Scandalmongering

Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger, 1927.

David F. Brooks wishes to inform the public that it's another bothsides case: "We've All Just Made Fools of Ourselves—Again".

Democrats, or at least former congressman Beto O'Rourke and former CIA director John O. Brennan, need to make a public apology to the president for calling him something like a traitor (and O'Rourke said he did the treason "ham-handedly", which is just mean) when they "lacked the evidence". Republicans need to apologize to Washington for calling it a swamp. Everyone concerned should adopt "an attitude of humility and honest self-examination."

I love it to death when David F. Brooks starts talking about honest self-examination. He, of course, is the exception, regarding himself as having no self to examine, an affable, ego-free void.

Also it's all because of Watergate:

The sad fact is that Watergate introduced a poison into the American body politic. Richard Nixon’s downfall was just and important, but it opened up the mouthwatering possibility that you don’t need to do the hard work of persuading people to join your side. Instead, you can destroy your foes all at once through scandal.

It's OK for David F. Brooks to say unpleasant things about Donald Trump, as, less than a month ago ("Morality and Michael Cohen"),

Donald Trump is incapable of hearing any cries except the roar of his own hungers.... Normal people have moral sentiments. Normal people are repulsed when the president of their own nation lies, cheats, practices bigotry, allegedly pays off porn star mistresses.... Supporting Trump requires daily acts of moral distancing, a process that means that after a few months you are tolerant of any corruption. You are morally numb to everything. You end up where Representative Jim Jordan blandly ended up Wednesday, in referring to the hush-money scheme: “I think it’s news we knew about.”

It's OK because Brooks is of course not trying to destroy a foe. He's simply being a normal person, exercising his moral sentiments. You don't need any evidence for that!

Personally, I don't understand why, if you have those kinds of feelings about Big Donald, you wouldn't be happy with looking for legal ways of getting rid of him. It's not just because he's not a Democrat! It's not just the tax bill and the tweets! That moral numbness and tolerance for corruption are a serious problem.

Seeing that he lies and cheats is seeing that he has a criminal character; why not see if he's actually a criminal, given that there are a number of signs he might be? Starting with the Trump University scam in which he robbed poor people earnestly trying to better themselves of $25 million, or starting with the way his and his father's entire vast fortunes were accumulated through tax fraud, as investigators at Brooks's own paper discovered last year.

Or starting with the fact that he's been acting since 2015 as if Putin were paying him off, as observed by no less an expert than current House minority leader Kevin McCarthy. To me the first essential point about the Trump-Russia investigation was an Occam's Razor thing, beginning during the 2016 Republican convention, when the Trumpies worked this inexplicable change in the platform's Ukraine plank (it was the only thing on the platform they took any interest in, and why? and this was long before I knew that Ambassador Kislyak was right there in Cleveland enjoying the show) and a couple of days later WikiLeaks began issuing those DNC emails (and it was already widely and as we now know correctly thought—in particular by the DNC's security firm, CrowdStrike—that the self-advertised thief, Guccifer 2.0, was a Russian).

And Trumpy kept up this peculiar Putin praise in all his public appearances (you think there was a good political reason for it? like Corey Lewandowski told him "All the NASCAR fans love that shit"?). And references to emails too, sometimes references to emails and Russia in the same sentence. Wrote my first post on it 24 July 2016, bringing in the DNC emails four days later.

somebody did divulge about 20,000 emails from somewhere else, Clinton-associated—the Democratic National Committee—with a leak that some people have certainly interpreted as likely to assist the Trump candidacy. Is that a pure coincidence?

[snip]

I don't quite know how to make it add up, but I'm readier than ever to believe that Trump (inattentive enough to have that confusion [between the secretary of state emails and the DNC emails], vicious enough to take Putin's help in subverting our democracy) is really Putin's useful idiot, borrowing his money and enjoying his flattery and semiconsciously doing whatever Vladimir Vladimirovich wants him to.

So Kevin McCarthy may have moved on from there, through daily acts of moral distancing to a state of moral numbness, as David F. Brooks might say, but I haven't, though I've dropped the "semiconscious". I've looked at a lot of evidence, over the last almost three years, and I'm still waiting for an explanation for that thing other than the obvious one that the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian anti-American campaign were at some conscious level working together.

In point of fact, there's one party that has endlessly produced scandals out of nothing as a political weapon since Watergate (from Billy Beer to Whitewater, from Benghazi to the private server) and one that doesn't (actual serious laws were broken and the will of Congress thwarted in the moving of weapons from Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras, enormous problems began when the intelligence committee began reproducing the views of the Project for a New American Century instead of actual intelligence product on the way to Iraq). Both sides don't do it.

And it's just not unreasonable, when you have the thugs of the Russian state and the thugs of the Trump organization behaving in this synchronized fashion, to wonder if they might be coordinating, and it's also not unreasonable to think of that as a good enough reason for getting Trump the hell out of the White House. It's not scandalmongering.

If there is an explanation in the Mueller report, I want to see it. I've examined myself with humility and I've found this isn't just because I want David Brooks's taxes to go up, though I certainly do. Barr's letter doesn't have the explanation, though, that's for sure.

See Steve M for more quotes and the perfect Shorter:

You don't have to discriminate between the ones that were truly phony and the ones that revealed real political and moral rot. You just have to condemn everyone who took any of the scandals seriously and say, "I'm a morally superior person! You're a terrible person who's destroying America!"