Everybody is talking about it. Well, around it: vacillating, cogitating, salivating, fluctuating, aspirating, constipating, meditating, figure-eighting, and to prove they’re serious, polling. We’re referring, of course, to the “I” word; Impeachment. Methinks they doth protest too much.

And when we say everybody, we mean EVERYBODY. Talk-show pundits. Gesticulating anchors. Brooding Danes. The only people not talking about it are the vast majority of the 21 Democratic nomination wannabees who are ignoring the question to concentrate on more important issues, like fund-raising. Should the chief of state be held responsible for possible high crimes and misdemeanors? After all, everyone agrees: something is rotten in Denmark.

To impeach or not to impeach. That is the question. Whether tis nobler in voters’ minds to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous leadership or to take arms against a sea of treason and by opposing, end him.

Elizabeth Warren was first to walk out on Elsinore’s foggy balustrade and sound the alarm proclaiming it our constitutional duty to catch the conscience of a king. Kamala Harris seconded the motion but the rest of the players are following Hamlet and Nancy Pelosi’s lead of exercising caution. Any more cautious and they’d be walking backwards. There are more things in heaven and earth, N. Pelosi, than in your philosophy.

Must give her pause to think back to the trap that ensnared Republicans after impeaching Bill Clinton; who then suffering disastrously in the 1998 midterms. Visiting the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no Party returns. For a couple of election cycles at least. No one can say she doesn’t know a hawk from a handsaw.

When not changing the subject, the candidates are thrusting lick’d fingers into the air to see which way the wind blows. But you don’t need a weatherman to tell you Donald Trump is not going down without his trademark bluster. Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. He can’t help it. To thine own self be true. 

Says he plans to fight impeachment in the courts. But see, that’s part of the problem because the process doesn’t work that way. The House of Representatives impeaches, which is like an indictment resulting in a trial over which the Senate presides. The play’s the thing.

Ay, there’s the rub. Not just every Democrat but 20 Republican Senators would have to vote to convict and the chances of that happening are about the same as the Islamic Brotherhood scheduling a barbecue rib cook-off in a strip joint on the outskirts of Kronborg.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Thus the complicated calculus begins. Do the seekers of the nomination risk backlash from centrists if they do come out in favor of impeachment or annoy the base if they don’t. Do they bear these ills they have or fly to others they not know of? To sleep, perchance to dream.  

Especially when the slightest of slipups will act as the whips and scorns of time causing them to shuffle off this mortal coil and dropping from the grown up debate table to the kids table?

So expect calls for patience and further investigations, and the native hue of resolution to be sicklie’d over with the pale cast of thought, which in the end, will, like conscience, make cowards of us all. Exeunt.

Will Durst is an award-winning, nationally acclaimed columnist, comic and former sod farmer in New Berlin, Wisconsin.