Oh no! Harsher!

Ross Douthat has out-harshed harsh David Brooks:

...ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase....

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify. 

Good luck with that, Ross. Those are your people in charge now, and they are craven political opportunists first, members of the central committee of the capitalist class second. Our best hope is that they see the president as a threat "on the near-term political horizon." Then we get to deal with Mikey Pence, friend of the working man and woman. Shit.