Sorry, Cobra — The Proper Sobriquet For The Human Stain On The Presidency Is HA (Horse's A$$) In The Oval Office, Not "Ego Maniac In The Oval" (See The 'Toon Below)

Today, The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) throws a hissy-fit over the "exoneration" of the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office. While "hissy" is usually a contraction of "hysterical," but is a fitting term for an outburst by a poisonous serpent. The snark today is high on vituperation and sharp observation. If this is (fair & balanced) high dudgeon, so be it.

PS; The source of this blog's 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]
The Ego Maniac In The Oval Is "Exonerated"
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

advisers Bork called community conservative counsel courts crime Don ego electoral Exonerated false federal fire former going Hicks House ignoring II illegitimate investigators Judge McGahn Mueller notes obstruction Oval people plays president presidential reason recalled report Robert Russia Russian special telling think Trump truth turn tweeted Volume Watergate White win

created at TagCrowd.com

When it comes to presidential obstruction, at least Watergate started with a crime. A stupid crime, but a crime.

After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth.

And it’s the same truth that has been terrorizing us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity.

The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id.

President Trump obstructed on nearly every page of Volume II of the Mueller report, even though Robert Mueller was too lost in legalese to throw the book at him. The report counts as the Worst Exoneration Ever, replete with incrimination.

And Trump’s motivation for trying to subvert justice and turn the White House into a writhing nest of liars? His ego.

He did not want people to think that the Russians were responsible for his election and that he was an illegitimate president.

And why was this the burr under his sociopathic saddle? Obviously, because he thinks he is an illegitimate president. He never expected to win.

The idea that he is in the Oval Office under false pretenses plays into his twisted sense of victimhood. The spoiled scion of Fifth Avenue somehow always finds a way to be aggrieved, a victim of the media, the deep state, “dirty cops,” note-taking aides and the elites — all out to get him.

It’s the same reason he is still talking at rallies about that “beautiful map” of his Electoral College victory, with its large swaths of red. And the same reason he focuses on ratings and crowd sizes and subscription numbers and all the other puerile citations of his ego arithmetic.

We can’t know for sure if there is a more sinister reason for Trump’s obstruction because Mueller didn’t put him under the interrogation lights. The special counsel did not provide any insight into whether Vladimir Putin has something on him.

All we know for now is that Trump’s advisers, talking under oath to federal prosecutors, attributed his actions to his fear of being seen as illegitimate.

“Several advisers recalled that the president-elect viewed stories about his Russian connections, the Russia investigations and the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference as a threat to the legitimacy of his electoral victory,” noted Volume II (which makes for far superior reading to Volume I).

Hope Hicks, the former Trump communications director, told investigators that Trump considered the assessment his “Achilles heel” because if people thought Russia helped him win, it would take away from his own accomplishment. Sean Spicer, Rick Gates and Reince Priebus echoed this point.

In other words, “boss man,” as Hicks called him, would be that most dreaded thing, the thing his father taught him to scorn, a loser, and he would be the thing he falsely accused Barack Obama of — illegitimate.

Despite the American carnage shown in the report, Republicans were mostly staring uncomfortably at their wingtips. Angry Democrats, if they had their way, would put Trump protector William Barr in the dock, right beside Trump.

The closest we get to a hero in the sordid report — as opposed to Kenneth Starr’s lurid report — is the former White House counsel Don McGahn.

While Trump was a whirl of ignorance, vindictiveness and self-destruction, some advisers stopped him from going over the edge by ignoring his “crazy shit,” as McGahn called it. When Trump complained that McGahn was taking notes, unlike Roy Cohn, McGahn explained that “real” lawyers take notes.

The president called McGahn at home twice on June 17, 2017 — which happened to be the 45^th anniversary of the Watergate burglary — to order injustice at Justice by telling Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller. Trump was using a lame pretext of a conflict of interest involving the Trump golf club in Virginia where Mueller had once been a member.

“McGahn recalled the president telling him ‘Mueller has to go’ and ‘Call me back when you do it,’” the report stated.

The White House counsel knew to hit the brakes and shelve Trump’s demand. As the report noted: “McGahn was concerned about having any role in asking the acting attorney general to fire the special counsel because he had grown up in the Reagan era and wanted to be more like Judge Robert Bork and not ‘Saturday Night Massacre Bork.’”

The thuggish Don in the White House obviously regards McGahn as his Sammy the Bull rat, calling him a “lying bastard.” On Friday, the president tweeted, not so cryptically: “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” and later tweeted that it was “finally time to turn the tables” on some of those who have crossed him.

Of course, McGahn, the shaggy-haired libertarian who plays guitar [stage right in video] in an ’80s cover band, needed to put up with the volatile president long enough to fulfill his own agenda: cementing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and salting lower federal courts with hard-right conservatives who are going to be around for decades.

McGahn did Trump two huge favors. He kept him from firing Mueller, which would have put a nail in the presidential coffin. And he delivered Trump’s greatest triumph on the right, conspiring with Mitch McConnell to fill the courts with socially conservative judges intent on undoing government regulation.

Ironically, Trump’s most lasting legacy was engineered by the same guy who shivved the president hardest in the Mueller report. ###

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

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

From A G/T-Classroom, A MIddle Schooler Takes On The Mueller Report

Straight from a middle school Language Arts class we learn that The Mueller Report and The Great Gatsby are both stories of men It is exactly like “The Great Gatsby,” a book about men who pretend to have more money than they actually have and turn out to owe everything they have to sinister forces but for whom you ultimately feel pity because they are lonely even though they have big houses. If this is (fair & balanced) truth from a child, so be it.

