Muddying the findings of the Mueller report became a cottage industry in GOP World. If obfuscation is the game, who better to enlist than Victor Davis Hanson? Ever the good soldier, he applied himself with gusto to a willful misreading – if there was a reading – of the Special Counsel’s conclusions. This was not a difficult letter to write, since George Terwilliger III had served as Mr. Hanson’s warmup act.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 May 2019, A9; Yahoo, 9 May 2019 (https://news.yahoo.com/progressives-face-bleak-post-mueller-103001666.html). If The Richmond Times-Dispatch posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version that appeared on Yahoo.
“Hanson Misrepresents Mueller Report Findings,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 16 May 2019, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/letters-to-the-editor-may-16-2019-hanson-misrepresents-mueller-report-findings/article_26be70e6-9913-57d2-88a5-e83a1a4b74ca.html).
Former Attorney General William Barr had his defenders. Whether Thorazine should be prescribed to address their sapiential disarrangement and their tenuous contact with reality makes for good cocktail conversation. Maybe they’re just cynical and dishonest. Whatever the case, onetime acting Attorney General George T. Terwilliger III’s portrayal of William Barr as a paragon of rectitude and the lion of rule of law was perhaps the zenith of Barr apologetics. Then again, Mr. Terwilliger’s balletic skirting of inconvenient, displeasing facts is perhaps a primer on the genesis of the proclivities fueling Trumpism. The Former Fabricator in Chief is not the aberration that GOP worthies would have everyone believe he is. A letter was sent to The Washington Post.
George Terwilliger III, “Barr Acted by the Book,” The Washington Post, 19 April 2019, A15 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/william-barr-did-this-nation-a-great-service-he-shouldnt-be-attacked/2019/04/18/a2e83760-6221-11e9-9412-daf3d2e67c6d_story.html).
“Fallout from the Mueller Report,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A22 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mueller-report-is-out-now-what/2019/04/23/cbcaab9a-6537-11e9-a698-2a8f808c9cfb_story.html).
After the 2018 midterm elections, President Good People on Both Sides took not days but just hours to send Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III back to Alabama. The dream was had ended for Mr. Sessions. It was a pleasure to see him depart; however, concern arose that his exile from the Trump archipelago represented the initiation of a purge that would endanger the Special Counsel’s investigation. The axing of the Gollum of the South and the elevation of the sycophantic Matt Whitaker to acting attorney general led Indivisible and other activists to stage protests across the country to demand that Robert Mueller be kept in place; I attended one in front of Richmond’s federal building. I sent a letter to The Washington Post in response to its reporting of Mr. Session’s banishment.
Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, and Josh Dawsey, “Trump Forces Sessions Out as Attorney General,” The Washington Post, 8 November 2018, A1, A10 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-resigns-at-trumps-request/2018/11/07/d1b7a214-e144-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html).
“Exit Mr. Sessions, Enter Chaos,” The Washington Post, 11 November 2018, A26 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-exits-chaos-enters/2018/11/09/27e2351e-e38e-11e8-ba30-a7ded04d8fac_story.html). (Scroll down).
With the indictments in late October 2017 of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, as well as the guilty plea of “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos for false statements to the FBI, it became more difficult for GOP luminaries to call the Mueller investigation baseless. This did nothing to whet their appetite to hold forth publicly. The fear of offending The Grand Pooh Bah was well ingrained a year into the Trump era.
The Washington Post detailed the evasions concocted by the Republicans and their craven reluctance to face the press. The letter comments on these proclivities sarcastically.
Karoun Demirjian and Sean Sullivan, “GOP Leaders’ Strategy: Avoidance,” The Washington Post, 31 October 2017, A6 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/tablet/v1.1/20171031/A06_RE_EZ_DAILY_20171031.pdf).
“The GOP’s Disheartening Response,” The Washington Post, 3 November 2017, A20 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-disheartening-lack-of-courage/2017/11/02/f362e084-bf4b-11e7-9294-705f80164f6e_story.html).
