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The New Russia Investigation The Usual Suspects 13 June 2019.

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Paul Manafort.

During the Cold War, the United States applied the Roosevelt Standard to foreign rulers: “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”  Paul Manafort made a very good living by helping improve the image of some very bad people.  He represented Jonas Savimbi, Ferdinand Marcos, and Joseph Mobutu in the corridors of power.  All of this activity aligned with American foreign policy.  Then the Cold War ended.  Suddenly, the “sons-of-bitches” had to swim for it.  So did Manafort.  He found an apparent new gold-mine in working with the post-Soviet Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.  Much of this work focused on Ukraine.

Ukraine had escaped from the Soviet Union upon the collapse of the evil empire.  However, old antipathies and affinities survived in the new country.  Basically, the farther west you go, the more Russophobe the people become[1] and the farther east you go the more Russophile the people become.  From 2004 to 2010, Manafort found work trying to improve the political chances of the Russophile presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovitch.  It should have been obvious that this work aligned with post-Soviet Russian foreign policy.  Reportedly, sometime between 2006 and 2009, the American Ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, told Manafort that he was working against the interests of the United States.  Apparently, Manafort did not heed this warning.[2]  In 2010, Yanukovitch won the presidency in an election judged fair by international observers.[3]  In 2014 he aroused massive opposition among the Russophobes by reversing course on an application to join the European Union.  He certainly did this at the behest of Vladimir Putin.  Soon, Yanukovitch was both out of office and out of Ukraine.  According to one account, the FBI then opened a criminal investigation of Paul Manafort.[4]  It was still running when the FBI began its investigation of suspected conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign in Summer 2016.

What did the FBI investigation launched in 2014 discover?  Did it discover that Manafort had scored big-time, but hadn’t reported his earnings to the IRS?[5]

Michael Flynn.

Michael Flynn had an impressive career in military intelligence during the “Global War on Terror.”  In April 2012, his ascent peaked when President Obama nominated him to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency.  Two years later, Flynn announced his retirement.   Normally, it seems, people get three years in that position, so he was leaving early.  Why?

On the one hand, there’s the whispering campaign.  It was “leaked” to the press that Flynn had a chaotic management style; he didn’t play well with others; he abused his staff; he wasn’t a team-player; and he had a loose grip on facts.  These seem like personality traits.  Nobody noticed them before while promoting him from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-General?  So I don’t think this is very credible.

On the other hand, there’s the counter-whispering campaign.  It has been suggested that Flynn repeatedly told the Obama White House that much of the opposition to Bashir al-Assad came from conservative-to-radical Muslims.  The “moderates” weren’t much present on the battlefield.  This seems to have contradicted the “narrative” preferred by the White House.  Eventually, the White House got fed up.

Then there’s this.  In February 2014, Flynn attended the “Cambridge Intelligence Seminar,”[6] run—in part–by Stefan Halper.  Reportedly, Halper found it alarming that Flynn seemed very close to a Russian woman who also attended the seminar.  Someone else shared these concerns with American “authorities.”[7]  The woman involved was Svetlana Lokhova.[8]  She denies that she spoke with Flynn for any extended period or that they had a personal relationship.  Did American authorities believe that Flynn had been caught in what John Le Carre novels call a “honey trap”?  The Director of the CIA at the time was John Brennan, subsequently an engaged participant in countering President Donald Trump’s allegations about the intelligence community.

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[2] Why not?  Perhaps because he was making a lot of money and the American government wasn’t offering him an alternative income.  Perhaps because he was trying to get his guy elected president of a new democracy.  America is all about exporting democracy.  What’s more important, democracy or getting the American candidate elected?

[3] See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/08/viktor-yanukovych-ukraine-president-election

[4] See: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-paul-manafort-michael-flynn-russia-robert-mueller-turkey-620215  One might be forgiven for wondering if the investigation was pay-back for Manafort having ignored Ambassador Taylor’s warning.  If it was pay-back, it soon hit pay-dirt.

[5] If so, then what—exactly—was Robert Mueller doing with his time for two years?  The Russian hacking information came from the NSA and pretty damn quick at that.  Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were low-hanging fruit easily plucked.

[6] On the larger framework of the Seminar, see: https://thecsi.org.uk/  NB: The reported views of Sir Richard Dearlove are interesting.  For a recent iteration of the Seminar, see: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/seminars/intelligence

[7] See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/politics/trump-fbi-informant-russia-investigation.html

[8] Her version of the encounter can be found at https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39863781  See also: https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/28/lawsuit-suggests-spying-trump-campaign-started-early-2016/

Just typing out loud here 12 June 2019.

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You challenged me on my enthusiasm for Joe Hill’s “Rebel Girl.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_tz3wPgLUw  Didn’t have a good response at the moment, but it got me thinking.  My mind works slower than do those of most people.  Hence the delay.

To my mind, the Democrats are generically anti-business.  Sure, they talk about income inequality and anti-monopoly and this, that, and another New Deals.  But what they mean to apply is an anti-business policy that will fall on all businesses, great and small.  Taxes.  Regulations by decree.  You never see Democrat candidates who have ever worked in/for a business.  You never see ones who have had their own business.  Barack Obama was a “community organizer.”   (George McGovern’s post-presidential experience is instructive here.)  They’ve all spent their lives as lawyers or “in public service.”  Public service is just another way of saying “public employment.”  You don’t get laid off in a recession and you get good benefits.  For following an elaborate set of rules.

They have a fantasy of returning to the Fifties: a few big industries that don’t have any global competition; high wages and good benefits achieved through government-sponsored union-bargaining; owners who inherited their wealth from their rough-and-ready ancestors who actually created it; and a horde of professional managers who deploy B-School-certified skills in return for a generous, but socially-acceptable, salary.  That—at best—is what the Democrats want to recreate.  Basically, Rudolf Hilferding seventy years on.   (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hilferding )

None of this has anything to do with contemporary reality.  It has been one, but only one, of the factors that have driven the American economy—and society—into the ground over the last fifty years.

Yes, there is a lot to criticize in Republican policies.  Mostly, to my mind, it is the starving/shrinking of the necessary regulatory functions of the Federal bureaucracy.  To take some examples: the IRS can’t audit; the FAA has shifted airline safety to the plane manufacturer (singular); the FDA can’t keep up with the companies trying to poison us for fun and profit.  Theodore Roosevelt theorized that only a strong government could mediate the conflicting demands of Capital and Labor.  Republicans are gutting the system projected by their second-greatest president.  The reduction of the corporation tax to international (i.e. Canada) norms seems to me a good idea.  All the tax cut-spend-elect stuff to counter Democrats’ tax-spend-elect stuff is wrong, but wrong for both parties.  And wrong for the American voters who gobbled it up.   Maybe “snorted” would be better?

As for “bigness,” see Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly.  Yes, we’ve been down this road before.

In the end, what I’m fighting for is my Dad and all the people like him.  He didn’t want to work for the government and he didn’t want to work for a giant business.  He had done both (Army, Shell Oil).  He just wanted his own show.  Win or lose, it was on him.   What’s wrong with that?  He provided a service that people wanted.  He paid his employees the best he could.  Wasn’t great money, but it was the same deal for them that he made.  They weren’t working for the government or big business.  There weren’t procedures to deal with.  Just people.  He and my Mom did a lot of unpaid work to make the business run.  I guess I don’t see much difference between my Dad and an artist: they’re both self-actualizing and creative.  Along the way, he put a roof over our head and food in our mouths and paid his taxes.  Some of those taxes went to pay for public competition with his private business.  Why?  Because not all high-school teachers wanted to coach, so some of them would rather work extra as driving instructors.  Teachers had a union, but private business did not.

 

American Opinion on Abortion 12 June 2019.

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For a baseline, most Americans support Roe v. Wade.  To be clear, in that decision the Supreme Court of the United States (popularly SCOTUS) “ruled that during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; [and] during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.”[1]

Oddly for a democracy, many Americans don’t hold the same opinions on abortion as do their elected representatives.  Many people—both Democrats and Republicans—reject the maximalist positions of their parties.[2]  Some 40 percent of Democrats oppose abortion “for any reason” and some 29 percent of Republicans support abortion “for any reason.”  Better than a third (36 percent) of Hillary Clinton voters in 2016 opposed using Medicaid money to pay for abortions, and better than half (58 percent) of all Americans opposed using Medicaid money to pay for abortions.  Basically, that’s the Hyde Amendment, which Joe Biden has just repudiated.

