THERE IS STILL NO [EXPLETIVE DELETED] MOMENT.

James "Clusterf**k Nation" Kunstler, no fan of Our President, nonetheless had an impression of California representative Adam "Pencil Neck" Schiff's closing statement that mirrored mine.

Finally, you’re left with that image of Adam Schiff sitting stock straight in the big chair with pursed lips and eyes bugged out, as in a very certain species of lunacy heretofore only seen in Canis latrans of Cartoon-land when, say, he has overrun the cliff’s edge clutching an anvil to his bosom. What was he thinking when he hatched this latest quixotic chapter in the ignominious crusade to reverse the 2016 election?

It appears as though no minds have been changed in the course of the public impeachment hearings, which I have mostly ignored, in preference to finishing the yard work and working on the railroad whilst listening to professional hockey or Northern Illinois basketball on the radio.  "House impeachment proceedings have helped — not hurt — President Trump’s approval in the eyes of voters, and in the latest survey, his rating has turned positive thanks to a massive revolt against impeachment by independents."

Here's why that matters.  Back during the interminable (well, it was only two years, but it crowded out the winding down of the Vietnam War and the first oil shock and the end of Moon landings, for what looks like well over half a century) Watergate investigations, the denouement came after Alexander Butterfield disclosed the existence of Lyndon Johnson's vanity taping system.

It wasn’t known then just how damning the tapes would be. But they would prove that Nixon had tried to cover up the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel on June 17, 1972.

As White House deputy chief of staff, Butterfield managed the president’s West Wing schedule. He knew that in February 1971 a voice-activated taping system was installed in the Oval Office and other areas because he ordered the Secret Service to do it. Only a handful of people knew of its existence. And if not for Butterfield’s revelation, the system might have stayed secret.

That's the process part of the story, with these tape machines an improvement over what President Johnson had installed. As is, apparently, the outcome.

Nixon fought as hard as he legally could to hold on to the tapes. He even ignored suggestions that he burn them. Nixon’s lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that the tapes were protected by executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, the justices decided differently. By a vote of 8 to 0 — Justice William Rehnquist recused himself — Nixon was ordered to turn over the tapes.

Fifteen days later, the president of the United States resigned.

“If you didn’t have the tapes, then there would have been an ambiguity about all of this,” [reporter Bob] Woodward said at a Washington conference in April. “It’s the clarity of the tapes. The people who listened to them, particularly Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, would not only deal with the substance, but it was the rage that Nixon would get in about small things and the indifference to the law.”

A Vox writer, Dylan Matthews, would like to believe that the Trump administration's archive of transcripts is the contemporary equivalent of Mr Nixon's secret tapes.

White House officials moved what the whistleblower describes as the “official word-for-word transcript” of Trump and the Ukrainian president’s call to a “separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature” — even though a White House official said the call contained no sensitive national security information.

It gets worse: “This was ‘not the first time’ under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.”

The allegation, to be clear, is that the Trump administration has been stashing transcripts of normal phone calls Trump made in a highly classified storage system so that they don’t get out and embarrass the president.

Mr Matthews expands on the "rage" the Post story alludes to.

The White House tapes proved not only that Nixon was involved in covering up the Watergate break-in, but that he was a vicious anti-Semite who traded conspiracy theories with his aide Henry Kissinger and that then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan went on a racist rant to Nixon assailing “those monkeys from those African countries” at the UN.

What neither the Post retrospective nor the Vox analogy tell you, dear reader, is that the Nixon adminstration engaged in what they referred to as a modified limited hangout (still a search string, fire up your search engine and see) in which they released edited transcripts of their tapes (these later collected into a best-selling book) in which many salient passages were redacted with [inaudible] or [characterization omitted] or [expletive deleted].

Those redactions angered more than a few people who had voted for Richard Nixon, whether enthusiastically, or as a better option than George McGovern, and they destroyed whatever support there might have been for Mr Nixon as an exemplar of Quaker rectitude.  Therefore, Republican Members of Congress and Republican Senators had less reason to fear voter anger than their contemporaries today do.  There's more than a little agreement among Trump voters that they elected him to fire the kind of careerists that are calling out irregularities.