ROGER KIMBALL: Yes, Acquittal is Vindication. “The pandemonium at the Capitol was not the cause but merely the pretext for the unprecedented second impeachment by the U.S. Congress of a single individual.”

It was informative to see our rulers’ reaction when — after a long summer in which cities burned, businesses were destroyed, and people were beaten or murdered — just the tiniest taste of civil disorder came home to affect them.

Plus:

I think that an acquittal is a vindication. I know that there are some intermittently conservative organs that disagree. They believe, or at least they say, that Trump’s acquittal does not mean he was vindicated. The proposition that Donald Trump is in the wrong is an analytic truth for them. Like the proposition “all bachelors are unmarried,” they regard it as a necessary truth. It is something inarguable.

It is worth noting, however, that these are the same organs that couldn’t stop berating Trump—the most pro-life, pro-Israel, pro-prosperity, pro-middle class, and pro-American president in decades (maybe ever)—while he was president. And they are also the same organs that, come tomorrow, will be wringing their hands over Joe Biden’s pro-abortion, pro-China, pro-totalitarian attacks on American freedom and prosperity. They prefer whining to wielding power, I suspect, and actually seem to believe that an incompetent mannequin-like Mitt Romney is somehow more preferable as president than someone like Donald Trump.

And poor Peggy Noonan must be really unhappy.

No doubt. Also:

That touches on one of the two main reasons that the Democratic machine wheeled out their impeachment wheeze yet again. They are terrified of the voters—all those embryonic “domestic terrorists” Joe Biden’s Stasi is tracking—who, ignoring the wisdom of their betters, might actually get together and vote someone else like Donald Trump—if not the Bad Orange Man himself—into office again. That mustn’t happen.

They do seem really afraid, don’t they?