Mark Sumner has raised some questions about the importance of Sally Yates’s testimony. Unlike Scooter-gate/Fitzmas, the stakes are higher and letting the prime suspect(s) skate because of legal technicalities should not happen prematurely. Like the combover, the real crisis is as false as reality TV.
We just need to continue to resist and keep the pressure on, not because there’s a witch hunt on, but the entire #TrumpRussia matter is symptomatic of a strategy of tension and shock doctrine.
Those features of post-war crises, the Cold War and neoliberalism are not the Fourth Turning of a Bannonian apocalypse. They are rather signs that so many of the postwar problems of capitalism are driving the global economy to an irredeemable unsustainability.
As straightforward as Yates was in her testimony, observers were likely to be frustrated in several ways. First, Yates was scrupulous in holding herself to a standard of not just withholding information that was still classified, but shied away from providing secondary information that might have been used to make out the shape of those classified matters. That was particularly obvious when it came to the heart of What Did Michael Flynn Do? Though Yates would say that Flynn’s “activities” were at odds with the statements coming from the Trump White House, she would not give the slightest hint concerning those activities, holding back from even admitting that Flynn was in communications with the Russian ambassador, which is information that’s already become widely known.
Perhaps even more frustrating was Yates’ apparent assumption that the information coming from Trump and Pence was always honest on their part. That is, she assumed — or at least played it as if she assumed — that every statement from Trump and Pence that disagreed with what she knew of Michael Flynn’s activities, was because Flynn had misinformed others. She never voiced the idea that Trump, Pence, or anyone else in their campaign might have knowingly colluded with Flynn to spread false information. And based on what we’ve seen, that seems both a large and a curious assumption.
The advantage of yesterday’s Senate subcommittee hearing was to remind us that there are many challenges ahead for what will be a long path to heal a democracy damaged by some basic human failings critiqued yesterday by kos.
We need to keep calm and focused because national consciousness is shifting as global consciousness understands what a danger #TrumpRussia means.