"Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster. Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. The effort to save democracy and the rule of law from this lawless president has been set back, not advanced." Lawrence Tribe
—————-
I am 79. Mueller is 75. I recognize the symptoms of degenerative old age. He looked very much today like someone who was too old to have accepted the role of Special Counsel in the blackhearted campaign to unseat Trump and restore the momentum of the globalist unifying revolution. He was not at all in command of the document, his document, a document that will be his major legacy in history. He fumbled around endlessly and had to be told over and over again where to look in his own report for materials referred to by questioners. Particularly sad was his exchange with a Democrat congresswoman who had been a career policeman and chief of police in Orlando Florida. She tried repeatedly to lead him to the paragraph she wanted to talk about and she just could not manage it.
Trump is a boorish, rude, specimen typical of New York commerce and its leadership and perhaps of the city itself, but I agree with his economic and immigration policies and will continue to do so unless he caves in to his enemies in these matters. In the ME he has shown himself to be the servant of Israeli imperialism and the anti-shia hatreds of the murderous Gulf Arabs. And then, of course, there is the matter of his neocon helpmates.
Nevertheless, the Democrats tried once again today to make something out of very little. The American electorate is watching. pl
What made him take on this task? He was asked and declined to answer.
Watching this made me want to feel sorry for him, but he walked into it and performed the task in the manner he saw fit. This is what he reaped. Nobody wins.
Remember Porky Pig’s sign off? “T tttttthats all folks.” Mueller did a good impression of an elderly Porky Pig. I know this for certain. If Mueller’s performance at 75 is the standard, Colonel Lang is a 60 year old. No stuttering from the Colonel.
All
My dad used to say that he wanted to trade dear old mom in for a couple of thirties. Hmmm!
I agree with you on Israeli policies and that we should not be involved in the ’30 years war’ between the Gulf Arab states and Iran. BTW I read several years ago that there were more Shia than Suni in the ME. Don’t know if true or not.
As for economic policy, Trump’s statement that “Trade wars are easy to win” is not proving true, especially for my soybean farming relatives. In addition, his one economic ‘win’, the 2017 tax bill has not had any positive effects on the average Joe and has resulted in huge deficits that if a Democrat was in the white house, would be causing the Republicans to scream bloody murder.
I view his immigration policy mainly as a vehicle to get his base all worked up to make sure they hit the voting booth in 2020. In 2012 or 2013 the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill that the Republican led House refused to take up. If he really wanted to do something about immigration he would revisit it and put some pressure on the Senate to get busy on such a bill. That will not happen as any bill would have to be a compromise with Pelosi’s House and his followers do not want any compromise with those socialist amoral Democrats.
Sir,
You and your readers might enjoy reading the Z-Man. He also does a Friday podcast.
Here’s a recent one:
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=18151
I guess more 4 years of MAGA (or MIGA–depending on POV), hopefully some GOPers will help with the wall if they get a majority. Here me and DJT are in the same boat absolutely. As per Democrats, good grief–is there anything redeemable in this collection of cretins and crooks running this freak show. They surely make GOP (and the bar is set extremely low here) look almost stately.
So Mueller didn’t know who Fusion GPS was? Are we really supposed to believe that?
Laurence Tribe is absolutely unhinged when it comes to Trump. I have doubts that Mueller’s poor performance today will stop his insufferable impeachment mantra.
“The Intelligence Committee hearings are altogether different. If the morning put people to sleep, the afternoon should be a loud wakeup call: Russia illegally helped Trump win, with his active encouragement and criminal cover-up. Real treachery. Not a witch-hunt. Not a hoax.”
“The bottom line today is that the Trump presidency is being exposed as the corrupt fruit of Russia’s ongoing attack on our democracy — an attack Trump invited, exploited, and is repaying with disloyalty to America. Now Congress must act.”
This is what Laurence Tribe wrote after that first quote of his cited above. That’s more or less how I felt after watching most of the afternoon session. However, Mueller definitely shattered the illusion created by his firm jawed visage and silence over the past three years. I’m sure his often halting style and his lack of aggressive combativeness disappointed many on the left. The biggest take away I got was the ongoing FBI CI investigation. Whether we hear anything from this before the 2020 election is an unknown.
