After successful disengagement of forces in both major areas of the Donbas in recent weeks, French President Emmanuel Macron has announced he will be hosting Normandy Four talks with Germany, Ukraine and Russia on December 9th. According to the AP:

Macron’s office says that the meeting will allow implementation of the Minsk accords, the 2015 agreement sponsored by France and Germany that envisages broad autonomy for the separatist regions in eastern Ukraine and an amnesty for the rebels.

A couple of folks in the media have apparently had some criticism thrown their way for acknowledging what everyone has already figured out – that the impeachment hearings last week have been about as stimulating as a shot of Nyquil or a hit of Benadryl. Listening to career National Security State bureaucrats relay Brzezinski’s talking points from the grave on Russia and Ukraine and the provision of a lot of second and third-hand hearsay that would not be permitted in a court of law, it turns out, is rather boring.

But, of course, it’s not enough to be subjected to this snoozefest as we slug rotgut coffee in between two crappy service jobs and wondering how we’re going to pay our medical bills. Now the average American also has to be condescended to by the political class and their media mouthpieces with implications that we’re too thick to understand the finer points of corruption being discussed by our intellectual superiors in Congress. Translation: Us plebes aren’t sufficiently waving our pompoms for impeachment because we’re morons.

In one of her famous daily “radar” rants at The Hill’s morning show, Krystal Ball explains to the whine and cheese crowd that average Americans understand quite a bit – including how the Democratic Party establishment has no moral leg to stand on when it comes to taking on Republican malfeasance because they’re all up to their botox-enhanced foreheads in the muck, parlaying their political positions into money-making enterprises on a regular basis.

Does anyone think that Obama would be making millions of dollars giving speeches to billionaires on Wall Street if he’d tried to govern like FDR? Does anyone imagine that he’s chiding these billionaires that they should temper their greed or “quickly get over” their sense of entitlement so that average Americans could have a fighting chance at a better standard of living and a more peaceful and sustainable world? Of course not. He knows he wouldn’t be invited back for more lucrative speeches if he did. The most he’ll do is ask these billionaires during a mutual admiration society meeting to give him a “thank you” for what he did for them while in office. With unmitigated gall, he reserves his finger-wagging for the little people who are finally making some demands for justice by supporting candidates like Bernie Sanders after decades of de-industrialization, stagnant wages, skyrocketing housing and health care costs, and endless wars that waste money and lives.

Moreover, Ball points out that even some Democrats are admitting in private that these hearings are not moving the needle to get more people to support impeachment and Trump’s removal from office. It’s a foregone conclusion that the Senate will not vote to remove Trump. But 6-8 weeks of a Senate trial will take several Democratic primary candidates – e.g. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – off the campaign trail during a crucial time. If one didn’t know better, it might look like Pelosi and the Dem Party leadership would rather have 4 more years of Trump than a left populist reformer like Sanders as president. And why not? They’d do just fine under a second Trump administration, just like they’re doing fine under the current one, getting to play the role of the loyal opposition for the cameras and laughing all the way to the bank, while not actually doing a damned thing to improve things for the rest of us.