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Writes the Washington Post's editorial board: "We … expect that Mr. Barr will lean heavily toward transparency. The alternative would be that questions remained unanswered — and suspicions festered — around the president’s behavior."
The Post confines its interest in the Muller probe to two instances of now-officially rebutted high presidential crimes. One, "based on Mr. Barr’s Sunday summary, ['questionable meetings between Trump officials and Russians'] did not reflect a broader coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow." Two, although Mueller "made clear" that his completed investigation "was not an exoneration" of Trump on obstruction of justice allegations, "Barr subsequently [and unilaterally] determined that there was not enough evidence to warrant an obstruction-of-justice charge against the president."
And that was that; indeed, the Post attempts to comfort us by observing that that "much should be a relief to Americans worried that the nation’s senior leaders acted as agents of a foreign power during the 2016 election." Perhaps my lingering depressed state of mind explains the absence of it being consolingly awash in said relief.
Or, there is another explanation. Nakedly presenting itself is a far more disturbing matter of interest, which is being routinely overlooked or ignored by other media outlets as well. This is quite peculiar, since it is also the simplest question out there — plus it's a superb candidate for Occam's razor. To wit ...
Why has everyone in the circle of distrust — i.e., Team Trump — feloniously, and at least initially, lied to prosecutors about all things Russian? That is to say, why has each of these bumbling thugs exposed himself to legal jeopardy and probable jail time whenever asked by legal authorities about Russian contacts, encounters, briefings, locations, construction projects, swanky cigar bars, meetings and the material substance of those meetings? Why did they all lie about that one subject — Russia?
One doesn't lie unless one harbors a perilous truth to lie about. Hence they all voluntarily hanged themselves on the piano wire of one law-enforcing virtuoso or another. Each was competing for either the dumbest-criminal-on-earth award, or the most loyal. But however we cut it, each lied. The question is, Why? The logically unavoidable answer? Taken together, each had played his part in the "C" word.
Yesterday afternoon I wrote about Trump and Brexit merely as a mental break from the depressing news; the cosmos was deep into nothing but Trump, Barr, Mueller, and the former's at least partial exoneration. I desperately needed something uplifting by comparison, so I wrote instead about the collapse of two once-great nations.
But I'm still mired in the inescapable epic of Donald J. Trump, Attorney General William Barr and Special Counsel Bob Mueller. For two years we've watched on the screen and read in B & W mounting evidence of Trump Inc.'s multiple ties with Russian intelligence, shady hackers and WikiLeaks' mediation, in addition to evidence of the president's nearly countless obstructions of justice.
Yet in less than two days, Barr both read Mueller's evidentiary submission (of possibly immense length) and wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter to Congress, neatly disclosing that all, after all, is well: The astoundingly criminal Mr. Trump is blameless. This came as even bigger news than the facts that Donald had spooned with Vladimir and has lied about it repeatedly ever since.
"The investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference, according to [Barr's] summary," writes the Times, and "Mr. Mueller’s team drew no conclusions about whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, Mr. Barr said, so he made his own decision…. [He] determined that the special counsel’s investigators had insufficient evidence to establish that the president committed that offense" (although the report "also does not exonerate him" of obstruction).
We're free to take politically appointed Barr's word for it, or we could read Mueller's report for ourselves — if, that is, Barr wanted us to read it, which he doesn't. And then there's the issue of Muller's own bar, which is exceptionally high. All accounts of his prosecutorial past relate that lacking evidence of a suspect's culpability beyond any reasonable doubt, Mueller will not proceed. Hence his submitted report could be chock full of reasonable guilt; perhaps 1 or 2 dolloped percentages of doubt obviated stronger and more determined language from the special counsel's office.
All the world knows that Donald J. Trump is a mobster, including ties to organized crime both here and abroad. And he didn't stop being a mobster by simply descending Trump Tower's escalator in June of 2015. Quite aside from the rhetorical violence of his presidential campaign, during his two years as POTUS Trump has consistently displayed the behavior of a degenerate, unrepentant "family" don, which makes this Times passage laughable: "Barr’s letter [to Congress] said that the Mueller report identified no actions that … 'were done with corrupt intent.'"
It was the same corrupt intent that compelled Trump to lie yesterday about Mueller's bottom-line report: It was a complete and total exoneration, he said to reporters before departing his Caponelike Florida palace. He just can't help himself, and the reason is simple. He's a criminal.