Why have the two parties missed out on this reality?  Well, they haven’t missed out.  They just don’t care.  Take the abortion-uncertain Democrats as one example.  They are more rural, more Southern, more politically “moderate,” less-educated[3], and more religious than most Democrats.  Basically, they live in areas and represent demographic groups that Democrats know they can’t win anyway.  So, why concede anything to the dissenters?  The same is probably true of Republican dissenters.  They’re probably more urban, more Northern, more educated, less religious, and more “moderate” than most Republicans.  Republicans aren’t going to win these regions or groups anyway, so why concede to the dissenters?[4]

Then–and this will be creepy for liberal Democrats–African-American Democrats (but I repeat myself) split 50-50 on abortion “for any reason.”[5]  At the same, public opinion supports abortion when the child is the result of rape or incest, or when the pregnancy endangers to life of the mother, or when the child would be born with some defect (i.e. Down syndrome like my sister Bronwyn[6]).

Anyway, abortion-rights is for Democrats what gun-rights is for Republicans: the issue mobilizes one-issue true-believers.[7]  No fixing America this way.

[1] According to a Gallup Poll, 60 percent of people support abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.  That would be within about 12 weeks.  That is, once a woman has figured out that she is pregnant, and has had some time to figure out how she feels about being pregnant, and has thought about whether she can manage a child, and has figured out how she will feel about terminating a pregnancy.  Put that way, people opposing abortion in this framework are just an immense collection of assholes.  IMHOP.

[2] Nate Cohn, “Crisp Battle Lines on Abortion Blur When Surveys Ask Voters,” NYT, 9 June 2019.

[3] Think about this for a minute.  Democrats with less education are more moderate than Democrats in general, let alone Democrats with more education.  Could one argue that more-educated people—Democrat and Republican—are messing-up our country?

[4] See: Clayton Christenson on Disruption.  Start at the bottom and eat upward.

[5] If I recall correctly—always a tricky issue—African-Americans also oppose gay rights.

[6] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ_4m2ocxhI  “Go fuck yourself you fucking child!”

[7] In 2015, there were 13,286 firearm deaths, excluding suicides.  According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2015, there were 638,169 abortions.  Put this way, gun control advocates are dealing with the lesser of two evils.  For those people who think that life begins at conception, abortion is a rolling-Holocaust.  Forced to choose between a child molester and a child murderer, about half of Alabama Republicans sat out the election.

Zion Island 14.

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Reichsarchiv.  Nachlass Bach-Zalewski.  Private files–Miscellaneous.

Sipo-SD IV-B-4.

Partial transcript of a recorded conversation, Toamasina, Madagascar, 14 May 1948.

……….

MB[1]: So, you saw him?[2]

MA[3]: I saw him.  Talked to him.  Talked for hours.  Aliphas[4] met me at the train station and took me home.  It took a week to set up.

MB: And?  Will he help?  What did you tell him?

MA: I explained our situation, what it’s like here, how it isn’t what they put in the fucking papers, when they do put anything in the papers.  I told him from now on we had to be strong, rely on ourselves.

MB: And he agreed?  He understood?

MA: Eventually, yes, the little bastard agreed.  He’d seen that news-reel.  It took forever to talk him out of that.  He’s German, but he got out a long time before.  Everything is theoretical to him.

MB: Will he help us?  Does he understand what we want?

MA: Maybe.  There are a lot of moving parts.  A lot of things have to be organized.  Organized like we did in the old country.

MB: It’s going to take time, then.  If we have it.  They’re probably watching us even now.

MA: He gave me the name of a man, Raymond.  Arranged for me to see him.  I went to El Paso to see Raymond.  It’s just across the border.  Took the train up to the north.  Had to wade across the river in the night with a bunch of laborers just to get in.  Raymond says the place is like a fortress since the election.

[1] Menachem Begin: b. 1913, Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire.

[2] Reference unclear.

[3] Mordechai Anielewicz: b. 1919, Warsaw, Russian Empire.

[4] Avram Aliphas: b. 1911, Kolno, Russian Empire; migrated to Palestine 1936; settled in Mexico 1940: taught at the Hebrew School in Mexico City.

Zion Island 13.

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Reichsarchiv.  Nachlasse Bach-Zalewski.  Private files–Miscellaneous.

 

Sipo-SD IV-B-4.

Partial transcript of a recorded conversation, Theresienstadt, Madagascar, 14 August 1952.

 

(excerpt).

…..

AG[1]: There’s something else.  The piano player from Rick’s.  You’ve heard him?  Course you have.  You love the night-life.  I met him at a party.  There were a lot of people there and a lot of booze.  We ended up in one of the little groups late in the evening.

