Looking for Meaning in the Mueller Meltdown
Beachgate, Nipplegate, Weinergate, Deflategate, Toiletgate, Pizzagate. We owe Watergate an apology. A real scandal culminating in the real resignation of a sitting President deserves better than to have its good name so tarnished. Russiagate is only the latest to spoil the reputation of the granddaddy scandal.
After 675 days of investigation the last thing we want right now is to wait, but wait we must. We need to wait to see how significant the specifics of the Mueller report will be. We do not, however, need to wait to see the significance of the Report itself. A lot has been made to hang on its outcome. Anti-Trumpers (on the left and the right) hung their hopes for the White House on the Mueller Report. Journalists hung their reputations on the Mueller report. The rest of us, the spectating masses, held out a glimmer of hope that the resolution of Mueller’s Investigation would mean a resolution to the hysteria. Will we ever be spared?
The Act Goes on, and on, and on…
You will be forgiven for experiencing sudden symptoms of whiplash. Mueller’s fall from grace is comical. He was supposed to be the unassailable straight-shooter methodically leaving no stone unturned. Now Mueller, the Justice Department, the Report, and the confidentiality of its findings are all highly suspect. If the evidence isn’t on their side they will claim it is immoral. They have travelled this path before—walls are immoral, billionaires are immoral. There is no reason why they shouldn’t hotfoot it now.
Joy Reid says, “it feels like the seeds of a cover-up.” Chris Matthews asks, “How can they let Trump off the hook? […] we have no reason to believe Trump is going to be charged by _rhetoric_ in the […] Mueller report.” Rhetoric is here used pejoratively—has Matthews forgotten the recent civic lecture series, surrounding the Kavanaugh Hearings, about how investigators collect facts, they don’t make arguments? The examples will become inexhaustible in the coming days.
What is the Glue?
To the casual observer it may seem that Russian Interference is a foregone conclusion, the guiding principle, the glue which holds the anti-Trump movement together. But I urge you not to be deceived. Their is a higher principle at work and in comes in the form fact-that-must-not-be-admitted. There is an imposing reality which keeps their heads firmly planted in the sand. It is the constant through the whiplash, which will be the last thing they admit: they lost.
Finding Fault: a New American Pastime
They are losers, but they will find fault with everyone else and everything else before they admit it. The first target: the integrity of the election. “We only lost because it wasn’t a fair race,” offer the democrats, without irony. The party that rigged its own primary ought to know a rigged general election when it sees one, right?
Now they have turned their sights to the integrity of the special counsel: Mueller didn’t find collusion because he is incompetent/compromised/Putin Puppet 2.0.
When that doesn’t work they will find fault with institutions. The Electoral College is the problem because Hillary won the popular vote. The gerrymandered districts are a problem because they are racist (incidentally, states are racist too because if a Congressional District can be racist, why not a state’s boundaries?). The Senate is the problem because small states are over-represented in Washington, D.C.
After the institutions, they will find fault with The People themselves: There is a deficit of proper education and a corresponding surplus of free-thinking; misogyny still reigns in flyover country; and, lest we forget, the Patriarchy & White Privilege.
Machines Never Sleep
You may notice that above mentioned ‘found faults’ are all being trotted out in tandem. They are firing on all cylinders and that is by design. An engine is the apt metaphor. They have discovered they get more mileage when one pulls as another pushes. The endless spin and changing of directs, while it has the result of disorienting us, is, like an engine, engineered to keep a machine in motion. That machine is hellbent on never admitting failure, ever finding fault, and, at all costs, not entrusting something so sacred as Democracy to people so undeserving as, gulp!, The People.
