Let’s Not Get Carried Away
David Brooks JUNE 20, 2017
The New York Times
I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.
Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.
In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.
There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians. Everything seems to be leaking out of this administration, but so far the leaks about actual collusion are meager.
There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians, but so far no more than you’d expect from a campaign that was publicly and proudly pro-Putin. And so far nothing we know of these meetings proves or even indicates collusion.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be an investigation into potential Russia-Trump links. Russia’s attack on American democracy was truly heinous, and if the Trump people were involved, that would be treason. I’m saying first, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and assume that this link exists.
Second, there is something disturbingly meta about this whole affair. This is, as Yuval Levin put it, an investigation about itself. Trump skeptics within the administration laid a legal minefield all around the president, and then Trump — being Trump — stomped all over it, blowing himself up six ways from Sunday.
Now of course Trump shouldn’t have tweeted about Oval Office tape recordings. Of course he shouldn’t have fired James Comey.
But even if you took a paragon of modern presidents — a contemporary Abraham Lincoln — and you directed a democratically unsupervised, infinitely financed team of prosecutors at him and gave them power to subpoena his staff and look under any related or unrelated rock in an attempt to bring him down, there’s a pretty good chance you could spur even this modern paragon to want to fight back. You could spur even him to do something that had the whiff of obstruction.
There’s just something worrisome every time we find ourselves replacing politics of democracy with the politics of scandal. In democracy, the issues count, and you try to win by persuasion. You recognize that your opponents are legitimate, that they will always be there and that some form of compromise is inevitable.
In the politics of scandal, at least since Watergate, you don’t have to engage in persuasion or even talk about issues. Political victories are won when you destroy your political opponents by catching them in some wrongdoing. You get seduced by the delightful possibility that your opponent will be eliminated. Politics is simply about moral superiority and personal destruction.
The politics of scandal is delightful for cable news. It’s hard to build ratings arguing about health insurance legislation. But it’s easy to build ratings if you are a glorified Court TV, if each whiff of scandal smoke generates hours of “Breaking News” intensity and a deluge of speculation from good-looking former prosecutors.
The politics is great for those forces responsible for the lawyerization of American life. It takes power out of the hands of voters and elected officials and puts power in the hands of prosecutors and defense attorneys.
The politics of scandal drives a wedge through society. Political elites get swept up in the scandals. Most voters don’t really care.
Donald Trump rose peddling the politics of scandal — oblivious to policy, spreading insane allegations about birth certificates and other things — so maybe it’s just that he gets swallowed by it. But frankly, on my list of reasons Trump is unfit for the presidency, the Russia-collusion story ranks number 971, well below, for example, the perfectly legal ways he kowtows to thugs and undermines the norms of democratic behavior.
The people who hype the politics of scandal don’t make American government purer. They deserve some of the blame for an administration and government too distracted to do its job, for a political culture that is both shallower and nastier, and for fostering a process that looks like an elite game of entrapment.
Things are so bad that I’m going to have to give Trump the last word. On June 15 he tweeted, “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story.”
Unless there is some new revelation, that may turn out to be pretty accurate commentary.
Link: NY Times Op-Ed
Which is just bizarre to me. After all, we had not seen ANY of the evidence connecting Nixon to Watergate a few months in.
Maybe the investigation turns up bupkis, like the Whitewater stuff. Maybe not.
It's a bit early for anyone to know for sure. Except all you guys. You guys know, I guess.
....as thorough as they are known to be. re: investigations.
Then again, they just might be withholding the facts to get ratings in the media.
Gotcha'.
WRT Watergate, past is not prologue.
And intelligence is not the same as evidence. They may well have a great deal of intel that (1) they can't reveal or that (2) would not be admissible in court. Russians talking to each other about the Trump officials they own would not be enough to put anyone away.
Mueller's job is to see if there is reason to prosecute anyone, and, if so, to build a case with what can be proven in court.
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1) Why can't they reveal it to the House and Senate Committees?
2) Not admissible in court? What about closed-door sessions with said Committees?
3) Trump officials they own? This is mere surmise, on your part, with no concrete evidence to back it up.
