The Krait (Gail Collins) hisses and bites the LK (Lyin' King) in the Oval Office frequently and often. She omits another obvious take on the TV spectacle of Robert Mueller III (age 74) facing the US House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees in back-to-back hearings on Wednesday, July 24, 2019 — is old and tires quickly. Take that from this blogger who Mueller's elder by 4 years. If this is a (fair & balanced) appeal for geriatric leniency, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
[x NY Fishwrap]
How To Take Down Trump
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
When it comes to tamping down excitement, Robert Mueller is a genius. He soldiered on through two much-anticipated House committee hearings, full of politicians eager to make a splash. The result was… muted.
OK, actually kind of boring. Not, of course, anything like the scene Donald Trump described later, in which it sounded as if Mueller fell weeping to the floor, admitting his whole investigation was a pile of lies.
“The administration, our president, me, we’ve done a great job,” Trump boasted as only he could. The probe into Russian interference in the election and his own attempts at obstruction of justice, he claimed, had “totally folded.”
“Robert Mueller had no material,” Trump said of the former special counsel, who authored a 448-page report on presidential misdeeds.
In the real world, Mueller didn’t say anything unexpected when he was called before two different committees on the same day. He testified once again about Russia’s assault on American democracy and said very clearly that the president was not exonerated on any count.
However, the man is just not good at drama. Think of him as Robert “I’d Refer You to the Report for That” Mueller.
The hearing was a miscalculation on the part of the Democrats, who were a little frustrated that Mueller’s report, although damning for Trump, did not have the kind of juicy language that makes for memorable headlines. His big quote, after all, was: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”
Plus, how many Americans were going to read 448 pages? One clue came when the FBI director admitted he’d just kind of skimmed. A CNN poll found 3 percent of the country had read the whole thing.
And even at that, how much of that 3 percent do you think were fibbing?
A) A lot
B) 2.9 percent
C) Everybody but vicious political science professors who assigned it as a term paper.
To get the story out, some House Democrats decided to bring Mueller himself before the cameras. Once Americans heard the report’s conclusions in his own words, how could they not get ready to impeach? The most riveting bits would be all over Twitter and Facebook and the evening news. What could go wrong?
Zzzzzzzz.
The result was the political equivalent of a movie that makes you want to avoid reading the book. Either through all-purpose weariness or determination not to be pushed, Mueller was pretty consistently … unexciting.
“We decided we would not make a determination as to whether the president committed a crime,” he said, um, determinedly.
The Trump forces seemed to feel the day was a big triumph for their side, which was true only if you’d be encouraged by the news that the world doesn’t think you’re any more wretched today than it did yesterday.
Even the 97 percent of Americans who don’t claim to have read the report know that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, and Trump did everything but jump up and lead a cheer with pom-poms when WikiLeaks dumped a ton of hacked Clinton emails on the nation.
The president’s defense was somewhere between outrageous and pathetic. He refused to talk with Mueller, even though — as Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) noted — during the time he was rejecting those invitations, he met with Vladimir Putin six times.
The Russian connection more than disturbed Mueller, even though he tried to avoid saying anything news-making about it. The closest he came was when someone mentioned Trump’s WikiLeaks euphoria. “Problematic is an understatement,” he said, in what was the equivalent of a howl of fury.
Mueller had warned that he wasn’t going to say anything that wasn’t in the report, and you can’t claim the man didn’t try to keep his word.
“I can’t speak to that.”
“I defer to you on that. I can’t get into the details.”
“I am not going to answer that question, sir.”
“If that’s what was written in the report, yes.”
“I can’t go into it.”
Congressional hearings can be worthy and boring at the same time. Honestly, if you want to complain about something, there are lots of better targets. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Overpopulated Democratic debates. Bicyclists who ride on the sidewalk. “The Secret Life of Pets 2.”
And even if Mueller had been way, way more forthcoming, it’s unlikely it would have given the impeachment crowd much help. The nation is so divided on the subject of Donald Trump that it’s almost impossible to imagine anything would get him kicked out of office.
If he got caught standing with a knife and a pile of murdered puppies, he’d claim that he had actually protected innocent children from a pack of small fuzzy sharks. And around a third of the country would shrug, while Senate Republicans muttered something about danger at the beaches.
Looks like the Democrats are just going to have to run a strong presidential campaign about how to make the country better. If they do that, Donald Trump will not be in the White House in 2021. At which time, we can let the collusion and conspiracy indictments roll. ###
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. See other books by Gail Collins here. She returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. Collins received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University (WI) and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]
Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
No comments:
Post a Comment
☛ STOP!!! Read the following BEFORE posting a Comment!
Include your e-mail address with your comment or your comment will be deleted by default. Your e-mail address will be DELETED before the comment is posted to this blog. Comments to entries in this blog are moderated by the blogger. Violators of this rule can KMA (Kiss My A-Double-Crooked-Letter) as this blogger's late maternal grandmother would say. No e-mail address (to be verified AND then deleted by the blogger) within the comment, no posting. That is the (fair & balanced) rule for comments to this blog.