 

PR[2]: You ended up in the same group or he was working his way toward you?

 

AG: Dunno.  Could have been.  Turns out he’s not French or German either, the “Graf” aside.  He’s a Russian, one of the refugees.  Grew up in Shanghai, then the family moved to France maybe twenty years ago.  He speaks French and Russian, but also English and German.

 

PR: What’s he like?

 

AG: Smart.  Big talker, but not so much boasting.  More like he can run on and on with stories.  Lots of them funny.  Sort of puts you to sleep, like the doctor before an operation.  A feygele[3] I think.

 

PR: So why tell me?

 

AG: He wants to meet people.  Says it’s lonely being so far from home; says the Germans aren’t too interesting.  Said it in a way that might make you think he didn’t like them—without coming right out and saying so.  Also, he wants to see something of the island.  He says the steamer from Shanghai stopped here on the way to France when he was a boy, but he never got off the ship.

 

PR:  OK, I’ll tell them.  Try to avoid him until they decide.

 

[1] Abraham Gancwajch: b. 1902, Czestachowa, Russian Empire.  Head of Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering in the Resettlement Community.

[2] Perec Rachman, b: 1919, Lwow, Polish Republic.  Interned by Soviet Union, 1940.

[3] Yiddish: a man who is believed to be gay.

My Weekly Reader 7 June 2019.

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Often times, modern readers misunderstand the monarchies of the Middle Ages.  They know that monarchy came to seem so tyrannical to the people of the 18th and 19th centuries that an “Age of Revolutions” took place between 1775 and 1850.  If they are lucky, they’ve seen Kenneth Branagh’s version of “King Henry V”: a king both conscious of his own humanity and imperious in his ambitions.  People may believe that Medieval kings wielded immense power.

They did not, or at least not necessarily.  For one thing, Medieval kings could be certain only of the troops and taxes they raised from their personal lands.  Beyond that, they had to rely upon their “vassals,” who owed a specified amount for support for a limited time each year.  In times of tumult, some of these vassals might increase their own power and independence relative to that of their king.  To take an extreme case, in 1066, the Duke of Normandy—a vassal of the King of France—invaded and conquered the neighboring kingdom of England.  Thereafter, the Duke of Normandy was a vassal of the French king, but the King of England was the independent equal of the King of France.  So, that’s concerning, as young people say.

For another thing, kings were just men who had inherited a crown.  A few were suited to be great kings, many were suited to be ordinary kings, and a few were—spectacularly—not suited to be kings at all.  King Henry IV displaced (and probably murdered) King Richard II.  His son, King Henry V, was a great soldier who might have turned into a great king.  His victory at Agincourt resulted in the Treaty of Troyes, which made Henry V the heir to the French king Charles VI.  England and France would be united under one ruler.  A super-state that could dominate Europe loomed on the horizon.  When Henry V died very young, his son became king when he was one year old.  King Henry VI of England[1] was “simple-minded,” mentally-unstable, and gender-dysphoric.  Not a good combination for a Medieval king.[2]

The weakness of Henry VI empowered other men.  On the one hand, great nobles led the fight to hold on to England’s French empire.  The long war exhausted both countries.  Oddly, defeat in that war discredited King Henry VI more than it did the men who had insisted on waging the war.  On the other hand, the descendants of the deposed King Richard II began to assert their claim to the throne.  Richard, Duke of York, began what came to be called “The War of the Roses” (1455-1485).  That civil war ended, at first, in a “Yorkist” victory.  Then the victory proved unstable, thanks largely to the efforts of Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s queen.[3]  However, in the end, the House of York trampled down the House of Lancaster.[4]  The once-again-deposed king, Henry VI, soon died under murky circumstances.  “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun/son of York.”

It was a short summer.  Soon, a distant relative of Henry VI overthrew the last Yorkist king, Richard III.  Nature better endowed King Henry VII to be king than it did King Henry VI.  However, only Henry VII’s grand-daughter Queen Elizabeth I, matched him and “the former lions of your blood” in ability.  So, monarchy was a bit of a crap-shoot.  So, Revolution is…?

[1] Lauren Johnson, The Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (2019).

[2] Or a modern elected president.  Not that I think President Trump is gender-dysphoric.  Far from it!

[3] She was more man then most men.

[4] Lancaster, not Lannister, but that seems to be where George R.R. Martin found his inspiration for “Game of Thrones.”

Highway of Tears 4 June 2019.

