House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter once said her mother would “cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding.” But at her Thursday press conference, Pelosi looked instead like someone who had been cut off at the knees and could not stump her way out of the mess she was in.

Pelosi’s pitifully transparent lie that her party’s attempts to impeach President Trump had “absolutely nothing to do with politics” and her embarrassing rant that her Catholic upbringing had taught her a “heart full of love and to always pray for the president,” were not — despite the left’s desperate #don’tmesswithNancy spin — signs of strength but of panic and weakness. Her party’s ascendant left flank has maneuvered her into a position that is both morally and politically unfeasible, and she knows it. Unless moderate Blue Dogs somehow manage to thwart the vote, Pelosi will be forced to “lead” her party into precisely the partisan and ill-prepared impeachment she warned against for so long.

While I confess the vengeful Little Rascal that dwells within my breast hopes that this pack of Democrat fools is walking straight into Cocaine Mitch’s House of Horrors — a long drawn-out Senate trial that will include subpoenas for Hunter and Joe Biden and perhaps the phone records of McCarthyite bad guy Adam Schiff — it may be that cooler rascals will prevail. As they did during the vicious attempt to smear Brett Kavanaugh, Senate Majority Leader McConnell and his crew may simply choose to let the public judge for themselves between the left’s hysterical abuse of the system and the right’s fair and balanced adherence to procedure. Donald Trump may suffer from occasional lack of impulse control, but it’s pretty clear which side has utterly lost it now.

What’s sad to me about all this noise, is that it drowns out the quieter voices discussing the things that really matter: why the wiser people in this country elected Donald Trump in the first place, and what his election tells us about the nation’s pain. The left’s ferocious defense of the power of its unconstitutional and unconscionable deep state, and the Never Trump right’s continued eye-rolling about the president’s attempts to give some semblance of fairness and sanity to our international political and trade relations both ignore what, to me, is the most important fact about our current political moment.

Americans are killing themselves in record numbers. According to a Senate report released in September, “the combined mortality rate from suicides and alcohol-related deaths is higher than at any point in more than 100 years. Suicides have not been so common since 1938, and one has to go back to the 1910s to find mortality from alcohol-related deaths as high as today’s.” The most dramatic rise in such deaths has been since 1999 among non-Hispanic whites.

Whoever tells you they know the reason for this is lying. But it’s safe to say this much: whatever we were doing in this country during the Bush and Obama administrations, it wasn’t working. Left-wing encroachments on freedom in order to build a perfect socialist state: not working. Right-wing global free trade theories that gave the jobs of American workers to Chinese slaves: not working. This is why — as former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal: “Populist patriots reject the elites of both parties. They believe President Trump defends their cultural beliefs from the left and their economic interests from the right. They see open borders, illegal immigration and multiculturalism threatening to redefine what it means to be an American, while unfair trade and a rigged tax code endanger their jobs.”

And so the left’s elites stage this disgraceful impeachment attempt while the right’s elites sniff at the president’s efforts to turn the tide.

We are going to have to find a new way forward, one that combines the legitimate concerns of the left — crony capitalism is stifling economic mobility — and the realistic wisdom of the right — free markets trump controlled economies every time. And, in my opinion, it is all going to have to be governed by and possibly powered by a revitalized religious vision. Because whether we move mountains or give all our goods to feed the poor, without love, we are nothing.

I am disgusted by the left and their mindless struggle for power, and disappointed by those on the right who will not face the failures of their philosophy. But my faith is in God and the American people. Beneath all the noise of the moment, they are both still here.