Gather round, my children, for I would ‘splain something to you.
Over the last week or so, in the aftermath of the delivery of the Mueller report, there has been a great deal of jubilant jollity in some quarters and tearful turbulence in others. Trump supporters have been out in the streets dancing, followed immediately by their trips home in order to make up very funny memes to post on the Internet. And for their part, progressives have been wailing at the moon and stars, lamenting the fact that the Russians even got to Mueller. And as much fun as all this might be, and I admit that it is a great deal of fun, I also think it is worth taking a moment to explain what the whole thing was actually about.
This was not a special counsel investigation. This was a Special Counsel Theatrical Revue, with everything but dancing girls.
This was not a serious attempt to find out if there was any collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign because the answer to that question was known from the beginning. If you postulate that the progressives somehow got it into their heads that Trump was a Russian “asset,” and that we needed to spend millions of dollars in order to uncover the truth about that, and then somehow, inexplicably, the whole enterprise came up empty, then that is what would have to be described as a progressive face plant for the ages.
In the same way that the TSA is not airport security, but is rather airport Security Theater, with costumed agents at the performance sites, so this investigative enterprise was a theatrical endeavor, and for an off-Broadway production, it had a nice two-year run. Any doubt about whether this was theater should have been removed when they raided Paul Manfort’s house with a no knock warrant, and a CNN crew conveniently notified to film the whole thing. At least they didn’t do a reprise of the end of the Blues Brothers, and one admires their restraint.
Mueller staffed his team with a bunch of Democratic donors, which would have been high incompetence if they were serious about finding Trump guilty of something. If there was going to impeachment material coming out of this, he needed to show more even-handedness. But if the point was to create a huge distraction, he just needed reliables.
So finding Trump’s collusion with the Russians was not the goal at all. That was never the point. The progressives ran a play, all right, and in the running of this play they were entirely successful. And the wailing tears of their base, far from being something to be enjoyed as a sign of our great triumph, is actually part of what is making their actual play work. And it did work too.
The point was never what was being investigated. The point was what was NOT going to be investigated, and to make sure that not being investigated stayed that way.
It may appear for a moment that I am changing the subject, but I can assure you that I am not changing the subject at all. Hillary Clinton is as corrupt and as dishonest as it comes. Were we but in possession of all the facts, I have little doubt that she is actually more corrupt and more dishonest than that. Treacherous, vindictive, mendacious, covetous, treasonous, cruel, arrogant, entitled, dim on one level and cunning on another, and a longer list than that upon demand if this paragraph asked us nicely if it could be a little longer. She would have been the worst president ever, and let us acknowledge that the competition is stiff.
But the key word in that list above was entitled. She had gotten to the point where the disease of her public corruption was open to all, transparent, lying on the surface of the table of public knowledge. And we are not talking about dirty deeds at the Rose Law Firm decades ago that nobody knows about yet. We are talking about things that were done over the last few years with all of us watching, slack-jawed and, as a King James translator might have put it, astonied —kind of like we are whenever we are watching friendly Joe Biden with the ladies at appointment ceremonies.
Incidentally, while I am here, let me propose an evil genius move for Joe Biden. Now that he is being deservedly #MeTooed, what would happen if he came out and said something like, “Look, I have been doing this with the cameras running for decades. Nobody ever cared. Why do you all care now?” The answer to that question is that there are now contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination who are to Biden’s left, and so that is why there is sudden concern about the dignity of women. But I don’t think this likely because I don’t think any kind of genius move is exactly in Joe Biden’s wheelhouse.
Back to the case! Because she was entitled to the presidency, because it was her turn now, because all the smart people she knew understood that she was going to be the next president, because the media was completely in the tank for her, because all the geopolitical swells had read the arc of history and knew that it descended upon Hillary—that woman who was walking in a nimbus of inevitability—she was in a position to just do her devil-may-care thing. The official accounts of what she had done could be determined later. Whatever was suitable for textbooks would all be written up at a more suitable time. Once established in the Oval Office, she would have minions that would obey her when she said “go take care of that.” Make that story disappear now.
Uranium One. Benghazi. Destroyed devices and deleted emails. Unsecured servers privately maintained. Funding the Steele dossier. The Attorney-General of the United States secretly meeting with Bill Clinton at that airport. Speaker fees that were up on the roof, watching the clouds go by. Pay for play donations to the Clinton Foundation. Ripping off Haiti. And because Mablog is a respectable joint of reputable opinion, I won’t even mention all the Arkancides. To conclude, there was all kinds of other stuff, topped off with the fruitiest of them all—naturally—which would be colluding with the Russians.
And so this is what happened when the unthinkable happened that night when Trump won. This was an Oceans Eleven kind of heist, and Hillary’s ascendancy to the presidency was the getaway car parked outside the casino. When our team of intrepid thieves trotted out to the rendezvous point to tumble into that getaway car in order to drive off into the credits, their only difficulty—somewhat significant, given the circumstances—was that there was no getaway car there.
Turns out that Hillary was not going to be the president. She would not be able to send any authoritative memos to the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, telling them all to put a sock in it. She would not be able suggest to the denizens of the deep state that it was time for them to sink back down to the cold ocean bottom again, there to gaze at the rusted out wreck of our constitutional republic with their bulbous eyes.
Let me change the metaphor. All kinds of people were just standing there, pants down around the ankles, and each hand in a nearby cookie jar, up to the elbow. And the spotlights came on, klllxgg, that was a sound effect, and there they are all were. Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Brennan, Lynch, Strzok, Page, Ohr, Steele, a host of extras, and of course Clinton.
No, she had been doing all this in that carefree way because she knew she was shortly going to have the apparatus of government under her control. She was entitled because pride goeth before a fall. She was going to have a desk that had a bunch of levers under it, and she was—by George—going to use them all. It was going to happen. It was the point in the movie where the villain says, “Ha, ha!” and then the hero says “not so fast.” And so then, all of sudden, there she was, with a debris field of all kinds of criminal deeds all around her, most of them still smoking, and no way to manage the clean-up.
Back to the previous metaphor of the casino heist.
These people are nothing if not quick thinking. They all laid down on the sidewalk where the getaway car should have been, pretended to be having a collective seizure, and when they came to, they started demanding that the authorities launch an investigation of the security guard who had chased them out of the casino. Somebody thought he had a Russian accent.
And lo! it worked!
One cannot help but have a feeling of admiration when one sees chutzpah that comes in these mountain-range sizes. A short of grandeur creeps into the whole vista. I think it is the snow caps that do it.
This is very simple. Two years of investigating Trump was traded for two years of not investigating Hillary. And there is a certain elegance to the whole thing because at the end of Trump’s two years being investigated, he can glory in his exoneration. He can enjoy that part of it. But he is not well-positioned to launch a counter-investigation of his own. It would take about five minutes to make that look like petty retaliation.
Ah, well. But things are so bad that it might happen anyway. We shall see.