By early afternoon Howe felt he had enough men to launch his assault. As the British forces began their advance, the cannonade from Copp’s Hill and British warships ceased. In line formation, the two wings had to negotiate fences and other obstacles as they slowly neared the Provincial line. The men from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were ordered to hold their fire until the enemy drew so close that their musket fire would have its most devastating effect. It was at this time, legend claims, that one of the commanding officers from the colonies ordered: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!“
The musket fire proved devastating when the advancing British came into range.
I think I can speak for my generation when I say that none of us will ever forget the story of The Battle Of Bunker Hill largely because of General Prescott’s famous (and perhaps apocryphal) command.
I also remember being taught that the colonists ran out of shot and had to use whatever they could as a projectile. Nails. Concrete. They fixed bayonets. It was quite a tableau for my impressionable head.
In the end, they had to retreat. But not before we gave the Redcoats a wicked bloody nose. They paid more than we did to take the high ground.
There is no parallel in history that comes to mind more trenchantly than that Revolutionary War battle and where we are at on an impeachment of Donald Trump.
This will be the second time that I’ve given Nancy Pelosi the benefit of the doubt regarding the matter. But the fact is that she is under an extreme amount of pressure. She has to satiate and continue to captivate the angry voters who have seen enough and need impeachment as a balm, and also protect vulnerable blue dogs in key states who cannot call for impeachment if they want to keep their jobs.
The American electorate is fickle; and our politicians have to try to placate a majority of their voters so they can stay in office. I’m pretty far left, but I think I understand and appreciate that this is a delicate balancing maneuver that the Speaker and the Democratic establishment are attempting.
I’ll just say it again for those of you in the cheap seats: impeachment can’t come yet. It’s certainly not for lack of crimes committed by this administration. It is about numbers and timing. It isn’t about Pelosi’s choice at all, and I don’t think she is stringing us along. It would be an enormous and inadvisable gamble to presume that Democrats will go to the polls no matter how much our concerns are ignored because the alternative sucks way more. The Speaker gets that we’re mad and impatient and if she and Democratic leadership learned anything at all from 2016, it’s that significant numbers of lefties (some of who are party faithful) will cut off their noses happily and withhold enough votes that will send the Democrats back to the woods to figure out how they blew an easy election.
Again.
No thank you.
So: let’s talk numbers. Since last tally, 70 representatives were ready to vote for impeachment, 69 of which were Democratic. We needed more than three times that to gain the majority on the question of impeachment. That was June.
As of this writing, that number has grown to 164 Democrats (and Justin Amash). Doing the math, that leaves 54 representatives that need to sign on to notch a simple majority that would pass articles. It’s a majority of Democrats, yes- but QED, those are not the numbers the Speaker needs to launch a successful campaign to impeach. With any luck, it won’t take much longer for the number of YEAS to increase significantly.
Second of all, Nancy only gets one shot at this- so she needs to use a great deal of breath control to bag Trump and all the pieces of shit that abetted his crime spree. The ideal time to drop a bomb on Trump is during the campaign season while he tries to con enough people to vote for his dumb ass again. Making next year difficult, painful and utterly deleterious would be a great play, even if the effort is destined to die in a complicit GOP-controlled Senate.
Let me take this moment as I have in the past to remind you that the best way to get to impeachment is to annoy your representatives to vote yes on the matter. Going on Twitter to scream for Pelosi’s head because she won’t support a measure that would die on the House floor is stupid.
This is our Bunker Hill. We can’t take our shot until it’s the right time. We won’t win in the end. But we will bleed the bastards enough, hopefully enough to tilt what is going to be a contentious process definitively in our favor when the war ends in November 2020.
UPDATE Sep 24: As of 1:55 today, the number of YEAS is now 170. Votes are beginning to cascade in as this strange Ukraine story spreads like a wildfire! Nancy may say the I word a hell of a lot quicker than I calculated…
UPDATE Sep 24: At 5pm, Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the House will be conducting an impeachment inquiry, rendering this post more full of shit than it already was. Now. Now it begins.