Is rigged trial, tovaritsch. And is nothing new for Donald Fredovich Trump.

The Senate is now going through the formality of adopting rules for Donald Trump's impeachment trial modeled after that of Bill Clinton, in which the nature of the charges was entirely different, in preparation for sweeping the Articles of Impeachment passed by the House under the rug.

Surprised? I'm not either.

This is the president, after all, who was the first in recent decades to refuse to release his income tax returns, on the totally bogus basis that he is unable to do so because he is under audit (the IRS says that this is no obstacle, and Richard Nixon released his when he was under audit).

This is the president who denounced the Mueller Probe at the outset, seeking to discredit it rather than to use it as a means of proving his innocence.

This is the president who did everything possible to impede the House investigation which led to the Articles of Impeachment, even preventing members of is administration from testifying before the relevant committees- thus adding a second article, obstruction of Congress, to the original article arguing that he is guilty of abusing his power.

This is the president who sees whistle-blowers as spies and traitors, who believes that the media should be legally precluded (!) from using unnamed sources, and who finds it convenient to forget that if he had his way every corrupt, incompetent, and even treasonous official in the nation would have virtual immunity from ever being exposed. Ever.  No patriotic, public-minded official would ever come forward if such people could be legally intimidated by the certainty of public identification and inevitable reprisals.

There is a pattern here. Accused of wrongdoing, Donald Trump whines that he's being picked on- and then stonewalls. When the Senate's Republican leadership now attempts to ram through rules designed to keep as much evidence away from the public as possible and to join him in obstructing the process and safeguarding him from the accountability he so desperately wants to avoid yet on which the rule of law and a free society so completely depends, there is nothing new here.

Vladimir Putin would be proud. This is certainly not the American way, but Russia has a long history of this sort of thing.

ADDENDUM: It appears that the American people disagree with Mitch McConnell about this stuff, and once the show trial is over and the Trump people are taking their Pravda-Esque victory lap claiming a fraudulent vindication, they and their hero are going to have to explain all this to a different jury- one far larger, and not very happy about how this is playing out.