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
My Book Report On The Mueller Report
By Alexandra Petri


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

American asks black book boxes character conclusion conflicts contained course darkness demonstrated Donald Dream everything example green heart irony looked lot man money mostly Mueller narrator pages people portions protect reading red refers report saying seemed shows something sometimes symbolize theme think throughout times Trump ultimately used vs wants whose

created at TagCrowd.com

I enjoyed reading The Mueller Report [PDF], a book that contained 448 pages, each more exciting than the last, as well as more than 1,000 footnotes! The book was published in 2019, meaning it is relevant to our times, and it contained many themes and symbolism which I will explain in the course of this report. At the back it also included a list of characters. Some people just skimmed through this report to come to conclusions they already had, but I did not, as this report will show.

The Mueller Report is about a man who wanted to find information, but really, I think, what he found was the American Dream. It is exactly like The Great Gatsby (1925), a book about a man who pretends to have more money than he actually has and turns out to owe everything he has to sinister forces but for whom you ultimately feel pity because he is lonely even though he has a big house, in that both that book and this one are about a narrator who is trying to find out information about one thing and ultimately discovers something else.

Basically, the American Dream is elusive to lots of people, and some people would say that it does not exist at all, which is also what people in this book say about collusion, which shows parallelism.

One theme of The Mueller Report was that it contains 448 pages. That is a lot of pages, and it is very impressive to read a book that long, as, of course, I did. But many of the words are covered up in thick black bars, which makes the reading go fast because of pacing. I would argue that the bars are even a character. In the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, a large asterisk drawn in thick black ink stands for a part of the human body. I am not sure what part it would be in this book.

The colors red, green, blue and white also recur repeatedly throughout this book. Green symbolizes spring, renewal, money and envy. It can also symbolize Personal Privacy. Yellow symbolizes cowardice. It also refers to portions of the book that deal with Investigative Techniques, but I think it can mean both things at the same time. Red is usually blood or anger but here alludes to the Grand Jury, whose presence was felt throughout this book.

This whole book is an example of synecdoche, in which a part stands for the whole. For instance, you say “wheels” when you mean “a car,” or “the unredacted portions of The Mueller Report when you mean The Mueller Report. Synecdoche is a useful rhetorical device and I like it a lot, even if it is not one of the ones Winston Churchill mostly used.

The conflicts of Man vs. Man and Man vs. Society are very prominent conflicts which are demonstrated throughout this book. Sometimes, a character will find himself opposed to other characters, who will try to stop him by just not doing what he has asked or by pretending they are confused by his request or sometimes by resigning. The Deep State, in this book, can represent society.

One way in which this book did not succeed was its lack of female characters. Ivanka Trump appeared briefly, but her character was not as developed as it could have been. Hillary Clinton was, in some ways, the villain of this book, according to some, but I think if it was their intention for her to be the villain, they should have made her do more. They just say she is crooked without stating why, which is an example of telling without showing.

Throughout the book, the character of Donald Trump was looking for protection, which we see from the fact that the word “protect” occurs more than 80 times in the course of the book, although some of those times, I am now realizing, are at the top of the page next to the title of the report. But mostly they are in the text. He wants protection, which is demonstrated by him saying, “‘You were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect” to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, whose name is a telling reference to lost causes.

This book examines the theme of protection through all three types of irony. In his quest for protection, Donald Trump makes an allusion to the play “Angels in America” when describing what a good protector should do (not take notes, just like Roy Cohn). This is an example of verbal irony. Secondly, the character Michael Cohen also says he wants to protect the president, but some characters disagree that this is what his actions accomplish (situational irony). And lastly, when Donald Trump says, “I’m f---ed,” it is an example of dramatic irony, because he does not yet know that Congress is going to protect him and never take any action that could possibly lead to him not being in office anymore, which is something we as the reader already know.

A character I really liked was George Papadopoulos, who was referred to as “Greek Guy” in a footnote to show comic relief. It is good to have some characters whom you do not have to take seriously, especially if the book is long.

The narrator seemed very ambivalent. Sometimes I thought, am I supposed to trust this narrator? Sometimes the narrator seemed on the verge of saying something very profound, but then there would be another black box. Black boxes can also symbolize censorship.

I found the black boxes distracting but also moving. This book asks, in a way, are we not all trapped in boxes, unable to connect? I think the boxes were very indicative. Sometimes the box looked like a Tetris that was successful, as on page 44. Sometimes the box looked like a brutalist beret. I think the boxes were a kind of Rorschach test for the readers to see whatever they are inclined to in them. I saw the craven darkness at the heart of everything. This is like in the famous book Heart of Darkness (1899).

Also they symbolized the American Dream.

One thing that I liked about the book was that it let you draw your own conclusion about what people’s motives were and whether they were wrong to do what they did. I think it will be fun to discuss that part a lot.

I did not identify with any of the characters in this book.

I would recommend this book, in spite of how it ended. ###

[Alexandra Petri is a Washington Post columnist offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (2015) She joined The Post as an intern in 2010, after graduating from college. In 2016, Petri received the National Press Club Angele Gingras Award for Humor Writing. She received a BA (English) from Harvard University (MA).]

Copyright © 2019 The Washington Post




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves