The GOP has thrown it ALL away on Trump. All that's left is a circle jerk of rampant stupidity, which will forever define this era. The "system" based upon using people up, had to use EVERYONE just to pretend it wasn't broken.
This impeachment was the last chance to save the Party. However, epic greed and asinine hubris prevented them from considering that option. Now, they've bolted the Party to an out-of-control megalomaniac...
This impeachment farce is now running entirely along party lines. Which is making a mockery of a Constitutional process. No witnesses, hence no real trial. History will say it was a Third World Kangaroo court. Nevertheless, it has had the fatal effect of directing all attention away from the real world and putting the spotlight on Circus Trump.
Few if any Republicans seem to understand what is now at stake. From a markets perspective, stocks are ginned up beyond all control to create fake pre-election hype. Secondly from a system perspective, now the entire U.S. capitalist system is leveraged to explosion, as never before in history. And third, arguably most importantly from an ideological perspective - all conservative principles have been wholesale abandoned to keep a known con man in power.
I used to be a hardcore libertarian, before I recognized that right wing principles were being weaponized against the U.S. workforce. After that, I wanted no part in the ongoing liquidation of the middle class to fatten offshore bank accounts. I certainly didn't want my own stated principles to be abused for evil intent.
That gambit got the GOP as far as 2008 and global financial collapse.
Now, the party has gone all the way and abandoned ALL of its former principles, merely to keep a known con man in power. They never knew when to stop begging for power. Now, all democratic principles have been abandoned. All fiscal principles abandoned. And all monetary principles now in the hands of a bankruptcy expert. In other words, in order to win a battle they lost the war. They squandered their credibility and ideals in every direction. All just to make bailout queens richer, at the expense of the middle class.
To say that history will not be kind is a ludicrous understatement. Today's fools in the Senate have not even the slightest sense of history or perspective on how this will look in retrospect. Today's masses are reveling in the zeitgeist of mass insanity.
The Republican Senate in 1974 made a shrewd calculation that paid off - to impeach Nixon and excise the cancer from the GOP. This current band of idiots just bolted themselves to a known con man.
For eternity.
The abandonment of principles however, is where it will really hurt the Libertarian movement. Now those ideals have been hijacked by con men and weaponized against the populace. When this all explodes, those "freedom" values will be associated with rampant criminality. Which points to the root cause of ALL problems: Selling credibility to the highest bidder. Those who truly value freedom should never have worshipped the false idol of self-interest at ALL costs. Some amount of moderation should have been in order for a festival of greed that history will regard as being nothing more than an epic Roman Orgy.