“In the end, there is only one conclusion to reach in this moment: The day I trust the word of a hired flak like William Barr regarding the behavior of a lifelong liar like Donald Trump is the day I flap my arms and fly to the moon. Barr’s missive is merely another salvo in a disinformation campaign that has lasted two years.” William Rivers Pitt
I never expected the Mueller Report to be a bombshell that would convince Republicans that their fealty to Trump is suicidal. Even if the report had flat out declared that Trump colluded with the Russians and obstructed justice to keep that fact from being discovered, Trump would still have claimed that the whole thing was a sham, a deep-state plot to drive him from the White House and deprive the American people of his great leadership.
Many Democrats put their stack of chips on Mueller, who, let’s remember, is a Republican as well as a former FBI Director, and while we’re remembering, let’s not forget the FBI’s long history of attacking and harassing the Left. Talk about an unlikely savior. The leadership of the Democratic Party, people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, have no capacity for reflection. If they did, they would have studied what went wrong in 2016, recognized that the party is beholden to corporate interests, and hasn’t had a coherent political message in decades, certainly not one that motivates rural, working-class, or aggrieved white people. Had party leaders reflected, they would have realized that Hillary Clinton was a victim of her own history, arrogance, and sense of entitlement rather than a victim of Vladimir Putin’s meddling.
Had the party elders done any sort of soul-searching, they would realize that progressives like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, among others, are the future, rather than a force to be marginalized or opposed.
Do you ever get the sense that everything new was once old, like William Barr taking a second turn as Attorney General, and performing the same obfuscation and white-washing he did to save George H.W. Bush’s ass? Barr is a political apparatchik, a Washington fixer who makes bad stuff disappear. The older I become the more I realize that the American government has always been corrupt, has always served the wealthy and connected, has always been murderous. Trained lawyers like Barr and Mueller parse meaning, argue from both sides of their mouths, and protect their clients. The full extent of American “justice” is reserved for the working-class and the poor, not the wealthy and powerful.
Trump is a dangerous criminal. If Congressional Democrats really cared about protecting the Constitution, they would launch impeachment proceedings against Trump. Yes, with the Senate in the hands of a totally spent, brain-dead and corrupt GOP, they would fail to impeach, but going through the process would be beneficial. Nothing is more important than reinforcing that ours is supposed to be a system of laws, with no one above the law, particularly not Donald J. Trump. The GOP had no reservations about trying to impeach Bill Clinton over a blowjob. Compared to Trump, Clinton was a jaywalker.
We should also bear in mind that when it comes to interfering in the American political process no country rivals Israel, but only a small number of journalists ever mention this fact. You’ll never hear a corporate-media talking head mention it. The hypocrisy is stunning.
From the way Trump is behaving he certainly believes he’s skated once again, as he always has, but it’s too soon to put the Mueller Report to bed and forget about it. All kinds of investigations into Trump are underway and one or more of them are sure to bear fruit. The money trail is still the key to the closet where Trump’s many skeletons hang.