Diatribes of Jay: What <i>Is</i> the Mueller Report?

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The media sphere is all agog. Long awaited and much discussed, the Mueller Report is finally done. It exists. It’s complete. It’s compiled and delivered.

We don’t know precisely what’s in it, but we surely know in general. It’s a compilation of evidence of our President’s lies, fraud, corruption, obstruction of justice, self-dealing, self-interest, gratuitous cruelty, incompetence, and treason. It’s a compilation of facts, as far as anyone can know them, prepared by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team of experts.

Mueller and his experts spent the better part of two years gathering facts, interviewing witnesses, and preparing the Report. More broadly, they each have devoted whole careers to gathering facts related to crimes and wrongdoing in a fundamentally honest way. They are our nation’s foremost experts in fair fact-gathering related to wrongdoing.

Why does everyone want to see the Report? It’s detail is crucial.

Everyone with a pulse knows all the crimes and misdeeds of which Trump stands accused. Everyone has heard his oft-reported denials. But everyone with a brain knows that you can’t capture a story as complex or important as this one with puerile name-calling like “witch hunt!” or “collusion!” It’s a subtle story and a broad one, one that already involves “215 criminal charges, 38 indictments or pleas, and five prison sentences so far.” Already that’s more than in our previously most corrupt regime, Warren G. Harding’s.

Everyone understands that you have to tolerate some detail to know the truth. So what is the Mueller Report? Why has it, sight unseen, assumed the importance of a national oracle?

First of all, it’s a mirror. It’s more than an impressionistic reflection in a stream or pond, whose ripples and mud distort the view. It’s a clear and polished mirror that will show every wart and blemish in our sick society. It will show what wrong and evil we have accepted—day to day as standard operating procedure—for over two years. It will show how a substantial minority of the American people have come to accept Trump’s reported 8,158 lies and misleading statements as some “alternative” version of reality.

The Report is hardly a mirror for Donald J. Trump. He can’t see himself at all. If he looks in a mirror, he sees only his delusions of grandeur, which require the fuel of constant flattery and popular adulation to maintain. He sees only what’s in his own mind.

Instead, the Report is a mirror for all of us. It will show us how we’ve allowed our shining city on the hill to become a moral slum. It will show us, precisely and in detail, the level of corruption, filth and degradation that we have come to tolerate and accept as “normal.” It will let us see ourselves as we are, like Al Gore’s frogs in water, not noticing as it’s heated slowly to boiling.

The Report is a thermometer. It shows just how sick our society is, at its very top. Trump has claimed the mantle of the greatest president in our history. But how can that be? Can this man who threatens Kim with “fire and fury” and then sucks up to him, who cozies up to killers like Putin and MBS, really claim the wisdom, moral clarity and steadiness of Washington, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR, or Obama?

Most of us suspect that our culture and our society are ill, but we don’t know how gravely. Like a medical thermometer, the Report will show us in detail. It will give us some hint whether we have a mere cultural flu, from which we’ll soon recover, or a life-threatening illness.

The Report is a lie detector. There are lies and there are lies. Some are explicit and obvious, like the thousands the Washington Post has carefully tallied. Some, like the many that Michael Cohen has alleged, are mere nods and winks in the Mafia-like context of Trump’s tiny clan. The Report will highlight the subtler lies in the only way possible, short of mind-reading: the actions of Trump and associates. By their deeds ye shall know them.

The Report is a goad. Genuinely decent conservatives like David Brooks and Michael Gerson writhe in mental torment as they try to square their views of the moral universe with what our national government has become. Yet they do little more than wring their hands. Brooks, in particular, seems to have retreated from politics and found refuge in abstract moral philosophizing.

Sometimes it seems that people like these have come to accept the most corrupt, vile and incompetent leadership in our nation’s history as a necessary evil to preserve a rapidly disappearing “conservative” tradition. Gerson’s recent column went so far as to recommend continuing to enable and support a party that has abandoned all of its principles and become a monster’s plaything.

The Party of Lincoln abolished slavery, enshrined its Abolition in three Civil-War Amendments to our Constitution, took public lands to create land-grant colleges, built the Transcontinental Railway, and propelled our mostly rural, isolated nation toward global leadership. In contrast, Trump and his minions have gutted voting and civil rights, sought to put education back into self-interested private hands, procrastinated endlessly on infrastructure, and poured the nation’s substance into the pockets of the unworthy rich. The Report and its incontrovertible detail may, at last, goad decent Republicans like Brooks and Gerson—and many more—toward their own peculiar form of resistance.

Finally, the Report is a trigger. So many Republicans who claim to follow Trump have got to hate him in secret. He’s the biggest bully in the party’s and our nation’s histories.

Trump has insulted Republicans and given them demeaning nicknames. He’s subjected them to hazing and crude dominance rituals worthy of a sick college fraternity. He’s ridiculed their values and their efforts. He’s stolen credit for their hard-won successes in elections and their rare successes in public policy. He’s broken every rule by which they’ve led their public lives. He’s crossed a line that no honorable man—let alone a pol or diplomat—ought ever to cross: he’s insulted, belittled and ridiculed their families.

How long will so many Republicans continue to tolerate this personal debasement, not to mention debasement of their party’s values? As Nobel Laureate Dylan sung, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

But the funny thing about bullies is how quickly the tide can turn against them. First one, then two, then many see the light. Then, all of a sudden, it’s “et tu, Brute?” Just so, without violence, the Report could trigger meaningful resistance among those with the most to lose.

If not, there is another possible future. Hitler’s real enablers weren’t the Brown Shirts—his violence-prone shock troops. They were just the muscle.

What really enabled the most violent and self-destructive regime in any developed nation were the German “elite.” The great German industrialists helped: the Farbens, the Krupps, the Speers, the Thyssens. So did men from noble families, such as the great general Rommel, whose support of the doomed regime led to his own destruction.

Non-college-educated people who work largely with their hands are the core of Trump’s “base.” They are not going to read the Report. Instead, they will slavishly credit their hero’s claims that the investigation was a “witch hunt” and that there was “NO COLLUSION!”

If Trump’s steady march away from democracy and toward dictatorship is to be stopped in its incipiency, our elite must put their shoulders to the wheel. Only they will read the Report, and only they have the power and influence to slow or stop our national degradation.

To do that, they must read the full text, in all its detail. To read it, they must have it.

The Report’s power as a mirror, a thermometer, a lie detector, a goad and a trigger lies in its detail. Apart from future secret leaks—for example, from Attorney General Barr’s office or from Congress—our elite can have access to that detail only to the extent Barr releases it to the public.

So whether those who can use the Report get hold of it now lies in Barr’s hands. For now, so do our nation’s future and its survival as a Republic.

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

Diatribes of Jay

24 March 2019

What Is the Mueller Report?

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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