Editors have been gentle in tweaking my submissions; however, a phrase was dropped from this letter, probably because it’s pretentiously obnoxious. The obnoxiousness warrants its preservation. Here’s the unredacted sentence:
“GOP senators and congressmen, many of whom doubtless see Churchill or Thatcher in the mirror during their morning ablutions, offer a dispiriting spectacle. . .”
Nearly a year after the 2016 election, it emerged that Virginia was among a score of states whose voting systems had been assailed by Russian hackers. The Commonwealth emerged from this unscathed. That was the good news. The bad news in my view was that the Russians represented the least of the concerns about voting going forward. This letter to The Richmond Free Press responds to this news and briefly catalogues the GOP’s efforts not just to discourage eligible voters from pulling the lever but also to excise segments from the electorate with surgical position. Some of the news from that time now seems prophetic, especially the poll suggesting that half of GOP voters would accept suspension of the 2020 election if The Fabulist in Chief falsely declared that fraudulent voting would make a fair election impossible.
Ronald E. Carrington, “Voting Systems in Va., 20 Other States Targeted Hackers in 2016,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 September 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/sep/29/voting-systems-va-20-other-states-targeted-hackers/).
The good news reported by Mr. Carrington – failure by probable Russian hackers to affect Virginia’s 2016 election results – should not blind the Commonwealth’s voters to the perhaps more insidious threat to the ballot box from within, conservative efforts to disenfranchise segments of the electorate.
President Trump’s narcissistic, delusional assertion that millions of “illegal” voters deprived him victory in the popular vote last November spurred his empanelment of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, its very name a paragon of Orwellian doublespeak. Mr. Trump placed at its head Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a man whose name is synonymous with voter suppression and who in 2016, in dogged pursuit of the voter-fraud unicorn, tossed triple the number of ballots in Kansas as in demographically similar states (The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 September 2017). Mr. Kobach, moreover, champions the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a project ostensibly aimed to improve accuracy of voter rolls but believed to target minority voters disproportionately.
Fear that Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s electoral “vision” will spread nationwide is not unfounded as the notion of carving demographic slices from the electorate gains traction in conservative circles. The loathsome Ann Coulter’s call to rescind the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and raise the voting age to thirty seems less like fringe lunacy when considered in the context of an August poll in which more than half of GOP voters would support, at Mr. Trump’s behest, suspension of the 2020 election because of his false claim of widespread illegal voting (Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” The Washington Post, 10 August 2017 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/]).
The backdrop to Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s undercutting of confidence in elections is the effort in many GOP-controlled states to discourage participation by traditionally Democratic constituencies – minorities, the young, the poor – by restricting early voting, imposing needless voter-identification requirements, and providing inadequate voting equipment for urban precincts. The GOP, furthermore, strives to make Democratic votes worth less through partisan gerrymandering unprecedented in scope and efficacy, an abuse now under review by the US Supreme Court. These antidemocratic measures threaten to overwhelm commendable attempts to expand the electorate, such as Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of the franchise to ex-felons, a restriction at its inception largely conceived to constrain minority voting.
The ballot box remains the best avenue toward social and economic justice. A vigilant and aggressive defense of voting is now especially urgent.
Nothing appeals more than spewing invective into the vicinity of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. In a rational world, Mr. Sessions would never have been confirmed as attorney general. He is the same man who couldn’t pass muster for a federal judgeship in 1986 because of his bigotry. Was it to be supposed that he grew more tolerant in the interim? Anyway, he had the brass ring in a death grip and it would have to be prized from his fingers. It may have been just as well that he remained in place for a while if it ensured that the country would endure less of William Barr or someone worse. Mr. Sessions is a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging doofus. William Barr is competently malevolent. There remains little sport in lambasting Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of shooting catfish in a barrel. The Washington Post passed on this response to its news reporting. I can’t imagine why, he says to himself ironically.
Robert Costa, Sari Horwitz, and Matt Zapotosky, “Jeff Sessions Says He Plans to Stay in Role, Despite Trump’s Comments about Him,” The Washington Post, 20 July 2017 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-says-he-plans-to-stay-in-role-despite-trumps-comments-about-him/2017/07/20/527e53d4-6d51-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html).
