-to-be convicted felon named Michael Avenatti producing a woman named Julie Swetnick who claimed that Kavanaugh ran a gang rape ring. A woman later identified as Judy Munro-Leighton claimed Kavanaugh raped her in a car.

All of these allegations were false. They were all easily batted down. But they served a common purpose. What should have been a pro-forma hearing of two or three days, followed by a confirmation vote turned into a month-long ordeal that involved a “supplemental” FBI investigation. And the volume of similarly themed allegations left some people wondering if there was a pony underneath that pile of horse dung, was Brett Kavanaugh a serial sexual predator in the Bill Clinton mode?

If one looks at the Trump impeachment trial, one sees the outlines of a similar pattern.

Oh, one most certainly does. And there’s a reason for that: as with Kavanaugh, as with many others going all the way back to Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, now taken to truly stupefying extremes with Trump, these are assuredly NOT matters of “principle,” of “conscience,” of concern for “our democracy” or the Constitution. These are no more than tactics, stratagems, subterfuges—sleazy partisan black-ops mounted by conniving, twisted, soulless DC shitweasels sick on their insatiable greed for power and all that comes with it.

Slow-motion suicide update! When you got nothin’, you got…nothin’ to lose.

So what happens in the never-ending impeachment story, once the current impeachment indictment leads to an inevitable Senate vote of exoneration?

Another Stormy somewhere? A follow-up to Operation Crossfire Hurricane? Tax returns redux? Whistleblower 2.0? Another New York Times anonymous op-ed resister? Bob Woodward’s sequel? More leaked phone calls? Another impeachment hearing, and another impeachment vote? Schiff’s new version of a presidential call? One more Ivy League psychiatrist distance-diagnosing Trump as nuts? An emoluments clause do-over? More FISA warrants? A newly discovered Trump phone call to Poland, Romania, or Mexico? Lt. Colonel Vindman’s twin?

I mention these post-impeachment psychodramas because they are symptomatic of a sick Democratic patient. Yet the endless effort to destroy Trump before the election in the progressive mind has a certain logic given the current Democratic dilemma.

The Democratic Party is currently struggling with the weakest field of candidates since 1972 or 1984, well apart from the irony that a party that hectors the nation on proportional representation and disparate impact is fine with an all-white debating stage.

The Democratic platform will likely include the “Green New Deal,” a wealth tax, Medicare for All, tuition debt cancellation, higher income taxes, veritable open borders, an end to deportation and perhaps ICE as well, reparations, and a leftwing version of Obama’s failed foreign policy.

In other words, the Democratic agenda is weaker even than the unlucky candidate who will be expected to run on it.

Gee, guys, didja ever consider maybe rethinking some of those century-plus-old collectivist shibboleths of yours and trying out some new ones that might actually, y’know, work for a change?

Case: CLOSED update! No matter how empty, how weak, how just plain bad you may think the Democrat-Socialist “case” is…it’s worse.

The House managers’ argument is simple. It alleges that President Trump withheld military assistance from Ukraine in order to force that country’s new president to investigate — among other things — why and how former Vice President Biden’s son became a director of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. A subsidiary argument is that Trump also refused to provide, for the same reason, a White House meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky.  In withholding the assistance and the meeting, the House managers argue, Trump used the power of the U.S. government for his own political purposes — a corrupt act that they claim warrants his impeachment.

The president’s lawyers, however, in their short two-hour summary of what they will say this week in more detail, fatally undermined this case. They began with the famous July 25 transcript that recorded a conversation that day between the two leaders. In the transcript, as the lawyers pointed out, neither Trump nor Zelensky made any reference to the military equipment for Ukraine that Trump was allegedly using to pressure his counterpart. (Zelensky did mention that Ukraine was “almost ready” to buy more Javelin anti-tank weapons, but they were not part of the withheld assistance.)

Even more important, there is nothing in the transcript that suggests Zelensky was aware — at least on July 25 — that anything was being withheld from Ukraine. Obviously, Trump could not be pressuring Zelensky by holding back military assistance if the latter was not aware of it. This is a fatal flaw in the House managers’ argument.

The president’s lawyers then produced strong circumstantial evidence that officials in Ukraine were not aware, until Aug. 28, that anything was being withheld. Through the rest of July and almost all of August, U.S. officials who would regularly hear from their Ukrainian counterparts heard nothing about the military assistance. But on Aug. 28, Politico published an article saying that Trump was withholding aid. This immediately set off a storm of calls from officials in Ukraine to their U.S. counterparts, showing that Ukrainian officials had been unaware that anything was being delayed. Again, if those officials had been in the dark, Trump could not have been using withheld aid to force Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.

What’s left for Senate Democrats is an attempt to get 51 votes for additional witnesses. But it’s a fool’s errand. Now circulating in the media is a story about a book by John Bolton in which he allegedly says the president directed him to hold up delivery of the assistance until Biden was investigated. The president no doubt says many things to many people that he trusts. But all these statements of intention are irrelevant if he never told the Ukrainians that the assistance was being withheld. Without such knowledge, President Zelensky was not being pressured.

There’s simply no “there” there. Bottom line: the Shampeachment farce is not about a single damned thing the lying Democrat-Socialists claim it is, and they know it full well. In reality, it’s about two elections: the one they lost in 2016, and the one they fear they can’t win in 2020. Period, full stop, end of story.