Remember back when you were a kid (bear with me if you weren’t this kind of kid) and you were up against a term paper deadline but because you were lazy or overwhelmed you hadn’t done a lick of research, so you just decided to wing it with swollen prose like “The Civil War has been a big important issue for years and years all across the many states of America”?

On day one of the impeachment trial, that was Bruce Castor – the latest entry in the MAGA annals of ineptitude.

Look, I can muster an ounce of sympathy for the ex-DA from the Philadelphia ‘burbs. There’s no way at this point that any top-tier attorney will work for the Mar-a-Lago mobster, so naturally it’s going to be a guy who whiffed on Bill Cosby signing on at the 11th hour and lurching through the English language like a drunken sailor.

Maybe I shouldn’t pick on Castor; the other defense lawyer, David Schoen, was arguably more execrable, spewing agitprop that was best suited for a super-spreader rally. Maybe I just wished that Castor would stop highlighting his ties to Philadelphia (“paraphrasing the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin who as a Philadelphian I feel as though I can do that…”), because it was embarrassing to those of us who live there.

But no. There was so much more – so much, in fact, that even Trump toady Alan Dershowitz surfaced on Newsmax (natch) and said of Castor, “I have no idea what he’s doing.” Even Senator John Cornyn, one of Trump’s insurrectionist enablers, said of Castor, “I’ve seen a lot of lawyers…and that was not one of the finest I’ve seen.”

Granted, if Castor had simply chosen to mimic the Jan. 6 mob by smearing his own poop in the hallowed hall, most Republican senators would’ve still stood firm in their determination to give Trump a pass. But if the ultimate aim was to sway some Americans in the court of public opinion, suffice it to say that Castor was no Atticus Finch.

For instance, Castor said: “President Trump is no longer is in office. The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.” Oops! Trump’s whole shtick, the core of his Big Lie, is that he wasn’t removed, and that, quite the contrary, he won in a landslide. That’s why he incited the rabble in the first place.

For instance, Castor said: “You will not hear any member of the team representing former President Trump say anything but in the strongest possible way denounce the violence of the rioters and those that breached the Capitol, the very citadel of our democracy, literally the symbol that flashes on television…To have it attacked is repugnant in every sense of the word.” Oops! His sociopathic client thought the attack was great; in a video, he told the rioters that “we love you.”

Castor also had no clue what impeachment was all about: “If my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense, and let’s understand, a high crime is a felony, and a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. The words haven’t changed that much over time.” Um, try again, counselor. “High crimes and misdemeanors” are not necessarily offenses as defined in our criminal statutes. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers, the term refers to flagrant breaches of political power – offenses that “proceed from…the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

On the other hand, some of what Castor said was indisputably true. For instance, this profundity: “If the individual state legislatures didn’t adopt the Constitution, we would not have it.” You betcha. And if the sun hadn’t risen this morning, we wouldn’t have daylight.

But, alas, all too often there was a clarity deficit. For instance: “I saw a headline, ‘Representative so and so seeks to walk back comments about,’ I forget what it was, something that bothered her.” It’s hard to say where Castor was going with that, because he never arrived at his destination.

There was also an interesting stroll down memory lane that connected to nothing: “We still know what records are, right? On the thing you put the needle down on, and you play it.” And there was an interesting observation about how the state of Nebraska was “a judicial-thinking place,” which had something to do with Senator Ben Sasse, but, hey, whatever.

And I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decipher this riff, because I give up: “Remember, the founders recognized that the argument that I started with, that political pressure is driven by the need for immediate action, because something under contemporary community standards really horrific happened, and the people represented by the members of the United States House of Representatives become incensed. And what do you do with a federal issue if you’re back in suburban Philadelphia and something happens that makes the people who live there incensed? You call your congressman. And your congressmen, elected every two years with their pulse on the people of their district, 750,000 people, they respond, and boy do they respond to you. The congressman calls you back. A staffer calls you back. You get all the information that they have on the issue. Sometimes you even get invited to submit a language that would improve whatever the issue is.”

Remember that grade-school term paper you probably winged back in the day? That last sentence sounds like something I might well have written.

Anyway, it was bad enough that Castor kept name-checking his buddy bond with Pat Toomey. I doubt that pleased his exiled client, who’s undoubtedly aware that Senator Toomey has publicly called out the fascist action of Jan. 6 for what it was. But what surely must’ve incensed his client most of all was his praise for the House impeachment managers’ presentation, correctly calling it “well done” and “outstanding.”

But that’s because the impeachment managers came armed with the facts and the law. It falls to the likes of Bruce Castor to work with nothing, and make it sound even worse.