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And it just goes to something that Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler, and Josh Marshall have called ‘the asymmetry of the parties.’ One of the many wild headlines by Trump’s GOP co-conspirators yesterday was that now that ‘collusion’ has supposedly been disproven-we actually don’t know that as we haven’t seen the report, apparently too subtle a point-Trump is owed an apology and maybe everyone whoever accused him of collusion should be prosecuted or something-or at least should be banned from cable news. They are calling on cable news to censor those who would accuse the faux ‘President’ of collusion. And if there’s any lesson of the last four years we can’t just laugh this stuff off. While there have been reports of the Trump Russia House demanding networks censor folks like Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff what they don’t say is what the networks’ response is. No reason to presume they simply threw these requests in the garbage-which is what they should do.

“Still, the president’s aides and allies have shown little desire to turn the page, preferring to write a new book detailing what they say is a rush to judgment from a Washington establishment unwilling to ever give Trump an unbiased assessment.”

“This is not something to put behind us and move on,” said David Bossie, Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign manager. He said the White House and the Trump reelection campaign need to make sure “we are beating the drum” on how what he sees as a D.C. echo chamber bungled its handling of the Mueller investigation.

So the Trump co-conspirators are in no rush to ‘move on’

even as the Democrats are lectured by the MSM to forget this whole thing and-‘put it behind us and move on.’

So even as the GOP is mobilizing for war the Democrats are demobilizing as this Washington Post article suggests:

“House Democrats conceded Monday that the possibility of impeachment proceedings against President Trump is over, at least for now — marking a dramatic retreat in the wake of the conclusion by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that Trump’s campaign did not conspire with Russia in the 2016 election.”

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and members of her leadership team agreed in a Monday night huddle that the caucus needs to stop talking about collusion with Russia because it was distracting from their legislative agenda, according to three people in the meeting or familiar with the discussion.”

Distracting from passing gun control bills that will go nowhere in the Senate. For some reason impeaching Trump is a waste of time unless the Senate convicts but it’s not a waste to do other legislation that also won’t get voted on.

This is the difference between the parties-the Democrats always immediately concede the point Note my real concern here isn’t impeachment-as that’s still an academic question until we get the facts-starting with the Mueller report.

It’s the 2nd paragraph which really bothers me. I mean if this is true it’s pretty galling. I mean is it really too subtle a point to wait to actually see the report before ‘moving on?’ Doesn’t it say everything about the two parties that the GOP ‘President’ one with the help of a hostile foreign power-this is a fact wether or not there was collusion and yet it’s the Democrats for whom this is seen as problematic for politically?

Now there is some reason for hope. Pelosi did say this this morning:

You then have this completely accurate statement by Adam Schiff-who is the one to spearhead any investigation of collusion.

There was a narrative this morning that James Clyburn has saiid Mueller is now ‘a closed chapter.’

But this plainly contradicts what he himself said just a day and a half ago.

So there is a bit of ambiguity-the MSM always does this-creates a narrative then confirmation bias leads to 100 stories that allegedly confirm the dubious narrative.

So maybe the MSM is just trying to sell their narrative that Trump is vindicated and all investigations of Trump are over-not just Mueller but the Democrats should scale their own plans back.

But then there’s the fact that the Democrats cancelled Felix Sater’s hearing-in response to the Barr Letter-at least according to the WaPo piece.

But in another sign of the impact of Mueller’s report, the House intelligence panel announced Monday that it was postponing a Wednesday hearing with former Trump business associate Felix Sater about his plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — one of the key events Democrats say fell outside the purview of Mueller’s probe.

This piece made me feel better:

Until this last paragraph by Jim Himes:

“There are some Democrats who are disappointed,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) acknowledged. “And I’ve said to five or six of them, the fact that the president of the United States is not in a criminal conspiracy with a foreign enemy is cause for celebration, not for disappointment. And if you get your head into a place where you think it’s a bad thing that the president is not a traitor, you’ve got to reorient your head.”

