"Permanent impeachment won't empower Pelosi's Resisters.... It’ll empower Trump's deplorables, because Trump will still need them."

"In effect, impeachment can be the anti-dote to lame duck insularity, reestablishing the accountability to voters that the term limit of the 22d Amendment takes away. I'm not arguing for impeaching every President in his second term. It’s a legalistic, emotion-draining way to try to correct for the ill-advised two-term limit. Usually there are bonds of ideology and party loyalty constraining even popular second-term presidents. Trump seems a special case — someone you really might not want to see unleashed. I'd feel much better voting for him again if he were impeached multiple times."

Writes Mickey Kaus in "Impeach Him Again, Nancy!"

I'm not agreeing with that, but I find it interesting. There are lots of other things you might say about the benefits of impeachment on the pro-Trump side. But having written "pro-"... I'd like to discuss Kaus's writing "anti-dote" — "impeachment can be the anti-dote to lame duck insularity."

Even in the 17th century — I checked the OED — there was no hyphen in "antidote." But the word is, indeed, made out of the prefix "anti-" — which means "against" — and the root "-dote."

It makes you wonder, what is a "dote"?

If you check the etymology of "antidote," you will see that "dote" comes from a Greek verb that means "to give," so an antidote is something that is "given against" something else.

But "dote" is an English word, and writing "anti-dote" — with the hyphen — seems to take us away from the familiar word, "antidote," and ask us to think of something that is against whatever that English noun "dote" means.

I looked it up in the OED. A "dote" is "A foolish, incompetent, or slow-witted person." It's been around about as long as the familiar verb "to dote." The OED has the noun "dote" going back to the 13th century, and it nicely has — among its examples — this from 2018:

2018 @Skeptic_Fashion 11 Apr. in twitter.com (O.E.D. Archive) U should have ur keyboard privileges suspended for a week 4 being a dote.

A tweet! First time I've noticed a tweet preserved as an OED quote documenting the current usage of the word. I like it. We need more mean but gentle insults.

Is Trump a dote? No, but many of his haters think he is, and they may want to give the country an "anti-dote." But to impeach him over and over again? Who's the dote?

And keep in mind: Even when you have a poisoning and want to administer an antidote, that the antidote itself can be a poison:

The effects of many toxic substances within the body are well understood and can therefore be treated successfully with specific antidotes even when those antidotes are often considered poisons in their own right. For example, strychnine is highly toxic but its symptoms can be counteracted with curare, also highly toxic, because both compounds interact with the same receptors in nerves but have opposite effects. Atropine (or belladonna) poisoning can be treated with physostigmine; and physostigmine poisoning can be treated with atropine.

I am showing you some reasoning by metaphor, after Kaus started it, calling up the word "antidote." You're in a figurative wonderworld when you use metaphors, but I'll just say even when you have a workable antidote for a poison, you don't just take lots and lots of antidote! And I think it's crazy to impeach the President and then impeach him again and again.