"A Book Which Everyone Praises..."

"Been down this road once or twice before..."

I remember the Nixon White House tapes, by which I mean the published transcripts. I had a copy. Hell, I had a copy of Ellsberg's The Pentagon Papers. Don't have 'em now, and never read either of them.   Don't know anyone who ever did.  Not Watergate, that, but of a piece withe the era, and the information available to us.  What we learned in the hustings about Nixon and skullduggery we learned from the Watergate hearings on TeeVee, not from Woodstein or a brief best-seller.  I learned about their reporting from my copy of All the President's Men, and frankly, the movie made more sense of the story than the book did.

So pardon me if this doesn't bother me all that much:

In my DC circle, full of activists and journalists, there’s been almost no discussion of the Mueller report. Nobody’s citing from it, sending out tweets or otherwise expressing any views. Among my friends, I haven’t found anyone who’s actually read it.

If we'd had in '73 what we have now, I'm sure I could have reported the same thing.  Even Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre didn't convince everybody there was some there, there.  The tapes hurt, but only if people paid attention to them.  Most of the people I knew didn't, and by that I mean adults who could vote (most of my friends, like me, couldn't vote until '73, so that was a bit late to defeat Nixon).  In fact, it was the slow accretion of information from the interminable hearings that did the job.  Woodstein probably got official Washington to pay attention, but they didn't affect the nation as a whole, any more than Twitter does today.  Those hearings really didn't jump from "J'accuse!" to conviction in one or two weeks.  IIRC, the Clinton impeachment hearings did, but the fix was in and the whole purpose of that was to embarrass Clinton.  Gingrich knew he had no chance of removal in the Senate.

Why some Democrats are eager to play Republicans 1999 is a mystery, 6except maybe they are too young to remember much about 1999.  Word is a lot of the young House members want to impeach Trump instanter; it's the political culture they grew up in, not all that different from the one Jacob Wohl grew up in, I guess.  I read an analysis that Wohl grew up in the rat-fucking culture of Roger Stone, et al., and thinks it's both normal and easy, which explains his remarkable inability to do anything but make a boob of himself on the national stage.  (I remember Watergate, when the term "ratfucking" first entered the general political lexicon (you could look it up).  Watergate had a cast of characters that makes Trump's whole presidency look like a one-act, one character play.)  But if the way Trump does things is not the way the system works, and if Gingrich abused the impeachment process in harassing Bill Clinton, who was far more capable of handling the office of the President than Trump is (hell, a monkey could do less harm than Trump does), then why are some so eager to get to pay back the GOP in kind?

“We’re restraining ourselves from doing ‘Donald Trump Justice.’ ‘Donald Trump justice’ is you just reach a conclusion and then let the facts catch up. We’re trying to show a contrast to that which is orderly process, which is frustrating in that it doesn’t happen as fast as you want,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) explained. “We’ve got one shot to get it right, you’ve got one record to create for the courts. You want to show you gave them every chance to comply. It’s frustrating, but that’s law and order.”

Rep. Salwell is right.  Creating a generation of Democratic bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich, of people who say it doesn't matter what the law is, Trump is wrong and we are right!, is not the answer. Of course, it does matter what the law is, but the law is not simply the words of one statute applied to one set of facts; and yes, Trump is acting lawlessly.  The solution to such lawlessness is the gun-slinging, bulletproof, one man army action hero, who saves the day by slaughtering all the evil goons and leaving the mess and blood and bodies and destruction, for somebody else to clean up.  Need I say this is not an action movie?

Is no one reading the Mueller report?  Neither are Barr or Trump's antics and obstructions moving the needle in favor of Trump's support in the general public.  If everyone did read Mueller's report, would they come to the same conclusion?  Probably not.  Lots of people read the NYT report on Trump's tax returns; a lot of people didn't.  Twitter was full of tweets about what a lousy business man Trump is; and yet there were no small number of tweets trying to fit Trump's excuse (real estate depreciation) into the few facts they had, or thought they had.  They were convinced, in other words, of Trump's continuing genius and business infallibility, even though the emperor is clearly nekkid as a jaybird.  Those people won't read the NYT article and even if they do, they will insist that black is white, down is up, and Donald Trump is a super genius billionaire.

You can't fix stupid.  All you can do is put the information out there, and these days, for better or worse, still the best conduit for that is television, where people can see and hear the questions and the answers.  The questions in Watergate were presented mostly by counsel, not by grandstanding Representatives and Senators eager to make points for their side.  It was quite effective, which is why Barr wouldn't go before the House Judiciary Committee when it wanted to do the same.  He relaxed in the friendly support of Lindsey Graham & Co. in the Senate.  He knew he'd get no such tongue baths in the House; not from lawyers looking only for square answers to hard questions.

That's what the country needs, and if it takes until November or even next year to clear the barriers and obstacles away and force witnesses to come testify under penalty of law (which is what subpoena means anyway, "under penalty"), then so be it.  If the system is going to work, it has to work under the aegis of due process and equal protection.  Anything less would truly be the constitutional crisis we call keep alternately clamoring for, and decrying.