Mueller announced that if called to testify he won’t say anything different from what was in his report. But that’s good. In fact, that’s great! That’s all I’m asking for, because it will be shiny brand new information to the vast majority of Americans. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Americans spend an average of 16.8 minutes a day ( 0.28 of an hour) reading for purposes other than school or work. And Americans watch more than 7 hours of television per household per day.
I wish someone would gift wrap those figures and give them to Nancy Pelosi. Because right now she has it backwards. She wants hearings before a call for impeachment. But the hearings are going nowhere. With the Trump administration’s effective obstructive tactics of delay, delay, delay we will land on Mars before a relevant, age-wrinkled or long-bearded witness staggers into the House hearings.
People will watch open hearings as they did the Watergate spectacular. That’s crucial, because given our current culture, the Mueller Report could be twice as compellingly written as a John Grisham thriller—but it doesn’t matter if fewer than 1% of the country is going to read it. Why read it when FOX News and even the credible networks will give you what they think you should know in easy to absorb soundbites?
Instead of Mueller taking 10 or 15 minutes to tell this nation that he wants no more to do with our national emergency, he could have told us what the investigations revealed about the president’s obstruction of justice. Why he concluded those 10 episodes of obstruction broke our laws. But no, we got the Sphinx. In other words, a riddle most of America won’t bother to solve.
It’s breathtaking when even without Mueller’s testimony there are 41% of registered voters who support Trump’s impeachment. And there is no valid reason for him not to testify. If he doesn’t, Nancy Pelosi can continue to play a high stakes political poker game with the United States Constitution.