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s determination to remain U. S. Attorney General is unfortunate. Mr. Sessions’ antediluvian attitude toward voting rights, his antipathy toward immigrants, and his resolve to resuscitate a failed war on drugs should have disqualified him from the office. He has blemished the position by enabling Mr. Trump’s basest, most autocratic impulses. His lone unsordid act – recusal from the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election – was not motivated by principle but by backlash against his dissembling under oath.
In the face of Mr. Trump’s recent and somewhat bizarre criticism of him, integrity demands that Mr. Sessions resign. Nothing indeed would so become Mr. Sessions in his time as Attorney General as his leaving of it, if he can muster sufficient principle to use his departure to make a statement: the Attorney General serves at the President’s will but is not and cannot be the chief executive’s lackey.
An open question during the first days of the Trump administration began to be answered early on. The fallout from the exile of FBI Director James Comey was clarifying. Hard on the heels of Mr. Comey’s dismissal it emerged that The Dear Leader possibly divulged classified material from Israeli sources to Russia’s US Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavarov. The public then learned of His Eminence’s alleged buttonholing of Mr. Comey to press for quashing the FBI probe of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russians. Would the national Republican Party, those rock-ribbed paragons of civic rectitude, check President Golf Cart’s authoritarian and self-dealing inclinations or would they submit to and become tacitly complicit in his antics? Would a rump of old school GOPers survive or would the Party of Trump devour the GOP tout entier?
The latter seemed more likely with each passing day. Some critical statements came from the usual Republican suspects – Senators Bob Corker, John McCain, Lindsey Graham (as a ventriloquist’s doll), and Ben Sasse and Representative Jason Chaffetz. From these, Mr. McCain belongs to the ages, Mr. Corker is retired, and Mr. Chaffetz fled Congress to become a Trumpy talking head on Fox News. And there is Mr. Graham, whose spine has proven detachable. The GOP leadership otherwise seemed determined to ignore The Fabulist in Chief’s behavior. A Patches O’Houlihan strategy was adopted to cope with a pesky press corps: “Dodge, duck, dip, dive, dodge.” The letter addresses the Party of Benghazi’s hesitancy to look at these matters.
Elise Viebeck, Sean Sullivan, and Mike DeBonis, “Controversies Rattle Hill Republicans,” The Washington Post, 17 May 2017, A7 (www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/lawmakers-to-trump-turn-over-transcript-of-meeting-with-russians/2017/05/16/e9b6deb6-3a3d-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html).
It is understandable that the GOP’s congressional wing is “rattled” by President Trump’s grave missteps; however, mumbling, noncommittal responses, temporizing, and inaction are no longer acceptable.
Strong statements made by some GOP senators – Messrs. Corker, McCain, Graham, Sasse, et al. – have been welcome but these sentiments must now be translated into concrete action. It is noteworthy that the lone GOP committee chair thus far to demand Mr. Comey’s memoranda, Mr. Chaffetz, is not seeking reelection. Is resignation the GOP’s precondition for political courage?
The near silence of the GOP’s congressional leadership speaks loudly. Majority Leader McConnell should for a moment cease to be the “Bluegrass Machiavelli” and Speaker Ryan should endeavor not to live down to Charlie Pierce’s recent characterization of him as an “intellectual invertebrate” (Chris Hayes, “All In,” MSNBC, May 16, 2017). They should jointly support the call for an independent investigation of the Russian affair and for open public testimony by Mr. Comey before the appropriate committees. The calculus of political advantage must yield to the national interest and the people’s right to know.
This is another failed response to a news story, in this instance what historians will likely view as a milestone of the Trump regime, the sacking of FBI Director James Comey. The axing of Mr. Comey, for whom I have no great regard, is wedded in memory with a personal event. The news broke while I was killing time in a waiting room as My Beloved was undergoing laparoscopy on a knee. During her convalescence, the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Comey dismissal was our principal diversion.
