Wednesday morning’s Beltway media tip sheets on titular Speaker McCarthy’s big announcement all center on confident assurances of the inevitability of Joe Biden getting impeached, seeming as though they were written at least in part by the House GOP’s marketing department. Consider:

Politico Playbook with “Is there any way this doesn’t end in Biden’s impeachment? Don’t count on it. McCarthy is privately trying to appease his unhappy centrist members by telling them that opening an inquiry is just that – an inquiry – and that doesn’t mean they’ll have to vote to actually impeach Biden someday… Any other scenario ignores the reality of 21st-century impeachment politics. Opening an inquiry then failing to follow through would be a major political boon to Biden – essentially, a tacit admission by the GOP that he’s innocent. And we wouldn’t be surprised if McCarthy uses that argument to squeeze moderates who currently see no evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors to back impeachment later on.”

Punchbowl News with “The reality for the 58-year-old, nine-term McCarthy is that once he opens an impeachment inquiry, it’s almost guaranteed that House Republicans will impeach Biden. Remember, a sizable number of Republicans were ready to impeach before the inquiry even began. And once the House has begun the process, not impeaching Biden will look like a validation of the president to many rank-and-file lawmakers. That may be too much for McCarthy to control.”

Axios with “Just before the 2020 election, Joe Biden and his campaign said his son Hunter hadn’t made money from China – and that Biden hadn’t met one of Hunter’s Ukrainian business associates while he was vice president, except for maybe a brief hello. Both of those claims were false, according to recent sworn testimony by Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer. Why it matters: House Republican leaders now have zeroed in on those two denials by Joe Biden in 2020 to help justify an impeachment inquiry into the president.”

Granted, they also get into plenty of the caveats of how McCarthy’s doing this out of a position of the weakness that defines his career in politics and the internal friction among the House GOP – as if that’s anything new. It’s the “Oh this is DEFINITELY happening” vibe, presented without any skepticism about how that’s supposed to play out under the intense scrutiny of wall-to-wall coverage of an impeachment inquiry that makes it seem like these lame-streamers are carrying Republicans’ water and plenty of orange Kool-Aid to go with it (Axios are somewhat less guilty of this than the other two in this instance, to be fair). They seem to want to simply make it “feel” like the GOP will have the wind at their backs and they’ll figure out how to paper over the complete void of evidence without having to worry about fierce rottwieler Dems like Dan Goldman, Jamie Raskin, Jasmine Crockett, and others tearing into them in hearings that’ll even be carried on Fox News.

This is the kind of shit the pros like Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler and Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall constantly complain about, with Marshall nailing it hard on Tuesday how “the inside DC sheets manage to carry water for House Republicans even when they are notionally highlighting the oddity of a full blown impeachment inquiry based on literally nothing.” The bottom line is these hot stove inside baseball newsletters remain in thrall to Capitol Hill Republicans and apply this sort of “balance” to maintain their access to the deep, dark machinery of representative democracy.

We get that access is everything, even sympathize with their position of being forced into constant trade-offs where they need to launder this line of bullshit to get to that actual truth. It’s just it’s hard to escape the feeling that, not only are these writers are just letting themselves get dogwalked every goddamned day, but they’re actually quite enjoying it, not even noticing the leash while they wag their tails excitedly over being allowed to sniff a piss-covered fire hydrant.