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Dan Werb is a Canajun, eh?  Born in Vancouver, BC, and went to grad school at UBC.  Went to grad school to become an epidemiologist.[1]  He started out studying IV drug users and HIV/AIDS.  The work involved many interviews with people most academics wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.  It would appear from his research that cops harassing losers doesn’t help those losers manage their problems.  Professional success followed.  Now, it appears, he’s teaching at UCSD.  So, we can anticipate further studies about IV drug use and HIV/AIDs in the poor quarters to San Diego (if such exist)?

Well, no.  For one thing, Werb isn’t in any kind of a rut, finding out more and more about less and less.[2]  He’s willing to shift his inquiries when some new thing catches his eye.  For another thing, he’s way past feeling creepy talking to “marginal” figures.  Werb’s curiosity and his attempts to satisfy it led to a recent book.[3]  Many different threads come together.

San Diego is a rich American city across the border from its poor Mexican half-sister Tijuana.  San Diego hosts big Navy and Marine Corps bases.  The bases are packed with wanna-be or actually-are sexually active young men from all over the country.[4]  So, Tijuana provided bars and restaurants, and some other stuff, along with prostitution services (safe, clean, at a reasonable price).  Thus, economic complementarity.[5]

After 9/11, the US slammed the brakes on easy passage through the Mexican-American border.[6]  North-bound traffic backed-up on the Mexican side, delaying the timely return of lance-corporals and machinist mates 3rd class to their appointed duties.  Then, for un-related reasons, drug gang conflict led to gunfire in Tijuana.  Ten years ago, the Navy and Marines began impeding visits to Mexico, Republic of, by their personnel.

Tijuana’s personal services industry crashed.  Many displaced employees became independent entrepreneurs.  There, that sanitizes it for your protection!  Instead of fucking the brains out of nice American boys who tipped generously—and doing it on clean sheets to boot, they ended up standing around truck stops at night or propping up the bar in some dive.  As a result, in Baja California, many of them got AIDS (and gave it to others); many got beaten to a pulp by crazy men who both burned with desire and hated what they desired; many crashed up against drugs; and a really frightening number were murdered or “disappeared.”  A “really frightening number” means 1,200 a year/100 a month/3 a day/1 every 8 hours.

Mexican society keeps churning out poor people.  Some—uncertain—share of the girls end up on the roads to Tijuana or Juarez or other border cities.  Mexican Federal Highways 1, 2, and 15 are those roads.  All are highways of tears.[7]

[1] Epidemiology: “the branch of medicine which deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.”

[2] See William Langer’s effort to counter this trend: “The Rise of Modern Europe” series by Harper and Row.

[3] Dan Werb, City of Omens: A Search for the Lost Women of the Borderlands (2019).

[4] Increasingly with women too, but I doubt they go south of the border.  Probably have their hands full, what with harassment by other military personnel and all.

[5] See: Steven Bender, Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings.  Same thing went for American bases in the Philippines.  Adam Smith would be delighted and appalled

[6] As a result, the Mexican side of illegal crossing-points are now littered with discarded copies of the Koran and Jihad for Dummies.  S’what I’ve been told anyways.

[7]

My Weekly Reader 16 May 2019.

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If you want to think about “God” in simple evolution-of-ideas terms, then the stages would run something like the following.  At first, humans believed all Nature was alive and that all living creatures possessed an “anima” (spirit, soul).[1] Later, seeking to appease these powerful natural forces, people “personified” them as “gods.”  There were many things that could go wrong or right in life, so there were many gods.  Build temples, offer sacrifices, and hope for the best.[2]  Then they refined this polytheism into each city having one particular patron god or goddess, along with the others.  That deity lived in a temple in the particular city that s/he protected.  Participation in religious rites figured as an important duty, rather than as a choice.  The deity didn’t move around.  Greek and Roman religion were merely stems from this stock, but elaborated non-religious ethical systems of great power.[3]  Animism yielded to Polytheism.

After a while, what became Western civilization diverged from this broad cultural pattern.   The Hebrews developed “ethical monotheism.”  That is they believed that only one real God existed; all the others were false gods.  That God existed everywhere in the world, rather than being bound to the confines of some runty city-state.  That God had made a “covenant” with His “chosen people.”  He would protect them if they worshipped only Him.  He didn’t settle for mere rites and offerings.  He also required adherence to a moral code of action in this world.  Then Christianity emerged from Judaism by opening the “covenant” to anyone who would profess the faith and by extending the “covenant” to include a promise of life after death.

