It was promoted and billed as the political game changer in the rush to impeach President Donald Trump. The mainstream media gushed over, salivated about, and hyper-promoted the much anticipated Congressional testimony of Robert Mueller the man who led a nearly two year inquiry into alleged Russian meddling, and influencing the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections that brought an unlikely winner to the White House. So after over $24 million spent interviewing witnesses and giving the media "something to talk" about each and every day, the 489-page report told Americans and the world what the media and other pundits have been saying way back then.
And as I watched the recent questioning of Mueller, brought live by TV stations like CNN, I can't say I was impressed. A day later the Democrats must be scratching their heads and trying to understand what went so horribly wrong. It was a Congressional "horse and buggy" show with clowns and jesters and all. Republicans and Democrats knowing that TV cameras were rolling grandstanded pompously making statements that they hoped would be picked up and aired on the 6 o'clock news. The feigned adversarial "fire works" between them were more about showboating than airing any real substantive differences.
And what of the star witness Robert Mueller? I came away with the distinct impression that he was at times bored and distracted to a fault. At other times he seemed not to even be familiar with his own report, and at 74-years old his hearing left much to be desired. His answers were perfunctory and vague; he refused to answer even basic questions that did not impinge on national security of intelligence methods and means. In short, Mueller was a nightmare witness for Democrats and was never going to give them the "impeachment smoking gun."
Mueller's testimony before the House's Judicial and Intelligences committees was just, as they say, "same-o, same-o." We learned absolutely nothing new or different. Of course, the Trump Administration had set the stage for this farcical prime time performance in Congress by effectively muzzling Mueller. Attorney General Barr preemptively dictated just how the hearing was going to unfold by warning "Mueller to stick to his report." That effectively prevented Democrats from wading into the putrid waters of the Trump Presidency and his alleged collusion with Russia.
The flopped Mueller comedy of errors show forced Democrats and Republicans to trot out a new report about"what else? Russian preparations for influencing the 2020 U.S. Presidential elections and other assorted now rehashed, dusted off, and reengineered nefarious "attacks" by America's long-standing enemy. This new report ginned up the Russiaphobia to new and dizzying heights with political pundits "calling out" the president for not, well, calling out the Russian president as if he was some schoolyard bully that needed a "talking down."
Sadly, the Russian bogeyman is not going anywhere. You see, picking fights around the world with real and manufactured enemies is an old, tried and tested American tactic. These days it is being used with the willing participation of the Corporate Media to detract American focus on the creeping dictatorship that is incrementally stripping Americans of long-held rights. More and more, each and every day, President Donald Trump is behaving and acting as a "bull in a China shop." Long an admirer of the world's "strong men" political leaders, Trump knows that while he cannot get away at least openly with the kind of dictatorial behaviors of these leaders, he can achieve the same goals manipulating the American legal system, push the boundaries of his "Imperial Presidency," and chip away at these rights incrementally and slowly.
First, it was his now-complete take over of the Republican Party. That political organization is no more. Today, it's the Party of Trump (POT). In the process, he's bullied, threatened, cajoled and cowed the former GOP's members in Congress who now march in lock step and toe Trump's political line. They have allowed for his most undemocratic and un-American behavior and actions by dismissing them as "Trump is just being Trump." Such force-fed normalization of Trump's dictatorial tendencies is tantamount to enabling him to become a twisted modern configuration of an unholy cross between a monarch and a strutting pompous, braggadocios dictator. By surrounding himself with a cadre of mediocrity unparalleled in United States presidential administration history, Donald Trump's government is the epitome of the Peter Principle everyone just rises to this Administration's level of mediocrity.
Democrats, the less conservative of the Corporate Party twins, have still not gotten over the humiliating loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Fact is that although the best prepared and most qualified candidate to become president in a generation, she was still a deeply flawed candidate. From her perch in the Democratic Party her arrogance shone through even when compared to Donald Trump. Then she ran a very bad campaign and underestimated Trump and the Republican Party. Both she and the Democratic Party that has embraced meritocracy as its new ideology, and openly prostituted itself with Wall Street, also misjudged the deep, seething anger of Americans left out of the economic boom. Finally, both of them never understood the fears and anxieties of "White America" facing the looming reality that America will not be "majority white" in the next 20 years.
So, they had to create an enemy that American ignorance can accept and hate. And so the neo-Russian Bogeyman was born in a servile incessant narrative pushed by the Corporate Media ad neausum, day in and day out, 24/7 for two years, consuming and sucking up the oxygen in each and every news cycle, and endless "breaking news." Shamelessly, after all that effort they have absolutely nothing to show for it. They are mad at President Trump who, rightly or wrongly, has chosen to ignore their constant babbling and spitting at the moon.
Robert Mueller was supposed to resurrect a dying narrative and breathe new life into the "Russian Bogeyman." His appearance before two Congressional committees was supposed to be the icing on the cake that would finally nail Donald Trump to the proverbial political cross. That did not happen. He was supposed to have the smoking gun in his back pocket. He did not bring it to the hearings. And he was supposed to explain his report to the American people who politicians accuse of not liking to read and not having the time to digest the report.
In the end it was, to borrow from Shakespeare's Macbeth ""it was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing." Robert Mueller came over in the end as a dithering, bumbling, incoherent, and distracted witness in a highly partisan charade and badly choreographed political fandango that backfired.
NEWS FLASH: The U.S. Senate and the FBI have now produced a new report condemning Russia for planning to meddle in the upcoming US presidential elections in 2020. They have gone a step further claiming without an iota of proof that Russia is also attempting to do retail meddling by hijacking local state elections.
