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Sunday, April 07, 2019

Mueller Time, Slight Return: Collusion Delusions

Tempting as it was to join the rest of Hot-Take Nation and insert my two-and-a-half-cents on the Barr Summary (as opposed to, you know, what has been mischaracterized as the "Mueller Report") into the ether, it just seemed unnecessary and pointless. Still does, really, though there are slightly more positive signs now, two weeks after Bill Barr's forty-eight-hour whitewash.

But the main takeaway is that -- get this -- laws, like taxes, don't apply to the rich and powerful. They always find a way to escape accountability, because there's always some rented scumbag willing to shovel their shit. Prove me wrong.

That said, I can still stand by my observations from the evening Mueller delivered the report, but before Barr's bullshit summary. Farming out the white-collar cases to SDNY and EDNY and EDVA, while strategically smart, are not a magic bullet -- after all, if Barr is corrupt enough to do what he's already done, right out in the open, it's not much of a stretch to imagine him either assigning fixers to those fed divisions before the cases reach trial, or just assert exec privilege and kill them outright.

It sounds like schtick, but I promise you, it's dead serious:  when I say that these fuckers' slogan is what are you gonna do about it?, that's really the way it is. Everything is an act of defiance with these people, and so far, they've been right. There has been no disincentive, and certainly no real accountability, for criminal and unethical actions, for lying outright, for taking bribes out in the open. The Saudis might as well back a fucking Brinks truck right up to the White House and have done with it. What are you gonna do about it?

There's still a very real non-zero chance that those district cases proceed and succeed, though, so it's worth holding out some hope for that. In the meantime, the first couple days after Barr's summary dropped told you everything you needed to confirm about the spinelessness and sheer idiocy of some key media players.

There are plenty of suspects to choose from, but the one I'm most disappointed and annoyed with would have to be Matt Taibbi, who seems content to sit pat on his "the Russians are too inept to have pulled something like that off" defense. The thing is, Taibbi has made a respectable career built on rigorous skepticism applied to the most toxic bastards in this country, from Wall Street banksters to evangelical hucksters. He knows firsthand that the current crew would be more than amenable to that sort of foreign assistance, just as he knows that Trump has been laundering bratva and oligarch money for at least a decade.

I have no earthly idea as to what accounts for Taibbi's inexplicable refusal to see the preponderance of circumstantial evidence, not to mention the guilty pleas and prison sentences that have already taken place, as well as the testimony and trials of key players still to come. Michael Flynn still has to allocate. Roger Stone is going on trial later this year. This thing is far from over, and it sure as fuck ain't over because a reliable stooge like Barr was brought in for the express purpose of sweeping this thing under.

It's not just Taibbi, of course; no shortage of useful idiots have come scuttling out the woodwork in recent days. Look, if you really can't see the cognitive disconnect of the refusal to release a report that supposedly clears you 100%, then I don't know what to tell you. I think there's actually even a good chance that Barr told Mueller to wrap things up and close the investigation prematurely. It's at least worth checking into, if one of the columnists and/or panelists can make that extra crucial step to being journalists. The Democrats need to get Mueller in front of them and grill him like a rotisserie chicken, because there is fuckery afoot, and we all know it.

Again, I don't know what to make of people who can't see the obvious, and I don't know what to make of people who just shrug their shoulders and don't give a shit, even if it's all true. I think that's actually a bigger problem than the crimes that Mueller was investigating. People are content to live in their own epistemological bubbles, and the mediots are more than happy to spoon-feed them clickbait and cash the checks.

I don't mean that we must all be outraged every minute of every day; being stoked into constant outrage is a big part of how we ended up here, and there is more to life than watching this doddering asshole decompensate daily before our eyes. It's why I check in once every week or two these days. There's certainly enough to be angered about constantly, but you just drive yourself nuts doing that.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be pissed about what's going on. These things are unprecedented and unacceptable, and it's important that we all recognize that there is nothing special about Fuckface Von Clownstick, and therefore he needs to be held to the same standards of accountability as every other mortal. If we stop doing that, if we just let him get away with everything, then we're no longer captives, but accomplices.

Another huge part of the problem is that Mueller ran right away into the proverbial "mission creep" -- he found loose threads right away when he started investigating the key players behind Comey's firing, and Flynn's discussions with the Russians (and Saudis), and when he pulled on those loose threads, a whole bunch of interesting things started unraveling.

But by definition, that makes it much more difficult to package the whole story into a straightforward narrative that the average 'murkin can follow. It is a sprawling narrative with plenty of characters and seemingly dissociated events that only form a pattern when you step back a bit. But so is Game of Thrones, so is The Wire.

There's a lot of illicit cash and undue influence being peddled here, and I would literally bet my next paycheck that if we were permitted by the Grand Vizier to read this report that supposedly totally clears His Travesty of all wrongdoing, we would quickly find an unprecedented web of corruption. We would find that our foreign policy is literally being sold to the Saudis and Russians and Emiratis and Israelis, for starters -- not even "traded" for some vague general benefit of the US, but for the specific monetary benefit of the Trump/Kushner crime family.

These people are fucking criminals, full stop, and by going down the rathole of toxic people that were magnetized to this boiler room pump-and-dump scam, Mueller was starting to unearth some of the more direct connections when Barr was installed to pull the plug.

There probably was never a direct Boris-Badenov-handing-sack-of-cash-with-dollar-sign-to-Donald-Trump scenario that would inculpate him in court, anyway. This is all done with cutouts and third parties and sleazy intermediaries that wouldn't have passed muster in a Robert Ludlum potboiler. And no one has to make a request from an inherently corrupt person who has already been on the take for a decade before he took office; both parties already know what needs to be done. So there's no crime to witness and adjudicate, even though crimes most certainly took place.

But again, this whole impossibly baroque, sprawling narrative is really about us in the end, what we're willing to accept and put up with. And clearly we're fine with it all, or enough of us are that the needle doesn't budge. So maybe we're getting what we deserve.

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