A common experience in public schools is when some smart aleck decides to waste everyone’s time by pulling the fire alarm. The people in charge have to take it seriously. There’d be hell to pay if there was a fire and it was ignored. So, everybody has to file outside, usually in the rain or cold. Then the teachers have to check the whole school before the business of learning can resume. Or as close to learning as can be achieved in public schools these days.

Since October, that’s what’s been going on in Washington. Nancy Pelosi decided it would be fun to pull the impeachment fire alarm. We’ve all been standing outside in the cold since, with the Democrats giggling at all the trouble they caused and how cool they are.

As more than a few have pointed out, the Democrats seem strangely scared of democracy lately. They won’t accept the result of the last presidential election, and are making noises like they won’t accept the next one either if it doesn’t go the way they want. People notice that type of behavior.

When Obama was elected, I commented to a friend that the best which could be expected from his administration would be four years of nonsense and a lot of bad laws to repeal. That proved optimistic. Obama lasted eight years, and we’ve barely made a start at cleaning up the legislative mess he left. But he was president, duly elected, for better or worse. We were stuck with him until the next election. The country had the opportunity in 2012 to trade in Obama for Romney, but Mitt didn’t pass the smell test (and his odor hasn’t improved since, to be honest). Republicans concluded that Romney was nothing more than Obama in whiteface and stayed home on election day. Perhaps they hoped that another four years of the affirmative action president would help race relations... Didn’t work out that way.

The point is that the way our system works gives a president a full term to govern. Then there’s a performance review in the form of another election. There have been good presidents and bad presidents, and a whole lot of mediocre ones. But so far, we’ve been willing to afford them all four full years to show what they can do. And it takes quite a bit to make us cut that short. In fact, the closest we’ve come to tossing out a president between elections was Nixon in 1974. And he actually resigned before it got to that point. I was too young at the time to really pay attention, but I suspect Nixon’s problem was a combination of stepping on too many toes in Washington and getting the blame for losing the Vietnam war. Vietnam was the first war we lost, and the country was going to take it out on somebody. Nixon was in the wrong place at the wrong time, regardless of how crooked or how competent he was.

The next impeachment was Clinton, for whom I was old enough and engaged enough to watch and learn from. There is no doubt that Slick Willy was guilty of everything he was impeached for, and more. Still, in retrospect, we shouldn’t have bothered. At that point the American people knew how corrupt and incompetent Bill Clinton was, but the economy was still riding the Reagan boom and the next guy would be along in a couple of years. Granted, Clinton and his cronies were sowing the seeds of disasters which wouldn’t show up for years, but we didn’t know that then. So, he got a pass.

Which brings us to the present tantrum the Democrats have been throwing about Trump. The biggest problem Democrats have with Trump is that he’s a winner in almost every sense of the word. Trump is one of those rare individuals who is successful whatever he tries his hand at. Fortunately, Trump loves this country and decided to help fix what’s wrong with it. Perhaps it’s true what Otto von Bismarck said: “God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States of America.”

The American voter is smarter than politicians tell themselves. We might go along with some stupid stuff (ObamaCare, solar power subsidies, and low-flush toilets) simply because it’s too much trouble to try and stop before they collapse under the weight of their own foolishness. But, if you think we’re going to go along with tossing out the first president in thirty years who actually listens to us, and is doing a great job in the process, you don’t really have a firm grasp on reality. People can see that Trump’s impeachment is nothing more than a cheap political stunt, and a childish one at that. We’re not going to trade in a winner for that lying bunch of losers.

In America, if a party loses an election, they’re supposed to use the time until the next one to figure out what they did wrong. If we, as a populace, elected the wrong man, we’ll figure that out on our own. And if you, as a political party, haven’t learned your lesson by the time the next election rolls around, we might just decide to stick with that reprobate until you come up with someone we like better.

What really pisses us off is when you try to pull some cheap, nasty trick like impeaching a president who not only hasn’t done anything wrong but is doing a bang-up job. It shows that you really don’t understand how thing are supposed to work. It also shows that you are pathetic losers, and sore losers at that. Impeachment is serious stuff, Nancy. The founders put it in the Constitution for when the president is an actual threat to the republic, not just a threat to your job. So don’t screw around with it when it’s not really needed. Keep that crap up and you’ll get sent to the principal’s office come November.