I think we will eventually see an impeachment in the House, although the Senate will quickly vote it down if they even bring it to a vote. I don’t think this will happen until next Spring. Until that time, House committees will continue to open and run investigations concerning foreign election interference (Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia), money laundering (Trump, Epstein, DB) and probably other issues. These investigations and hears will bore all of us and exasperate many, but they will lead to the eventual House impeachment proceedings carrying into the election season.
Every aging David needs an Abishag.
TTG
Yes. Tribe backpedaled to save his status in the Left. IMO you will wait a long time for a majority in the House that will vote a Bill of Impeachment.
ex PFC Chuck
Send us a picture of yours.
I keep arguing that this “shia vs sunni” narrative is largely propaganda. I have Israeli friends who have bought into it – how Israelis can actually believe that the rank and file citizenry of Bahrain/UAE/KSA are now pro-Israel is just astounding to me – but a lot of people will just gulp down whatever propaganda they are spoon fed.
Here is a video of Palestinians harassing a Saudi national visiting the temple mount as part of a Saudi make-nice-with-Israel trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp7pNKiVwDU
The Palestinians are mostly Sunni. The (mostly Sunni) Egyptians who watch this clip are not going to be on the side of the Saudi.
”As for economic policy, Trump’s statement that “Trade wars are easy to win” is not proving true, especially for my soybean farming relatives. In addition, his one economic ‘win’, the 2017 tax bill has not had any positive effects on the average Joe and has resulted in huge deficits that if a Democrat was in the white house, would be causing the Republicans to scream bloody murder.”
True. As for as the farmers, Trump signed a 15 billion dollar bail out for them BECAUSE of the losses caused by his trade war with China…so that’s 15 billion out of our tax money with no return. Some people are under the impression that his tariffs make money for the US–they don’t..US producers still have to buy raw materials from overseas and the tariff cost is passed on to the consumer in the products. In addition Trump is pressuring the FED to lower interest rates even more to keep the economy roaring…which is going to lead to even more speculative borrowing…There will be an implosion.
Wasn’t Abishag just 12 years old? I never bought that story that she was just warming the old man’s feet. Every pedo has some type of similar cop-out. It seems David was an Iron Age Epstein.
Since SWMBO retired she has been on a house organizing spree. She’s doing a very nice job, and I’m loving the results, until she told me that she is “throwing out everything that’s old and worn out.” I found that statement rather alarming until she assured me that no, that did not include me.
Interestingly, she did not claim that I am not old and worn out, merely that she is not throwing me out.
I wonder if Abishag is where the English slang for having sex – a shag – comes from?
I for one want our tax dollars back that Mueller used and abused in his Trump snipe hunt .
Just in……Mueller is now eying a book deal worth at least $10 million, however Russian Oligarch Deripska wants his $25 million back that he fronted Mueller for the State Department failure known as the Robert Levinson extraction that went south thanks to then SecOState Clinton State Department’s thumbs down.
How much of Mueller’s $10 million plus do you think will ever be paid to the U.S. Taxpayers who have fronted Mueller’s snipe hunt. We’ll be shorted by Mueller just like he shorted Russian Deripska.
J
From Robert Mueller’s testimony.
“Ken Buck: 04:53 Okay. But could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?
Robert Mueller: 04:59 Yes.
Ken Buck: 05:00 You believe that you could charge the President of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?
Robert Mueller: 05:05 Yes.”
Is it speciman or specimen.
He reminded me of Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante:
“The Oddfather” and “The Enigma in the Bathrobe” by the press, Gigante often wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself. -wiki
Vinnie the Chin used this tactic masterfully in order to deflect all matter of inquiry into his affairs.
I am reminded of the punch line to an old mathematics joke:
20 guzinta 80 many more times than 80 guzinta 20. The speaker of the punchline is tbd.
SRW,
as far as laws are concerned – they require seriousness, compromises, attention to details, thinking, general attention and an attention span beyond what’s needed for tweeting.
