To that end, can we agree the following decades-old verse (slightly tweaked by this writer) has become notably apt right now?
When you’re pestered by critics and hounded by faction
To take some resounding and overdue action,
The best you can do (to take my advice) is:
Appoint special counsel to stave off the crisis.
I’d love to be able to say I made up those lines (Milton, eat your heart out). However, if memory serves, I found them in the now late, lamented journal Books in Canada, and they seem to have stuck.
Indeed, they sprang to mind within minutes of my reading two news items. One, Donald Trump’s friend Silvio Berlusconi was found not guilty of the latest charges against him; the backstory, of course, is that years ago, he was indicted, convicted, and sentenced. Two, former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks is not amused by Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith to prolongingly probe the overpoweringly fetid swamp-turned-sewer that is Trump.
To change tropes in mid-stream-of-consciousness: she makes no bones about the skeletons in Trump’s walk-in closet. Recalling Richard Nixon’s profanity-laced, effectively self-damning 1970s tapes, she begins her 11/18 tweet on Garland’s garden path with “Expletives deleted.” She goes on to couch the AG’s marathon of bureaucratic can-kicking as “a waste of time and money that insults the prosecutors at DOJ and gains nothing.”
Between the lines: as a stall that may help Trump run out the clock.
With November zooming by, let’s talk turkey. The Nixon tapes contained the “smoking gun” that decent, non-despotic Republican lawmakers and jurists decisively chose not to ignore (or try to normalize). But times have changed. On 1/6/21, many if not most of us saw our country under fire from the hard right’s ‘smoking Howitzers;’ today’s tuskers have whitewashed them as (quoting the RNC from 2/4/22) “legitimate political discourse.”
Toiling for months (after a tardy start), the House 1/6 committee “got to the bottom.” Kept digging. And all but begged Garland to indict Big Blonder.
We’re now at a point where endless fact-finding may connote that there can never be enough truth to hold Trump to account. Rather than keep probing, let’s size up (once and for all) the 80-ton Godzilla in the Rotunda. Spurred by the falsely aggrieved, ceaselessly deceitful Donald (who told his troop to “fight like hell….to take back our [sic] country”), brazenly Mussolinian mobs launched a search-and-destroy mission against our vote-legitimized governance. The more people (on both sides, it seems) who try to frame that as ‘too bad to be true,’ the more it needs to be confronted post haste (and then some).
For years, liberals have honked “no one is above the law.” Sad to say, Garland seems bent on shortening the long arm thereof. (Not across the board, of course, but on behalf of the most dangerous single person in our nation’s history. Sad.)
The cozy institutionalist seems to believe donkeys can thrive by wonk alone. And that a “system” of guardrails that has buckled at least three times (under Nixon, Trump, and, originally, Senator “Low Blow Joe” McCarthy) will hold to the crack of doom- and/or as long as God wants it to. Question: if we the people cannot fight for our collective life more forcefully than that, what on Earth (and/or in hell) are we to do?