I wrote last week that "from other federal and state prosecutors will come charges of tax evasion, charitable foundation fraud, money laundering, and God only knows what. Who needs collusion?" That rather consoling thought still holds. Very few hoodlums peacefully leave this world in their bed at home, Meyer Lansky-style. Trump is likely to prove no exception. His decades of racketeering, mobsterism, and abuse of the innocent will catch up to him, and soon. If he doesn't spend the last years of his wretched life in prison, he'll at least spend them in state and federal courts, battling criminal and civil charges.
Trump is known to love chaos and personal anarchy. Well good for him. Because despite Mueller's disappointing report (as far as we know), he's still facing plenty of both.
The concluding thesis of historian Alan Brinkley's splendid Voices of Protest — those often malignant tones of Huey Long and Father Coughlin during the Great Depression — is that these extraordinary demagogues commended a past as beautifully nostalgic as it was absurdly nonexistent. They converted millions to the imagined belief that the Golden Ages of the 19th century held the promise of our future; that the Great Depression was proof of society's contemporary corruption; that turning our backs on modernity and returning to (almost literally) horse-and-buggy thinking were the keys to a resplendent, resurrected America.
With gradual economic recovery, the Second World War, the brilliant statesmanship of FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as the United States' postwar global leadership and the socioeconomic revolution in middle-class living standards, most Americans overcame the childlike beliefs and romanticized pronunciamentos of the 1930s' demagogues. They held firm in the future's promise — until, that is, the rise of the New Right in the 1970s (a direct spinoff of Goldwaterism) and its closest ideological kin, Christian evangelicalism. Straight lines can then connect those early days of political senility with the historical ignorance of Reaganism, Bushism II and Trumpism, and the preposterous promise of an immutable America populated by nothing but head-of-household Ozzies and subservient Harriets — plus, naturally, servile minorities.
How similar we've become, once again, to our British cousins. Our Trumpism is their Brexit, our historical ignorance is their wistful nostalgia, our powers of grim concentration is their justified fixation on the fix they're now in. Writes British novelist Sam Byers in a NY Times op-ed, "At dinner with friends and family, on our couches in front of the television, even in our attempts at cinematic escape, there is only one subject of conversation: our departure from the European Union [or Trumpism], the need to either oppose it or enact it…. Brexit [or Trumpism] is not just an event, it is a feeling — suffocating and dispiriting and freighted with gloom."
Indeed significant blocs within both the U.K. and U.S. have reverted to a belief in a romanticized past — one with no globalization, no massive migratory patterns, no human-eliminating technology; just the simple life of unseen government and communal volunteerism and pulled bootstraps. We hear transatlantic, spectral echoes of Huey Long, Father Coughlin and their fellow utopians of the early 1930s, those "With nothing meaningful to say about our future," writes Byers. "We’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia. The result is that Britain has entered a haunted dreamscape of collective dementia — a half-waking state in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the previous century leap vividly to the fore." Our specialist in erasing the previous day or hour is, of course, Donald Trump, whose every horror is swiftly painted over by yet an even more dispiriting barbarity.
Notwithstanding the pseudo-heroic mantras of blinkered Brexiteers and blind Trumpeteers, "We" — here, Mr. Byers is again writing for only his own — "are not quietly leading any revolutions right now, unless one counts as a revolution our project of self-dismantlement." I, for one, do in fact count that as revolutionary, for rare is backward-looking societal upheaval anything but destructive. "We are pathologically unable to say what needs to be said," concludes Byers: "that nostalgia, exceptionalism and a xenophobic failure of the collective imagination have undone us."
For Britain, Mr. Byers is almost certainly correct. Where we American mutts deviate from Albion's Anglo-Saxons, however, is that we will not be undone by the assorted failures — nostalgia, exceptionalism, xenophobia — of Trumpism any more than we were undone by the passing political hallucinations of Huey Long et al. In 2020 we'll slam the ignominy of this once-noble country into reverse, and get on with human decency and the like in 2021.
In this, I persist in my cynical optimism, or perhaps I should say demarcated pessimism. Sure, we'll keep screwing up, and on occasion in a big way. But in its undisguised evil, Trumpism is sui generis. The Huey Longs of "movement conservatism" and Father Coughlins of Fox News will always be with us, in some perverted way. Trumpism, though, will be remembered and condemned by future American generations as our version of 1930s fascism. Never to be tolerated again.
