I was going through my routine at Planet Fitness this morning, as is our habit – three times weekly, usually around 8 of the clock; half-past at latest, for an hour on the elliptical and the stair-step with a cool-down on the recumbent. There is a bank of television screens across the middle of the gym, offering all the alphabet networks, plus CNN, Univision, the Planet Fitness channel, and something that has Friends and Seinfeld on rotation during the time that I am not watching any of them. (I have perfected the art of reading my Kindle while stepping and pedaling; after all, being able to read makes the whole exercise thing bearable.)

All the news feeds – four or five of the screens had the same damn unending Schiff show; which is to say that interminable search for solid grounds upon which to impeach a sitting and duly elected president of the USA.

And so far, for all the sturm und drang; the answer to any honest observer would be … no, not so far. The goalposts have been moved so often in the frantic search to take down Orange Man Bad, that they might as well be put on wheels and skidded randomly across the playing field. Today, the main testifying witness, a gentleman who was chyron IDed as the US Ambassador to the European Union, said that there were never any conditions on aid to the Ukraine, which seems not to have been what Rep. Schiff wanted to hear. Honestly, I don’t know for how many more days the main news outlets can run this fishing expedition live, and not produce a single minnow. As Gertrude Stein remarked in another context, “There’s no there there.”

How far will the establishment mainstream media – especially the alphabet news programs go in chasing after the impeachment minnow? As far as they can, I can only assume, having hitched themselves to the Orange Man Bad bandwagon, they must have resigned themselves to go down, down, down. The disappointing thing about this whole Schiff show and the hours of broadcast time, and commentary devoted to it is that there’s a whole lot of news happening elsewhere: Hong Kong may be going up in flames, China may be poised to brutally crack down on dissidents there and in other places on the mainland, the Swedish city of Malmo has been wracked for months by Muslim gang violence – shootings and bombings mostly – the Yellow Vests in France are still protesting, and Dutch farmers are starting to follow suit, , Britain is still wrangling over exiting the European Union, and who knows what the hell is happening in the Ukraine, aside from the spawn of current US political figures treating the place like an ATM machine?

If it weren’t for specialty blogs, foreign newspapers and conservative-leaning websites actually getting in there, asking questions and posting pictures, hardly anyone would have heard about these events, since our own establishment media seems more inclined to just re-write Democrat party news releases.