Despite knocking the entire world on its ass last week with the assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, T-Rump is still quivering about impeachment — he knows bad shit when he smells it:

The Impeachment Hoax, just a continuation of the Witch Hunt which started even before I won the Election, must end quickly. Read the Transcripts, see the Ukrainian President’s strong statement, NO PRESSURE – get this done. It is a con game by the Dems to help with the Election!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2020

Big pop today (Forbes): ‘Former national security advisor John Bolton said Monday he is willing to testify in the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Trump, a dramatic reversal that, if it takes place, could provide vital information and potentially pressure moderate Republicans to vote for Trump’s removal from office.’

However, a big ant-pop is that war-monger Bolton has always craved war (regime-change) with Iran, and if the T-Rump gives him that candy corn, Bolton just might lie his ass-off about everything/anything Ukrainian during the Senate trial. He has a book deal, too, where the spicy bits want to end.
Charles Schumer tried to cover the bases: ‘“Given that Mr. Bolton’s lawyers have stated he has new relevant information to share, if any Senate Republican opposes issuing subpoenas to the four witnesses and documents we have requested they would make absolutely clear they are participating in a cover up.”‘

Meanwhile, total-T-Rump toady Lindsey Graham is trying to change rules/push-back the goalposts: “If we don’t get the articles this week, then we need to take matters in our own hands and change the rules … so we can start the trial,” Graham said during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.’
Nancy Pelosi continues playing the game on the right edge, keeping the Articles of Impeachment out of the hands of the Senate until some semblance of “fairness” (Republicans, HA!) can be ascertained within that asshole august anti-body. If she can hold out until Feb. 2 — T-Rump’s State of the Union — it would be fantastic.

In the interim, and the cries of war — Hesameddin Ashena, a top adviser to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, displayed some smarts yesterday:

We have ZERO problems with the American people. We even achieved deals with previous US administrations. Our sole problem is Trump. In the event of war, it is he who will bear full responsibility.

— Hesameddin Ashena (@hesamodin1) January 5, 2020

The Iranians know the T-Rump is an idiot child, vain and mean-spirited — they’re going for the brain set. No one, even the US military, know what the fuck they’re doing, or what might happen in the next hour, week, month. Any ability to talk our way out of this shit is gone johnson.
And from all indications, the current scene is horribly resembling 2003 and the run-up to the Iraqi war — we know how well that started, and 17 years later, seemingly has never ended. Lies and more lies.
The conclusion to a decent analysis by CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour late this afternoon:

We have yet to learn about the strength of the evidence that led to Soleimani’s assassination.
The question has never been whether Soleimani was a malign influence, but whether his assassination was a wise or proportionate response.
Israel and the US had him in their sights throughout his bloody campaigns, yet never pulled the trigger for fear of what would come next.
In 2008, Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer he thought George W. Bush should have been impeached for lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
We are still feeling the blowback from that fatally flawed Iraq war.
One can only shudder at the gale force of another one.

This ‘another one‘ has been prompted by a vile, pathological, full-blown lying-asshole, so what about that ‘evidence‘ for the Soleimani killing — apparently, all of it is just asshole-bullshit:

“An imminent threat is what you would need to justify taking an action in self-defense,” Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale University and a former national security lawyer in the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel, told the Washington Post.
Although the Trump administration has repeatedly used the phrase “imminent threat” in the days since announcing the airstrike, Hathaway noted that it wasn’t used in the Pentagon’s initial statement on the matter.
“It makes me wonder whether the lawyers realized that they had a problem on their hands,” she told the Post.

Again, in Pinball’s immortal words: “We be fucked.”

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Seated Pierrot,’ found here).