How many laws were made in Trump’s presidency so far? Certainly one, for christmas – a tax reduction for the rich, and him (aka the not so rich). Perhaps there was another one that I don’t remember.
How many solo acts like these presidential orders (don’t know the exact name) – a couple hundred, perhaps more than thousand. Trump is a solo boy. He likely runs the Whitehouse like his companies.
I don’t expect him to go a way of laws. Rather he’ll likely call out a few more urgent national emergencies to be able to contiunue solo without having to talk with, say, the parliament or his ministers.
I recall a nice line from an anonymous big company lawyer who, like many other colleagues refused to work for Trump’s in his numerous cases. The reson in two sentences: He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t pay.
That IMO rather well describes being a boorish rude in practical effect.
confusedponderer
You are incorrect. The tax law and reductions in regulations have greately benefited the middle class and the working class as well. Have you not seen the numbers on unemployment by sectors and increased]s in GDP? At the same time europe is stumbling along like Mueller at his hearing.
Anonymous
Thank you.
catherine,
Soybeans aren’t the only thing that can be grown and having only one customer is always a pretty risky position to be in; though it does distract nicely from the Mueller “Fusion GPS, what’s that?” line of answers he gave yesterday.
Col.,
“At the same time europe is stumbling along like Mueller at his hearing.”
Yes, as exemplified by Ford of Europe cutting 12,000 jobs and closing six plants. That’s a major disaster for European employment. I’m sure the new EU President can repeat the ‘immigration is our strength’ line a few times times but I doubt she be able to persuade voters like she is able to persuade the press.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/27/ford-cutting-another-12000-european-jobs-as-restructuring-continues.html
You can indeed charge, but if you cannot convict then lack of provable guilt wins.
The USA is currently the Earth’s most important nation. Every other nation on earth has an interest in who will be the next leader of the USA. A list of ten nations that interfered in the last presidential election is easily made: Mexico, Canada, The UK, Japan, PRC, Nationalist China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Israel,
France. If the topic to be investigated is interference in US Presidential politics, the field is broad and full of bouncing Bettys, if the topic is the reversal of an election outcome the field is narrower and only requires a few crooked cops and lawyers.
I think the efforts at regulatory “right-sizing” have had a bigger impact than the tax cuts (not they are bad,, but could have been better), but that is anecdotal.
I thought Obama was an honest and decent man but I think it is now **VERY** apparent that some kind of tax reduction and a concerted effort to “right size” regulations would have been more useful in 2009 than “Stimulus Spending,” “Cash for Clunkers,” or “PPACA.”
Mueller.
A good friend of mine grew up on a farm in the Mid-West. When he was a young boy, his uncle rode up to the house on a tractor. He yelled to my friend that he had just run over his dog. My friend started to cry and said “where is he”? His uncle said “back along the road. I threw him in the ditch”. My friend said he ran crying back along the road to find his dog where he was lying in the ditch to bring him home. My friend buried him behind the house.
Yesterday we find that Bob Mueller was a mere figurehead. He had little idea of the patch quilt case he had been given to defend with his reputation and he got run over by the tractor. None of it ever should have happened.
His boys will leave him there in the ditch, wanna bet.
Fred:
Yes, is it just me or do the EU and NATO both look like roadkill floating in a vat of embalming fluid that is leaking? No wonder German manufacturers told Merkel to get Nord2 done, and that right quick. I had thought the EU and NATO would make it to 2023-24, but I think the vat is leaking faster than that.
And I know Boris is “captured,” as they say, but bring Williamson back? Maybe Boris should change his name to Yeltsin.
Perhaps the New Yorker piece on John Bolton has been mentioned already on SST; if so, apologies.
re:
the New Yorker wrote of Bolton:
Curiously, this posture would seem to put Bolton at odds with neoconservatives exemplified by the Kagan boys who castigate Iran and Russia for their attempts to subvert the “international order.”
Flavius,
He isn’t Old Yeller about to be put out of our misery. He has been well compensated in fulfilling at least one of his purposes – hamstringing the current administration. Lots of others face some big problems, starting with Comey, Brennan and Clapper.
Speaking of Abishag:
The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,
The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.
Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.
Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.
Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!