This morning I got an email from my wife, who was at work, telling me about the upcoming Mueller appearance, and suggesting I watch it. My first reaction was negative, as I told her I was afraid he was going to cop out, by which I meant that he would simply repeat what we already knew and that he would be circumspect, etc.
In the end, I did watch, and my basic reaction was that he didn’t say anything we didn’t already know. I wrote to my wife and told her it was a “dud”.
An hour or two later I pulled up my RSS reader, and lo and behold, I found that my point of view was not widely shared. Josh Marshal gave it a rather tepid reception, but apparently the mainstream media felt differently. Even the folks at Fox, according to the folks at Crooks & Liars, interpreted his comments as a implicit call for Trump’s impeachment. Somehow, the mere repetition of what we could already read in the report was a game changer. For instance, it is now news that he would have absolved Trump of any criminal liability if the evidence supported such a move, but it didn’t. That is more or less a direct quote from the report.
The Prince of Denmark once said, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. Mueller’s statement could have been dismissed in much the way Josh and I dismissed it, but apparently there are folks that thinkit makes a difference if you say something in front of a camera that you’ve already set down in black and white. They happen to be the people that matter, the talking heads that appear on our television screens and the people who write newspaper headlines. Maybe Mueller was smart enough to see that was the case. In any event, it appears that his little speech will push the country further toward supporting the idea of impeachment, thereby putting more pressure on Pelosi to commence impeachment proceedings. I believe that Pelosi is perfectly happy to be pressured. I personally don’t care if they ever actually impeach, but I do think they should be investigating relentlessly. Using the impeachment process makes it all the harder for the genius’s judicial enablers to prevent that investigation. Even Kavanaugh would have a hard time (not saying he won’t anyway) coming up with a reason why the constitutional power to impeach does not carry with it the constitutional right to gather evidence.
We’ll have to see what the future brings, but maybe Mueller’s humdrum little speech might have started something.
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