If you want to go all sociological-psychological, then you might argue that Christianity amounted a generational revolt by young men against the old men who ran Judaism.  Alternatively, you could argue that God now wanted all of His Creation to share in the benefits and strictures of the faith he had granted first to the Jews.  Polytheism yielded to Monotheism.

Then, in the 7th Century AD, another monotheistic faith arose: Islam.  This, too, is an example of ethical monotheism.  If you want to go all sociological-psychological, then you could argue that the Prophet Muhammad borrowed much from Judaism and Christianity, and then preached his new faith to the polytheist Arabs at a critical moment in their history.  Alternatively, you could argue that God had gotten fed-up with the inability of Jews and Christians to follow His instructions.  He had sent Muhammad to call back the whole world to the benefits and strictures of the faith he had granted first to the Hebrews.

Since then, Judaism and Christianity have divided between growing secular majorities and shrinking “fundamentalist” minorities.  Islam, however, has not followed the same path.  The Koran remains the unalterable Word of Allah.

“Every schoolboy knows” the term “a willing suspension of disbelief” when approaching a work of fiction.  What might make understanding between faiths easier would be a “willing suspension of his belief” on the part of the individual.[4]

[1] For a serious, accessible, and sympathetic portrayal of this belief system, see Brian Moore, Black Robe (1985).

[2] I suppose one could think of this as either bribery by the people or extortion by the gods.  Living now in a more secular age, it appears that politicians have become the new source of manna.  Reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in parallel each day, I conjecture that Democrats believe in the bribery interpretation and Republican believe in the extortion interpretation.  But what do I know?

[3] If not of universal compliance.  That’s one of the things that makes Ancient History so much fun.

[4] I stole this from Eric Ormsby, “Allah: A Biography,” WSJ, 17 January 2019.

Couple of Factual Points.

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First, so far as I can tell at the moment, the first use of the term “collusion” came on “Meet the Press,” on 18 December 2016.  The person who used the term was John Podesta, a major figure in Hillary Clinton’s shambolic presidential campaign.  Did Podesta not want to use the term “conspiracy”?  Later that week, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada)—who may have been watching “Meet the Press”—also used the term “collusion.”[1]  From there it entered the lexicon of both Democrats and the media.  Then, apparently, it became the term of choice for the President and his supporters when asserting his innocence.  Then it became a term roundly denounced by Democrats and the media as meaningless and an obfuscation.

Second, firing James Comey as “obstruction of justice.”  On 14 February 2017, Trump reportedly told FBI Director James Comey that “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”  After all, “he’s a good guy.”  On 4 December 2018, a sentencing memorandum from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller said Flynn “deserves credit for accepting responsibility in a timely fashion and substantially assisting the government.”  As a result, Flynn should receive little or no jail time.  What’s the diff?

Third, the Mueller Report “did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation.”  More emphatically, “the Special Counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations.”

Fourth, “as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.”[2]  His actions should be seen in this light.

Watching the “analysis” following Attorney General William Barr’s press conference this morning, I couldn’t help but be reminded of President Obama’s remark that he had to hold on “until the fever breaks.”[3]  Many people seem to have behaved badly in this mess.[4]  What to do?

I’m “concerned” (i.e. worried, frightened, angry) that Republicans will NOT let it go.  We don’t need a “reckoning” or a bloodbath or a counter-vailing “witch hunt.”  All of us—liberals, conservatives, and independents–would be lucky if the perpetrators of the “witch-hunt” calmly reflected on what went wrong.  The New York Times did so admirably after the Jayson Blair[5] and Judith Miller[6] events.

Calm reflection is difficult when the hounds are baying at your heels.  So, hounds, lay off.  Much as “they” need to be on the next thing smoking to Guantanamo, just lay off.  America’s democracy is at stake.

[1] See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/opinion/collusion-meaning-trump-.html

[2] Quotes from https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/18/transcript-barr-press-conference-1280949

[3] See his equally shrewd statements that “the Cambridge police were stupid”; that ISIS is “just the JV team”; and that “Russia is only a regional power.”

[4] See: “Ace in the Hole” (1951), “Absence of Malice” (1981); “Network” (1986); “Shattered Glass” (2003).  These are among the real origins of the belief in “fake news.”

[5] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

[6] See: http://nymag.com/nymag/features/9226/