Quick(ish) take: The House managers are kinda missing the point

 OK, I realize that Donald Trump will be acquitted anyway, so analyzing the structure of the House managers' legal argument is something of an exercise in intellectual wankery, but I'm a professor.  You get that this is what I do for a living, right?  I can't help but assign grades.  The House managers do... not get an A from me.

Ooooh, they tug at your heartstrings, don't they?  Oh, no!  So scaaary!  Watch the footage of the insurrection.  Are you shitting your pants?  Again?  They have more footage!  The director's cut, this time with extra ultaviolence!  Don't you hate it when they get you to buy the DVD, and then release the director's cut, and you buy it again for that extra footage?  That sucks, man!

No, I don't give a flying fuck about "the Snyder cut."  Fuck Zack Snyder.

Regardless, there are two errors here.  First, and most obviously, Senate Republicans shall not, they shall not be moved.  Why not?  Some are true believers in the Church of Donald Trump, Est. 2016.  Many, probably most, are just terrified of Republican voters, who are Trumpists.  Donald Trump could rape and murder their children, on national tv, and they'd still do nothing.

I am not exaggerating for dramatic effect.  I am writing literally, and I detest misuse of the word, "literally."  They would let him rape and murder their children, redefining law and morality to grant him the privileges of rape and murder.  (They already give him permission to rape anyway.)  That's how bad it has gotten.  There is no line for the GOP.

So if the House managers think that showing dramatic, scary footage will move them emotionally... really?  Have y'all been paying attention?

And yet all of this is built upon a logical fallacy.  The question is not about the moral acceptability of the insurrection, but Donald Trump's culpability in it.  No dramatic footage from the riots has any bearing on that.

None at all.

How much footage from January 6 should have been shown?  Logically, none.  None of it had any bearing on Donald J. Trump's culpability, with the very narrow exceptions of the audio clips in which the rioters told you, directly, that they were there on Donald Trump's orders.  But the scary clips of the rioters attacking cops, 'n such?

They had zero relevance to the question of Donald Trump's culpability.

Hand me a paper like that, and you're gettin' a shitty grade, because you are engaging in specious reasoning.

The question:  is Donald Trump responsible for X?  If your evidence of Trump's guilt is how horrific X is, then you have missed the point.

Look, I know that a lot of anti-intellectuals running around the extreme left these days have tried to reject science and reason as a plot for "white supremacy," or some such, but... no.  These are the tools we have for assessing reality, and reality is not a social construct, nor any of that postmodernist bullshit.  Sorrynotsorry for going back to this, but I'm really sick of this.

The evidence for Donald Trump's culpability comes from his words, his tweets, his actions, his refusal to do anything during the riots...  this is how we establish his culpability.  Through logic.  Reason.  Evidence.  He deserves impeachment on the basis of evidence.  Evidence from his actions and inaction.

Showing more footage of the riots?  That is not how reason works.