It occurred to this blogger that AG William Barr released his foolish letter prematurely. He should have released the damnable document today — not a week ago — on the truly appropriate April Fools' Day 2019. In the aftermath of the ultimate political prank upon the United States of America, Tom/Dan wrote:
Hey all,
Last week, an Attorney General once described by William Safire, of all people, as “Coverup-General Barr” (thanks to his history helping George H.W. Bush bury evidence of his involvement with Iran Contra and the sale of WMDs to Saddam Hussein) was at it again, releasing a three and a half page book-report-after-reading-the-Cliff’s-Notes “summary” of the Mueller report, which is reportedly 400 pages long. And even in that carefully-worded summary, he felt compelled to quote Mueller’s cautionary note that the full report “does not exonerate” the president (as noted in last week’s cartoon).
So the entire news cycle last week was, of course, full of blaring headlines declaring that Mueller had exonerated the president.
And maybe he has! I haven’t read the Mueller report, and neither have you, and neither have the Russiagate skeptics who spent the entire week taking a victory lap or ten on Twitter. But just from the things that we know as a matter of public record — notably the Trump Tower meeting, and Trump lying about his attempts to build a Trump Tower Moscow — it seems incredibly likely that the full report is a lot more damaging to the president than anyone paying cursory attention to the news this week might be led to believe.
We can infer, as the cartoon above suggests, that none of it rose to the level of provable or indictable. I’m going to withhold judgment before I accept that it means that Trump is clean as the driven snow, though.
It doesn’t mean that Trump is Putin’s puppet, obeying his every command. And it definitely doesn’t mean that Russia is responsible for this nightmare of our own creation. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere, and his racism and brutality clearly play well with a lot of Americans. But it does seem clear that there’s some deep corruption here, and while there’s been a rush to declare this story over and done, I suspect we’re going to learn a lot more about it in the months ahead. Unfortunately, and thanks in part to the media’s own self-flagellation, Trump will probably be able to elide past it all once again, dismiss it all as the work of the fake news media, the enemy of the people. It is, at least, a good sign that polls this week indicate that only about a third of Americans believe that he’s been cleared of all wrongdoing.
For the time being, we remain exactly where we were a week ago, where we have been for the past two years, really — suspended in amber, trapped in a moment, waiting for… something.
Dan/Tom
Yesterday, this blog was graced with a story of the Great Dying (of the dinosaurs and other living things) more than 250 million years ago. The young paleontologist in the account was greatly interested in amber (fossilized tree resin) that contains the remains of vegetation and animal life at that moment in time. And that is what Tom/Dan is referring to in the closing sentence: "...[We] have been suspended in amber, trapped in a moment, waiting for something." If this is the (fair & balanced) response to our political equivalent of the Great Dying on November 8, 2016, so be it.
[x TMW]
Absence Of Evidence
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]
Copyright © 2019 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
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