The expectations that Robert Mueller was going to put the case for impeachment over the top, or even that he was just going to kick-start it was ridiculously unrealistic. The common as dirt movie plot gimmick of the savior daddy figure has made even educated people extremely unrealistic, that unrealism is ubiquitous, apparently.
The very things that made Mueller's reputation, of being a well-functioning cog in the machine of the legal establishment is what makes him unwilling to go beyond the specifications of his functioning to keep it from driving off a cliff. For crying out loud, he was OK enough with the oozing sleaze and manipulation of the law of his friend William Barr whose known history has been as an engine of Republican-fascist corruption and criminality, no doubt if pressed to give an answer Mueller would come up with some legalistic - bureaucratic babble to excuse Barr's conduct.
Well, I've been warning you for a time about that kind of annoyingly respectable boy-scouting based on following rules to the letter, it's been obvious for a long, long time that the rules as written, and as corruptly interpreted by courts and lawyers who figure their job is to find ways to do as much bad as you can while not technically breaking the law as written are what brought us here. All human made systems are imperfect, even with the best of intentions, such legal types are trained in finding out how to not only break but to smash the clear moral intent of the law in order to allow those able to do what they want to. Or who have the money to hire those who will do it for them. There's a reason that Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen is in prison for doing things that Trump ended up in the White House, ordering him to do them.
The system as it is got us to this, the law as interpreted down the centuries by that engine of such legalistic loophole finding and expanding and cutting through to allow worse, the Supreme Court, other courts, is not what's going to save us. A master of it - which I don't think Robert Muller is, though he is a student of the masters - is not going to admit that the system, itself, is inadequate to protect egalitarian democracy.
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My biggest annoyance in this is that the media, from top to twitter level, is putting the blame for Trump still being in office IN EXACTLY THE WRONG PLACE. It isn't House Democrat's fault that Trump was put there, it isn't their fault that it is next to impossible for them, in their position in the Constitutional system UNDER REAL LIFE CONDITIONS, to get him out of there no matter how obvious his criminality, no matter how obvious his dangerous unfitness for the position that Republican voters put him into.
The carping at Democrats in the House when it is Republicans in the House and the Senate and in the media and who vote in elections who gave us Trump is symptomatic of the even bigger defect in American democracy, the corrupted electorate. Since it is the media that has lied and corrupted the morals of enough Americans to produce presidencies by a series of corrupt, criminal Republican administration and two completely illegitimate regimes put into office by minority vote, for them to blame Democrats is just them continuing their practices that got us here.
In the end Trump is in office, placed there, maintained there by the electorate, by the effectively managed parts of the electorate that produced Republican majorities in the Senate, large enough margins of Republicans who will never vote to impeach and remove Trump from office - we have never had a Republican minority large enough to remove a Republican criminal from the presidency, the one chance that might have happened, Nixon, is unknown because it was not tested. It is just possible there were enough semi-honest Republicans in 1974 to have removed him from office, though it is just as possible that that would have failed. We like to imagine it would have happened, then, it is sheer delusion for anyone to think it would have happened in any of the forty-five years after that AND TODAY'S REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE MOST CORRUPT IT HAS BEEN AT ANY TIME IN THE COUNTRIES EXISTENCE, EVEN THE MOST CORRUPT CONGRESSES AND SENATES OF THE 19TH CENTURY CAN'T SURPASS IT IN CORRUPTION.
The demand that the Democrats in the House do what can't be done because of Republicans is, itself, a demonstration of unreality, exactly the kind of unreality that got us here. It is a product of most peoples' civics education coming from Hollywood, from entertainment that isn't required to give us an image of reality. The late night comedians*, even those who do a good job, aren't likely to tell you the truth about that, they're as part of their system as Robert Mueller is. That they are frequently the foremost truth tellers in 2019, Trump ridden America is a demonstration of the problems we have gotten into.
The Hebrew prophets describing the corruption of ancient Israel have a lot to teach us about what got us here. Their descriptions of corrupted People and the governments that inevitably arise when People are led astray and the wide ranging consequences are going to tell you more than even Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee will, and Colbert and Bee will tell you more than anyone in the journalistic side of things. Much as I like her work most times, Rachel Maddow, one of if not the smartest of them was holding the torch for Mueller so long that I think she must have felt it burn her hand yesterday.
We are in a mess that the habits and traditional mechanisms of American democracy won't get us out of, it is what was manipulated to get us here. The media that lied to us and corrupted us by selling us what we most wanted instead of what we most needed, scientifically taking advantage of our strongest weakenesses was how we were corrupted. TV, other media are the vehicles that drove us over the cliff, the fantasy cop-daddy figure of Robert Mueller isn't going to save us. I don't think he would be willing to break the rules to do it. He will not be blamed for the systematic inadequacies that created this catastrophe.
Nixon resigned because of the shame of impeachment, not the certainty of a conviction in a Senate trial. Gingrich and the GOP thought that shame would force Clinton out, but Clinton's faults were not Nixon's, and he stared them down. It was a win-win because now, without a certainty of conviction in the Senate, impeachment in the House is an empty gesture.
ReplyDeleteBesides, you can't shame a whore.
Impeachment has never been a check on the President. Respect for the rule if law, understanding how government works and why, and Congress, have all been enough. Nut now We the People have put a toddler in charge, and no one can save us from ourselves except ourselves.