Friday
I’ll write more extensively about the release of the Barr-redacted Mueller Report next week but a quick note here. When the Attorney General attempted to spin the report prior to its release, thereby functioning as the president’s press agent rather than the country’s chief law enforcement officer, I thought of Dr. Quack in William Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675).
In a complicated scheme designed to circumvent watchful husbands, Dr. Quack lets it be known that Horner has been rendered impotent (a eunuch) by venereal disease. Because of the lie, husbands allow the rake to visit their wives, and Horner and the women proceed to make merry.
When the truth about Horner’s actual condition threatens to come out, the entire society faces disintegration, with wives dishonored and husbands revealed to be cuckolds. In our case, the truth of Russia’s interference in our election, and Trump’s knowledge and encouragement of that assistance, threaten his presidency. Quack is the man who will salvage the situation.
Except that one husband is not buying it:
Pinchwife: An eunuch! Pray, no fooling with me.
Quack: I’ll bring half the chirurgeons in town to swear it.
Pinchwife: They!—they’ll swear a man that bled to death through his wounds, died of an apoplexy.
In the end, however, Pinchwife buys the lie along with the other husbands. In doing so, they maintain their “honor,” a term cynically used throughout the play to mean “public reputation,” nothing deeper.
Trump’s GOP is engaging in comparable self-deception. They cling to Barr’s “no collusion, no obstruction” spin, even though the Mueller Report indicates there was plenty of both. To do otherwise would be to admit the extent of their complicity.
Country Wife concludes with a dance of the cuckolds. We’re currently watching Trump, Fox News and Trump’s supporters engage in that dance.
