CSotD: One Big Juxtaposition
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The theme today, O Best Beloved, is blindness, as introduced by Jim Morin.
Unless there is a Congressional inquiry into his Russian connections, we'll never see Trump's tax returns, learn about his business ties, find out about those Russian deals. And, even if his records were subpoenaed, there's no guarantee.
First of all, he'd claim executive privilege — despite the Supreme Court's decision on the White House tapes — and, second, he has a record of fighting lawsuits by stalling until the other side accepts a compromise simply to get on with it.
Mind you, I was surprised when Nixon had to resign but, then again, it was those tapes that did him in. Sam Ervin and John Dean did less to bring him down than Alexander Butterfield did.
Don't expect a similar break again.
I saw a comment on Facebook yesterday in which a Trump supporter defended him by saying the liberals were getting all upset about things he probably wasn't going to do.
The things people were getting upset about were things that he had promised to do. And she voted for him, which I guess explains the ongoing mystery of how Trump supporters could have trusted a man who was such a blatant, obvious liar.
They didn't.
They knew he was a liar and they voted for him anyway.
This doesn't exactly provide an answer to that mystery, but it at least rephrases it in a more helpful way: We need to stop asking how they could be so stupid as to think he was honest and ask instead why they would vote for someone they knew was lying to them.
I've said that I didn't expect his supporters to ever wise up, but Clay Bennett comments on reports that people are beginning to realize they're likely to lose their health coverage.
The frustrating part of that is the number of other indicators they had: It wasn't just that Trump promised to get rid of it, but Paul Ryan and other Republicans did as well, and even their proposed "fixes" were obviously going to cut a lot of people off.
And, as that linked Vox article notes, it's not just Trump supporters who assumed nobody would actually repeal a law that impacts so many people. Some pretty wise, experienced people doubted it could happen.
Well, nobody thought Trump had a snowball's chance in Hell of being elected, either, until he was.
Surprise, surprise, surprise!
And Dana Milbank outlines some other surprises that may be coming down the road, unless something happens to modify the promises that Trump has made.
Meanwhile, as was noted here yesterday and as Darrin Bell notes today, the Democrats are still trying to figure out what happened, and doing a pretty lousy job of it.
I used the metaphor of looking into the rearview mirror rather than watching where you're going; Bell also uses a mirror, but in quite another way, suggesting that finger-pointing is more popular than self-criticism.
The factors noted in his cartoon were, indeed, factors, but none of them were decisive and some were largely mythical, albeit blown up in the press and social media to an extent that made them "true" in the sense of having more impact than they deserved to.
For instance, as On the Media reported last week, Comey had no choice but to write that letter to Congress because they had put him under orders to report any possible evidence.
As author Tim Weiner told Brooke Gladstone:
The Hillary hunters on Capitol Hill mouse trapped Jim Comey. Now, he made two mistakes, one in July. He said, there is no crime in Hillary Clinton's conduct and handling of classified information, but she was extremely careless. Carelessness is not a federal crime. Comey screwed up. He then opened the door for Congress to say, you must report to us anything even remotely related to this now-closed investigation. He compounded that mistake on October 28th, when he sent a very brief letter to the Hill, saying, there's this new cache of emails connected to Huma Abedin, who is Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman. We don't have a search warrant to open these yet, but they’re there. Was he duty bound to do that? I'm afraid he was. That letter was then leaked about 9 nanoseconds later by a member of Congress and then became, in Comey’s own words, “misinterpreted.”
Which is the sort of thing that can happen when the opposition has been relentlessly attacking and slandering your candidate for three decades, which is why you probably shouldn't nominate someone whom the opposition has been relentlessly attacking and slandering for three decades.
Unless you are self-confident to the point of arrogance, in which case, as David Horsey suggests, you ignore what you should have learned in the primaries and fail to embrace those whose candidate, once his campaign ended, repeatedly urged them to support you.
Well, there was enough blame for everyone, but, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Est quid est."
Time to move forward and hope that, as Nancy Pelosi said of the Affordable Care Act (and the media immediately misinterpreted), once the Trump Presidency is in place, people will "find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
Now here's your moment of zen
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