My abysmal "mood" — a euphemism that respectfully substitutes for what I call my Moriarty: infrequent, but recurring, evil depressions — just vastly improved. With the special counsel's submission of his concluding report to the attorney general, we are now one lunge closer to knowing, with legal certainty, the many crimes of Donald J. Trump.
The president's obstructions of justice have always been plain to see, most notably his confession to NBC News' Lester Holt that he sacked an FBI director to evade further investigation of his illicit shenanigans with Russian intelligence. The same for witness tampering, as evidenced by veritable caravans of threatening presidential tweets aimed at intimidating those with material knowledge of executive corruption.
No new indictments — more than three dozen to date — from the special counsel's office are expected, but that news is no cause for disappointment or sorrow. Mueller has farmed out future prosecutorial actions to other federal officials, and, given Trump's tentacled malfeasances, future prosecutorial actions there shall be. Don Jr., especially, is a deadhead walking.
I have taken it as a near presupposition that we'll all be able to read Mr. Mueller's full report, and rather soon. Two years of suspense; an airtight, non-leaking special counsel operation that has left us hanging; tremendous public pressure and stentorian Democratic congressional demands will convert Attorney General Barr's rather casual attitude toward the question of release into an unbearable imperative. After all, the president himself has said he's fine with the public reading the report — a characteristically cretinous Trumpian remark that will haunt Mr. Barr.
In Shakespeare's Richard III, King Edward IV's wife, Queen Elizabeth, spoke eloquently (though with "gentle," mistakenly) of Trump's predicament at the slashing hands of Bob Mueller: Ay me! I see the ruin of my house. / The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.
Next, from other federal and state prosecutors, will come charges of tax evasion, charitable foundation fraud, money laundering, and God only knows what. Who needs collusion?
When middle aged, the magnificent literary critic Harold Bloom plunged into a major depression. He has since written that reading Emerson — especially his Conduct of Life — helped to elevate him back to sanity. I have read and enjoyed The Conduct of Life, but never found it as inspirational or uplifting as Bloom did. (Indeed I find Bloom more inspirational than Emerson.) In pursuit of fleeing my own mental abyss of late, I instead turned to Isaiah Berlin.
This may seem an odd choice. While Emerson (for want of a better phrase) speaks to the soul — that rather dubious superior element of humanity by which we climb to otherwise unattainable heights of self-contentment — Berlin speaks to the intellect, but in ways I find enormously inspirational. His cardinal aim in lectures, essays and books — many of which were conceived during the Cold War — was to ascertain how humanity could live with itself; that is, how the irreconcilabilities between ideologies, nations, cultures, societies and groups could somehow reconcile, or at least get along.
That was an intellectual problem to be solved, and I have reconsidered — re-treated — Berlin's works as a kind of microcosm of the self-contained intellect at work, toward a resolution. By that I mean how could my scrambled, severely depressed mind reconcile its irrational irreconcilabilities? (A regular reader and good friend recently emailed this deeply insightful comment on such irrationality: "I learned about depression when a close friend fell into that hole. I asked her, 'What's wrong — why so unhappy?' And her reply told me what depression is: 'Nothing, that's the whole problem.'")
I have for some time taken an anti-depressant for dysthymia (chronic, low-grade depression), which, when compared to my current clinical depression, is but a bedbug to a tarantula. I will not, however, use a blunderbuss to kill this monstrous pest, as I have done in the past. Such weapons require an agonizing lag in effectiveness, only to then find the side effects … well, depressing. I have decided instead to think — and exercise — my way out of this hellhole, much as Berlin pondered his way through the gruesome Cold War.
"If," wrote Berlin, "like Tolstoy, [some ideologues] sometimes thought that man was not truly free but determined by factors outside his control, they knew well enough, as he did, that if freedom was an illusion it was one without which one could not live or think." Thus it is similarly possible, I reckon, to fool myself (if necessary) into self-contentment, from which comes the indispensable freedom to live and think.
Berlin's free-will speculation comes from one of his collected essays, which draws its title from a 1784 Kantian observation: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." It seems I was made with a few more crooks, twists and turns than are normal, but I shall never cease trying to straighten myself as best I can.
