In one way at least, it seems a pity that the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry turned out to be such a box-office dud. In times less fevered than ours, the parade of self-important State Department functionaries who appeared as witnesses against the President would have been seen by dispassionate observers as confirming every disobliging thing he has ever said about “the swamp” or the so-called “deep state” in Washington that he ran against in 2016. That Representative Adam Schiff may have worried about this possibility is suggested by his refusal to call the original “whistle-blower” as a witness—or even to disclose his identity. A man seemingly so lacking in self-awareness as Mr. Schiff must have a smidgen of it tucked away somewhere in the dark corners of his soul—enough at least to know that putting a rank-and-file member of the ever less respected “intelligence community” at the head of these self-righteous jacks-in-office would have made it too obvious that something other than public spirit had led them to come forward to assist him and other House Democrats in attempting to depose an elected president.

It was pretty obvious as it was. As Angelo Codevilla, that most knowledgeable and incisive of commentators on the dysfunctional intelligence services, put it in a recent essay:

Dogs biting humans being naturally unremarkable, any attempt to convince us to regard accounts of their biting as noteworthy events leads one to ask whether the person advancing that position is ignorant of nature,