IMPEACHMENT THEATER OF TROLLS:

And the president’s approval rating? It’s 44.1 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average. The day before the Ukraine transcript was released, it was 45.0 percent. After six weeks of set-your-hair-on-fire-and-do-the-funky-chicken impeachment hoo-ha, the Democrats have succeeded in reducing the president’s support by not quite one full percentage point. Minus red-hot public demand, the Republican senators won’t be escorting the president out the door.

Brooks noted in his column that an Ohio professor discovered that, of 80 students in his class, 78 had not heard about the impeachment saga and all 80 said they were uninterested anyway. Hence the Democrats’ hopecasting that getting the TV networks to sign on as their promotional partners Wednesday might turn their sad charade into a national obsession. “The first hour of a hearing and the first hearing has got to be a blockbuster,” a senior Democrat told CNN beforehand.

So . . . how’d that go? “Impeachment hearings play big on TV, less so with viewers,” ran a headline on, gulp, NBC News? NBC News is a television news outfit. For it to admit its own programming fizzled is not its usual habit. Does McDonald’s post a giant sign outside saying, “Yelp Reviewers Dislike the Quarter Pounder”?

As Yogi Berra said, “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”