I can read and think and exercise my way out of this mental sinkhole. In fact, I'm already on my way. Excuse any lapses of logic or poor writing above, for I'm not all the way there yet. Some scrambling has yet to be unscrambled. But I'll get there. Soon. Till then, you take care as well.
I am forthwith banning all personal comments, namely mine. This was my fault. I take full responsibility. A year or so ago I introduced you to a lady friend. I bragged and strutted and then when things went south in the romance, I became, as a recent commenter noted, childish. He was being kind. I was brutish, inconsiderate, and ungentlemanly — which is the worst crime for a man.
It is for that reason that I am cancelling this site for the foreseeable future. When I began to bring my personal life into my political commentary, I was done — toast. That's why, for years, I remained just a political voice. I've learned my lesson.
My health is another reason for canceling. I can't seem to recover from severe fatigue, nor stop crapping all over myself at night because of lingering ulcerative colitis. Three years of doing bed-sheet laundry at 2 in the morning are enough. The doctors can't help, and I can't help myself.
I am cancelling at the worst possible time, for me. This is the eve of my biannual fundraiser, which keeps this site going. But this site has deteriorated into personal invective, and that I will not allow any longer.
Best wishes, and good health.
I shall return, Someday.
When I was a teen, one of my many unsavory friends was an ex-convict. He shot a cop. He didn't kill him. He just shot him. This foul deed was done in the course of a warehouse burglary. By the time I knew him, he was late to one of my many unsavory friends' poker games, because, as was explained in due course at said game, he was busy robbing another warehouse. But as soon as his rehabilitated work was done, he'd be there.
He was a friend. Not a close friend, but a friend. My close friend at that time was his brother Joe. They were both soon dead. My friend, a passenger victim of his drunk driver; my close friend, Joe, a gun victim. (He felt his sister had been insulted in a bar, whereupon, poetically, he retrieved his .38 from his car. The bartender was waiting with his own. Kaboom. End of close friend.)
But I digress. My friend, the cop shooter, received and served a sentence of four years at the state penitentiary. His dearest advice to me was that if I ever found myself in that hellhole, I should 1) excuse my being raped as a testing system — would I rat? — and 2) always stuff some magazines inside my tucked shirt, as a defense against any provoked, or unprovoked, stabbing.
Four years. He didn't defraud the citizens of the United States. He didn't cheat them out of millions in taxes. He didn't help elect a corrupt, ignorant POTUS. And he didn't spend years flowering up a bunch of corrupt, foreign dictators.
"Judge Ellis told a packed courtroom in Alexandria, Va. that anyone who didn’t think [his Manafort] punishment was tough enough should 'go and spend a day, a week in jail or in the federal penitentiary.'"
True enough. But who believes Mr. Manafort will spend one day in a maximum security penitentiary, rather than a minimum security resort? In fact, who believes Mr. Manafort will spend any time serving his sentences?
Pardon?
And who did the worse harm to the people of the U.S.? My friend? Or Mr. Manafort?
Politico reports, "In the latest sign that Joe Biden will run for president, his team has brought on Cristóbal Alex, the head of the influential Latino Victory Fund." The article then adds, "It's not clear what role Alex would fill in a Biden presidential campaign."
Let's take a wild and exceptionally clueless stab in the dark. Head of Latino outreach?
But as for basics — again …
I have still to witness a candidate preferable to Joe Biden — against Trump. If Republicans were running a much younger candidate, or even a Kasich, then a Dem of Biden's age might be reasonably objectionable. But against Trump, Joe's age is conveniently ruled out as a downside.
And since Trump is destined to go down in 2020 — just a mere, four years late — it would also be preferable to have a Democrat in the White House who knows his teammates. It was said of FDR that you could slap a chalkline anywhere across a wall map of the United States, and he could name the party's chairman in each chalk-delineated county, coast to coast. That in itself isn't a sign of an imminently "great" president, but arduous learning curves for political outsiders are as time-wasting as they are time-consuming. Biden knows politics, he knows policy and government, and he knows where the WH light switches are.
Once Biden gets in the race — this time, that seems a safe wager — it will be interesting to see where the money goes. If he can lock down establishment boodle early on, that could swiftly lock out a few other hopefuls. And the field needs to be culled as soon as possible, so the party can speak with one voice.