4) Mueller's job is to attempt to prove that his buddy, Comey, is vindicated...period/end.
There is no collusion nor obstruction.
The SSCI and HSCI are also not allowed to reveal TS info. They have had hundreds of hours of classified briefings and testimony on this. So, yes, they know more than they are telling.
Again, you are confident that you know everything.
You will be proven wrong.
Whether or not it will be enough to take down the president remains to be seen.
Neither Mueller nor Comey, who are reported to be joined at the hip, deserve their current "lionization" among politicians and mainstream media. Instead of Jimmy Stewart-like “G-men” with reputations for principled integrity, the two close confidants and collaborators merely proved themselves, along with former CIA Director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, reliably politicized sycophants, enmeshing themselves in a series of wrongful abuses of power along with official incompetence.
It seems clear that based on his history and close “partnership” with Comey, called “one of the closest working relationships the top ranks of the Justice Department have ever seen,” Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.
Mueller didn’t speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn’t speak out against torture. He didn’t speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn’t tell the truth about 9/11. He is just “their man.”
Believe it or not, I think it is a good thing that Mueller didn't buy into the psycho 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Go figure, eh?
Read more, post less.
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You should contact Rooney. I'm sure he can find you a safe space...
Canada passed a law Thursday making it illegal to use the wrong gender pronouns. Critics say that Canadians who do not subscribe to progressive gender theory could be accused of hate crimes, jailed, fined, and made to take anti-bias training.
Canada’s Senate passed Bill C-16, which puts “gender identity” and “gender expression” into both the country’s Human Rights Code, as well as the hate crime category of its Criminal Code by a vote of 67-11, according to LifeSiteNews. The bill now only needs royal assent from the governor general.
“Great news,” announced Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister. “Bill C-16 has passed the Senate – making it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity or expression. #LoveisLove.”
Great news: Bill C-16 has passed the Senate – making it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity or expression. #LoveisLove
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) June 16, 2017
“Proud that Bill C-16 has passed in the Senate,” said Jody Wilson-Raybould, the country’s attorney general and minister of justice. “All Canadians should feel #FreeToBeMe.”
Proud that Bill C-16 has passed in the Senate. All Canadians should feel #FreeToBeMe https://t.co/6vbYYtvGqT pic.twitter.com/pnYIAEBff9
— Min. Wilson-Raybould (@MinJusticeEn) June 15, 2017
“[There’s an argument] that transgender identity is too subjective a concept to be enshrined in law because it is defined as an individual’s deeply felt internal experience of gender,” said Grant Mitchell, a conservative senator, in November 2016. “Yet we, of course, accept outright that no one can discriminate on the basis of religion, and that too is clearly a very deeply subjective and personal feeling.”
Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, and one of the bill’s fiercest critics, spoke to the Senate before the vote, insisting that it infringed upon citizens’ freedom of speech and institutes what he views as dubious gender ideology into law.
“Compelled speech has come to Canada,” stated Peterson. “We will seriously regret this.”
“[Ideologues are] using unsuspecting and sometimes complicit members of the so-called transgender community to push their ideological vanguard forward,” said the professor to the Senate in May.
“The very idea that calling someone a term that they didn’t choose causes them such irreparable harm that legal remedies should be sought [is] an indication of just how deeply the culture of victimization has sunk into our society.”
Peterson has previously pledged not to use irregular gender pronouns and students have protested him for his opposition to political correctness.
“This tyrannical bill is nothing but social engineering to the nth degree, all in the name of political correctness,” Jeff Gunnarson, vice president of Campaign Life Toronto, a pro-life political group in Canada, told LifeSiteNews.
It's refreshing to see that Trudeau is allowing Muslim immigrants into Canada, who just so happen to support Female Genital Mutilation.
"Oooooooh Kanada, please clip those clits for us. Or else we will take it out upon our shriveled nuts. "
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He's pretty liberal with his commentaries.
Brooks describes himself as having originally been a liberal before, as he put it, "coming to my senses."
