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Perhaps the most annoying response to last night's Iowa debacle are the haughty scolds from journalists and pundits chastising anyone who might proffer a sinister explanation for what unfolded. No, there is not yet evidence of some grand conspiracy — and as ever, the likeliest explanation almost certainly involves an astronomical dose of standard-fare incompetence. But for such a catastrophic failure to have happened in the first place — still zero votes counted at the time of writing, at least three campaigns claiming fraud or illegitimacy, seismic technological and human error, et cetera. — there had to have been some malicious intent involved.

The Senate is not going to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and to all appearances the whole thing is nearly over. Acquittal is imminent, and supposedly serious commentators are on Twitter wailing in unison with Democratic activists. But what they are saying does not make any sense — it’s contradictory. On the one hand, they say that the case against Donald Trump is open-and-shut: so utterly persuasive in objective terms that only the Senate Republicans’ bad faith has prevented them from admitting it.

The Senate leaders have stated their positions clearly and constantly. Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democratic minority, is demanding that John Bolton testify. Mitch McConnell, who leads the Republicans’ narrow majority, responds that the Senate already has enough evidence to vote. If more was needed, the House should have gotten it when it had the chance. Anyway, the House managers have repeatedly boasted they have 'overwhelming evidence'. The president’s lawyers add that, if any witnesses are called, they want to call some, too. They want to hear from former Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, the whistleblower whose complaint started the impeachment, and Rep. Schiff and his staff, who apparently worked with the whistleblower.

Anti-virus pioneer and globe-trotting eccentric John McAfee placed third in the 2016 Libertarian party presidential primaries. Now he’s running again, this time from a secure, undisclosed location likely on a boat outside the United States, which he fled last January allegedly to escape the IRS Although that sounds like an ideal setting for a Libertarian presidential campaign, McAfee doesn’t think too much of his chances of being their nominee. ‘It doesn’t really matter to me either way,’ he told me. ‘Number one, I’m John McAfee. I can’t be president. If anyone thinks I can, they need to move out of their mother’s basement and see the world. Neither can any Libertarian candidate. Ever.

What’s wrong with trying to sell books? President Trump and his janissaries are trying to depict Bolton as a disgruntled former employee out to tar Trump. Yes, he is. But that doesn’t invalidate his account. It actually means that he resembles a host of former Trump associates who were tossed aside like so much useless ballast when no longer deemed useful. Many of them have interesting things to say about Trump, whether it’s Michael Cohen or Rex Tillerson. So does Bolton. Anyway, Bolton’s motives are hardly as tangled as Trump’s, who is trying to hang on to his job in the face of a mountain of evidence that he was scheming to ease the path to reelection by leaning on Ukraine.

President Trump’s woman troubles never seem to go away. A recording aired by ABC News today indicates that Trump himself demanded the ouster of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, during a dinner with Lev Parnas, whom he claims he never knew. He did. Trump declared at an April 30, 2018 dinner that included Parnas, 'Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.'It took a while but eventually Trump’s paladins did. They understood that by 'take her out', the president didn’t mean ask her to go to a fine restaurant or the ballet. They had other ideas. Eventually, Yovanovitch was dismissed and replaced by William Taylor. Look how well that turned out.

The news media of the late 1700s and early 1800s consisted almost entirely of partisan political operations. Ron Chernow, the biographer of Washington and Hamilton, describes the newspapers of that era as 'avowedly partisan’, with 'no pretense of objectivity'. It was, Chernow, writes, a 'golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons’. Some two centuries later, we are returning to a media landscape in which the majority of sources are 'avowedly partisan' with little pretense of the objectivity that only a few decades ago was a hallmark of American journalism.

The first day of impeachment hearings, and everyone has questions. I’m as confused as anyone else. So I phoned Alan Dershowitz, who’ll be testifying for President Trump’s team on the constitutional implications of impeachment, and cross-examined him on the case against Trump, the constitutional rights of the president, and whether he’d like to see Hunter Biden testify.DG: Adam Schiff says that you’re not a constitutional lawyer, you’re a criminal lawyer.AD: I’ve taught constitutional criminal procedure for nearly half a century. I’ve taught a seminar on impeachment, I’ve written three books on impeachment, I’ve written several other books on constitutional law and numerous articles.

After all the fakery of the 2016 election, the hot sauce in her bag, the ‘chillin’ in Cedar Rapids’, Hillary Clinton has finally told, ahem, her truth. And that truth is that she really hates Bernie Sanders. It’s a truth clear to anyone who had watched them during their last go-round. She bristled when she spoke to him. This nothing socialist from some state with three electors was trying to defeat her, Hillary Clinton, whose turn it was to be president. It was obvious. But then suddenly, when the 2016 primary was over, she needed him. His voters were angry. He had lost and it seemed like the fix was in. Hillary needed them to show up for her, so she put on her best smile and made nice with Bernie Sanders.