The event afforded me another opportunity to take a swipe at the appalling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. By acceding to the Mr. Comey’s banishment, the attorney general undid his lone virtuous act, his honoring of the Office of Legal Counsel’s advice to recuse himself from oversight of the Department of Justice’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It seemed clear that canning the FBI director was intended to hobble the investigation by other means. It was becoming evident by this juncture that neither competence nor honesty nor respect for rule of law would be the métier of Trumpian governance.
The unpublished letter is a standard response to the situation. It does contain a misstep in form, an allusion to another letter that had been published. No one cares about that; however, it indicates how exercised I was by Mr. Sessions’ tenure as attorney general.
Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky, “Trump Fires FBI Director,” The Washington Post, 10 May 2017, A1, A4 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comeys-removal-sparks-fears-about-future-of-russia-probe/2017/05/09/013d9ade-3507-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html).
My recent letter (“Mr. McCain’s Words and Actions,” Washington Post, February 2, 2017) implored Senator John McCain to match his fair criticism of President Trump with action by voting against the most troubling of the president’s cabinet nominees, among them former Senator Jeff Sessions.
Attorney General Sessions’ involvement in the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey – notwithstanding Mr. Session’s recusal of himself from the FBI’s examination of Russian meddling in the 2016 election – exposes the danger inherent in acceding to an unqualified, temperamentally unsuitable, and potentially compromised nominee.
It is imperative that Republicans resist Mr. Trump’s baldly transparent effort to hamstring the FBI probe and stand with Democrats in calling for a special prosecutor to investigate potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Statesmanship and defense of the constitutional system must outweigh partisanship and the Senate must defend the government’s balance of power against a disingenuous and unscrupulous chief executive. Senator McCain and his Republican senatorial colleagues can perform signal service to the nation by joining with their Democratic counterparts.
And then there was a second whiff with the Grey Lady.
I enjoy reading Paul Krugman’s columns. His consistent, reasoned, and informed assault on supply-side economics and his extolling of the virtues of rational deficit spending are valuable. There’s joy to be found in Mr. Krugman’s capacity to inflict agita on conservative economists; moreover, the clarity of his exposition is admirable.
This being said, his explanation for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loss to Queens’ Least Favorite Son was wide of the mark. Sensible people in late 2016 struggled to cope with the discombobulating event. Mr. Krugman unfortunately gravitated toward a simplistic explanation I had heard from others, that it all should be placed at the feet of Russian skullduggery and the media’s mishandling of the story. Mr. Krugman opted for proximate causation – the isolation of a single factor at the terminus of a lengthy string of causation – as the culprit rather than wading into the debacle’s complexities.
The elegant simplicity of a proximate explanation is appealing. It banishes from consideration the myriad of factors that undid Ms. Clinton’s campaign, namely the Mt. Everest of political baggage she and her husband have accumulated, the narrowing of her potential electorate by decades of right-wing demonization of her, her mediocre skills and flawed instincts as a candidate (she’s not her husband, whatever one may think of him), and her campaign’s strategic and tactical blunders.
The centering of a proximate explanation has perhaps another advantage: It leaves a weltanschauung intact, unquestioned, unexamined. The subtext of the election for me was the corrosive effects of the neoliberal consensus, four decades of misguided policies to which the Clintons had materially contributed.
Nonetheless, I still enjoy reading Paul Krugman’s columns. A second rebuff from the Grey Lady didn’t discourage me.
Paul Krugman, “Useful Idiots Galore,” The New York Times, 16 December 2016, A31 (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/useful-idiots-galore.html).
Paul Krugman accurately characterizes the GOP’s hypocritical silence in the face of Russian hacking and the media’s often uncritical handling of Russian cyber skullduggery and Ms. Clinton’s emails. He, however, has anointed himself chief apologist for a flawed candidate and an inept campaign. Before engaging in shotgun name-calling, he should ponder how, with a noxious, patently unqualified GOP opponent, the election was so close that hacks or media missteps mattered. Ms. Clinton wrested defeat from the jaws of victory.