He recounts that a turning point in his thinking came while he was still an undergraduate, when he was selected to present the socialist point of view during a televised debate with Nobel laureate free-market economist Milton Friedman. As Brooks describes it, "It was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point. That didn’t immediately turn me into a conservative, but....”
of Trump. Knee jerk journalism in the days of instant gratification.
I am as surprised by Brooks today as I was all Spring at his anti-Trump rants.
The investigation of Trump just is beginning.
And while many may believe Trump is an ass, that does not make him a criminal.
Others believe Trump is in the right, but that too is an ill-informed opinion.
Cases turn on facts, which none of us know yet.
Respective to the original Russia probe, so far actual disclosures indicate trouble for Flynn.
Few other factual public disclosures about the Russian involvement in our election have been released.
Rather than detail, we have speculation as to whether or not Kushner or Manafort did anything criminal.
It will take time, but Mueller will find the answers to all of the above, and more.
In our instant gratification society, this has given nuts on both extremes a large void to operate in.
The answers will come, just not from them.
despite Obama's cronies walking the halls of justice to this day. The investigation is a farce and designed to impede Trump's agenda. The one who should've gone to jail was Hillary.
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The very same call where Flynn floats sanctions lifting. There is no indication in that article that Flynn hadn't earlier colluded with the Russians.
Bot moron.
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Where does that say that it hadn't been authorized by Pence and Trump or that they didn't know about it? Where does it say that Flynn was cleared of prior collusion during the campaign?
Bot moron. And Wa Po is now credible? Thanks.
those who are partisan R's, and who want a future with the party, are going to be knocking down the door to participate in an independent counsel investigation of a R president?
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What a farce.
Three members of special counsel Robert Mueller's team on the Russia probe have donated to Democratic presidential campaigns and organizations, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Jeannie Rhee, a member of Mueller’s team, donated $5,400 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign PAC Hillary for America.
Andrew Weissmann, who serves in a top post within the Justice Department’s fraud practice, is the most senior lawyer on the special counsel team, Bloomberg reported. He served as the FBI’s general counsel and the assistant director to Mueller when the special counsel was FBI director.
Before he worked at the FBI or Justice Department, Weissman worked at the law firm Jenner & Block LLP, during which he donated six times to political action committees for Obama in 2008 for a total of $4,700.
James Quarles, who served as an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, has donated to over a dozen Democratic PACs since the late 1980s. He was also identified by the Washington Post as a member of Mueller's team.
Starting in 1987, Quarles donated to Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis’s presidential PAC, Dukakis for President. Since then, he has also contributed in 1999 to Sen. Al Gore’s run for the presidency, then-Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) presidential bid in 2005, Obama’s presidential PAC in 2008 and 2012, and Clinton’s presidential pac Hillary for America in 2016.
He also donated to two Republicans, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) in 2015 and Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) in 2005.
The political affiliations of Mueller's team have been spotlighted by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) an ally of Trump.
After initially hailing Mueller's appointment as special counsel, Gingrich questioned for former FBI director's ability to be impartial on Monday because of "who he is hiring."
Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair. Look who he is hiring.check fec reports. Time to rethink.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) June 12, 2017
Michael R. Dreeben, who serves as the Justice Department’s deputy solicitor general, is working on a part-time basis for Mueller, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Like I said there is a limited pool of talent for the job, and those that are likely to take it will have D not R connections.
In fact the job would be career suicide to an R leaning attorney.
That's absurd.
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...that Mueller will do everything he can to protect his buddy, Comey.
They will look hard. If it's there they will have every incentive to nail him. If not it will go away.
It wouldn't under your scenario.
Do any of us actually know?
Does he?
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...he's correct when he states that this is nothing more than a "Witch Hunt".
They flip him, it could be John Dean all over.
I also don't think Flynn lied to Pence. I believe that he was fully authorized to make his overtures to Russia before Trump was prez. I also believe that Manafort and he had full knowledge of the Russia hacking efforts.
This is why Trump went to the wall over him with Comey.
And if you are right, Mueller will clear him unless you think he's going to make up a case?
Something about that stinks to high heaven.
channel? Where does it say that? You are a fool.