Thursday I’ve written a lot about people’s hopes in Robert Mueller, which helps explain the palpable disappointment in his performance yesterday before two Congressional committees. From one perspective, there’s no reason to feel let down. After all, his report exposed one of the great scandals in American history: our president welcomed and encouraged Russian election […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "In the Pine Woods Crows and Owl", Arthur Conan Doyle, Crime and Punishment, David Lodge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Renoir, Robert Mueller, Rules of the Game, Russia investigation, Sherlock Holmes, Small World | Friday In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade explains to femme fatale Bridget O’Shaughnessy why he’s arresting her for the murder of Miles Archer, even though he’s madly in love with her. “When a man’s partner is killed,” he says, “he’s supposed to do something about it.” That’s essentially what Robert Mueller was telling Congress in […]
Wednesday The GOP right now appears to be taking its cue from the Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to what’s in the Mueller report, they tell us. It’s time to move on. Neither Donald Trump, Senate Judicial Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell want Robert Mueller to testify before Congress […]
Thursday The drama surrounding the Mueller Report continues to become more postmodern with every passing day. Or rather, the Trump administration has been trying to render it so. To highlight how Attorney General William Barr is throwing up smokescreens, I turn to my favorite passage from Sense and Sensibility. First, however, let’s note that the […]
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 […]
Thursday I haven’t quoted the Alice books for a while, even though in the past I have turned to them many times to capture America’s fractured politics. We are now so far down the rabbit hole, however, or so deep into the looking glass, that Lewis Carroll is must reading. On a general level, we […]
Monday Two weeks ago I had an interesting interchange with reader Josh Grumet about which narrative would emerge once Robert Mueller submitted his report. While I said that liberals and NeverTrumpers were rooting for a Sherlock Holmes ending, I feared we would end up with a Samuel Beckett non-conclusion. Josh, meanwhile, compared Trump supporters to […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alexander Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo, Donald Trump, Endgame, Franz Kafka, Oxbow Incident, Russian Collusion, Samuel Beckett, Trial, Walter Clark, William Barr | 
