So, kids… What time is it… really?
Exactly three years ago today, on July 24th, 2019 — that’s 1,095 day ago, if you’re counting — a shopworn-looking, gray haired man was the subject of a much-anticipated congressional hearing. It was obvious that he did not really want to be there, but circumstances (and perhaps fate) nevertheless compelled him to sit in front of the media circus microphones and say something — ANYTHING — about that little discovery project he supervised over the course of the previous 2 years to determine the facts surrounding accusations that the 2016 presidential elections were rigged in favor of Trump by Russian operatives as demonstrated in the Steele Dossier and other significant sources.
His answers to congressperson’s queries were generally quiet, one word responses. Most would observe that his choices of words were deliberately designed to be ambiguous and legally vague. He did, however, reveal one important point — that after leaving office, Trump could be indicted for 10 counts of Obstruction Of Justice...
As people pored over that heavily redacted report afterward — redacted by his close personal friend, none other than the Trump Attorney General William Barr, himself appointed by Trump as a foil against any legal challenges to his brutish authoritarianism — people with objective intentions could not help but wonder: what was being hidden from public view? What was going on during that election cycle that was so embarrassing and incriminating, the country’s Attorney General himself decided to commit misprision by burying the results of two years worth of exhaustive research costing millions of dollars and render it fit for little more than cage lining in a dog pound? Was the unredacted report destined to get sealed in a copper-lined monel sarcophagus and buried in the floor of the National Cathedral with instructions that it not be recovered and opened until the year 2250?
Essentially, Barr’s redactions in the Mueller Report were the exact equivalent of the entire Republican Cult pleading the Fifth Amendment before the court of the American People. And three years later- after putting a Democrat in the White House, with numerical Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress and a Democrat-appointed Attorney General- we STILL have no unredacted report to help consider whether or not Donald Trump is a surreptitious Russian operative (fancy words for “a useful idiot”) installed by the Kremlin to cripple the United States as a world power, poison our country’s world image against its friends and neighbors, sow division and discord among our people and financially cripple the largest segments of our population… in addition to being a Mafia- style political thug, the führer of a fascist cult, and “derelict in his duty” during the January 6th insurrection of his own creation (as some people so generously put it).
Oh, yeah — and as for those Obstruction Of Justice charges Mueller was talking about 3 years ago? Those were quietly buried in an unmarked grave under the mountains of the usual distractions like COVID, another contentious election cycle, an armed insurrection by a ginned-up mega-mob of cult zombies, neocon Supreme Court usurpations of the public’s fundamental liberties — in other words, the now all-too-usual American “justice” system of apathetic shuck-and-jive bait switching.
If dealing with criminals like Trump isn’t difficult enough when republicans are in power, the optics that we Democrats create when we finally get our politicians to occupy the White House and Congress aren’t much better, really. All too many of them arrive in D.C. with the usual lousy communication skills, their corporate donor’s agendas, their overly-cautious indictment procedures in discovery, their clinging to archaic ideas about “compromise” with those who tell them to their faces that they want to destroy their legislative initiatives, and treading delicately among the evangelical cults to avoid perceived improprieties to the First and Second Amendments... all of which, given what is at risk, amount to chronic intellectual constipation. Like it or not, the common American voter sees right through it all, and that is why we Democrats lose elections; we tell them that we stand for the right side of History while essentially capitulating to the wrong side by gumming up fate itself with fumbling self-obstructive gaffes, failure to use the same parliamentary procedural cudgels that republicans use to get legislation enacted and being distracted by overwhelming, divisive media chaff that blinds the public’s collective radar. Meanwhile, Trump is a free man, continuing to weaponize our country’s liberties to decompose our democracy at taxpayer expense.
And so happy third birthday, “Mueller Report Hearing Before Congress”. You may be dead and buried, but some of us haven’t forgotten you. We remember you with a jaded tear, and ponder the things that could have been.