How do you know he’s not a traitor? At most you can read the half sentence we actually got from Mueller as meaning he can’t prove Trump is a traitor beyond a reasonable doubt, still leaving very much open the possibility that he is a traitor on a preponderance of the evidence basis. I mean  c’mon Congressman Himes! You’re the lawyer not me. How is this that hard?

That the MSM is falling for this sophistry lock, stock, and barrel is depressing enough. But that Dem Congressmen on the Intel Committee are…

Indeed, to appreciate the difference between the two parties-both of the MSM’s attitude and the parties themselves consider the analogous situation to the Barr Letter-the Comey Press Conference of July, 2016.

The Barr Letter and Comey Presser are on their face very similar as they both have a top line that at least superficially clears the subject-though in the case of the Barr Letter it’s pretty dubious.

With the Barr Letter in the MSM has treated like complete exoneration and vindication of ‘President Trump’-sorry I use inverted commas as he won with the help of Russia-and Comey, of course. Indeed, some among the (not so)Smart Set are going as far as to suggest the MSM owes the illegitimate ‘President’ an apology.

The Clinton comparison is instructive: the media reaction was 180-no one said ‘Hillary is exonerated, she’s vindicated, and totally innocent’ but rather ‘Ok even if she wasn’t indicted she’s extremely careless.

The MSM totally focused on extremely careless rather than cleared of wrongdoing. With Trump it’s the opposite-I don’t think it’s going out on really any limb to presume that if this were Clinton the focus would be not on ‘not able to establish conspiracy with the Russian government’ but rather that Mueller was ‘unable to exonerate.’ The irony of the canard that Trump is exonerated is that Barr said the exact opposite-he was not exonerated. And in Clinton’s case this would be noticed. But if Clinton’s campaign manager was sentenced to 7 and a half years in prison she’d already be impeached by now-even in a Democratic Congress.

While the Democrats-may be depending on who you believe-already backing off, after the Comey letter-that no one suggested exonerated Clinton much less embarrassed the Republicans chanting ‘Lock Her Up’ -the GOP doubled down. The demanded Comey testify before the House-and unlike Trump, Obama did anything sooner than try to prevent it.

The GOP kept hammering Comey and the FBI so relentlessly that eventually Comey was cowed into releasing the Comey Letter that ‘won ‘the election for ‘President Trump.’

So doubling down worked for the GOP-just like as we saw in previous chapters, contrary to conventional wisdom, impeaching Clinton ultimately helped the GOP-in the long term it so dirtied the Clinton brand that the weight of it was enough to deny her the Presidency. As for short term-they may have lost a few seats in 1998 but by 2000 the were in control of all three Houses in DC and would be through 2006.

If this book has a theme it’s the historical treachery and Machiavellianism-the Nixonism-of the modern-post Nixon-GOP. The GOP knew after the New Deal that they couldn’t win based on the issues-as the public supports the New Deal-so they chose rather than to adjust themselves to PACE William F. Buckley stand athwart history and yell ‘stop.’

They have been determined to entrench minority rule by ANY MEANS NECESSARY-from every manner of Nixonian campaign dirty tricks to gerrymandering, redstricting, voter fraud-as we saw in North Carolina-up and to outright collusion and treason with a hostile foreign power-Nixon 1968, Reagan 1980, Trump 2016.

The corollary is the Democrats who because they have the facts on their side tend not to realize that: in political combat the truth is not enough. It certainly helps but it’s not the whole board-the GOP out of necessity has gotten very good at pounding the tale.

So another major theme of this book is that the Democrats need to fight rougher-they don’t need to become GOP devils but have to lose the canard that the only way the can win is by being angels themselves.

In Chapter A I looked at Michelle Goldberg’s interesting analogy of the media’s different treatment of Democrats and Republicans to society’s different treatment of men and women. Within our politics the Democratic party ‘is a girl.’

While girls are much more well behaved than girls when they do misbehave they get sanctioned and punished much more harshly You can substitute Dems for girls and the GOP for boys and this very well states political lines in America. The Dems are expected to be the good ones and when someone feels they’re not all hell breaks loose in a way you don’t see with the GOPers-for Republicans to behave badly-nasty, aggressive-is sort of dog bites man.

So one analogy for this book could be the book Date Like a Man: What Men Know About Dating That You’re Afraid to Find Out

Basically a book by a woman-Myreah Moore-to her sisters on the alleged secrets of dating that men are privy to.

LOL. Now don’t get me wrong this book has bitten off more than enough to chew-and then some-I’m not endorsing-or contradicting-anything Ms. Moore says about what men allegedly know about dating that women could stand to learn from. However, the structure of this book is in a sense analogous as I’m a Democrat writing a book for Democrats-it’s not only for this purpose but one of them-on the GOP’s secrets of the dark arts. I’m not saying Dems should become ‘as bad as the GOP devils’ but am saying they should also stop believing they have to be angels to have any credibility.

I think Democrats certainly need to know the depth of GOP perversity and it should lead them to be tougher in some ways. One thing the GOP is very skilled at is in setting the narrative. While the Dems-certainly most of those you see interviewed on tv-always accept the premise of whatever snarky questions the MSM asks them, the GOPers never concede anything if you watch them. They pushback on the narrative if it doesn’t favor them-rather than attempt to defend themselves based on the narrative.

The Democrats have just meekly accepted that ‘there was no collusion’ without seeing not only the full report but not even the full sentence-which strongly makes you suspect that even the full sentence would have undermined the no collusion narrative. The MSM seems utterly incapable-even an alleged legal expert like an Ari Melber-is utterly incapable of distinguishing between criminal collusion and collusion. But the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees find it too subtle that just because there isn’t criminally chargeable collusion doesn’t mean there’s no collusion?

I mean are Jim Himes and friends aware of this or not:

Pretty sure Schiff but that comment by Himes just makes me wonder. Note that whole basis of this investigation began with probable cause.

There’s certainly a huge difference between the statements ‘no criminal collusion’ and ‘no evidence of collusion.’

How much noncriminal collusion took place? Barr states that Mueller “did not establish” that Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia. There’s no reason whatsoever to question that finding. And while that is an extremely important finding, it only answers one of the questions that propelled the investigation in the first place.

The key concept here is one of the few principles agreed to beforehand: Collusion is not a crime. It follows from this that the lack of a crime does not mean a lack of collusion. But Mueller was appointed to find out not only what Russia did to interfere in the election, but also “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

But actually I would like to push back even on Jonathan Chait’s statement that ‘it’s an extremely important finding.’

Why? Well the truth is it was never very likely that criminal collusion would be found as folks like David Frum and Ryan Goodman had tried to warn us.

Way back in December 2017-the month your author begun this book!-Goodman had warned they were unlikely going to charge anyone with collusion-but the key is this fact doesn’t mean the collusion didn’t happen.

During the hearing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Wednesday, some members of the House Judiciary Committee did not try to conceal their attempt to discredit and derail Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The way that the Russia investigation has been framed has made it easy for them to do that: Its legitimacy appears to rest on finding a smoking gun of criminality – a simple yes or no on whether any of the cast of characters in this saga committed a serious federal offence.

But making this merely about the bright line between illegality (criminality) and legality means that most Americans are missing what is right under our noses. To wit, there is no question that Russia made multiple, unprecedented attempts to penetrate a U.S. presidential campaign, that its approaches were not rebuffed, and that its contacts were sensitive enough that everyone, to a person, has concealed them. These facts might never be adjudicated inside a courtroom – they may not even be illegal – but they present a clear and present national security threat that we cannot ignore. We write here to broaden the public understanding of that security threat, and to underscore why the principal part of Mueller’s investigation—which is a counterintelligence probe not a criminal one—is performing a vital role for our country.

Again he wrote this eight months before Helsinki.

Look all I can tell you as that speaking as a life long Democrat if you’re going to let this go or soft pedal and pullback going forward don’t talk to me about 2020. What’s the point in voting for the Democrats if they won’t even draw a line on treason?

 

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