On the first day of January of the worst year in many decades (that being 2020) I wrote a piece in which I made a number of predictions. Here’s one paragraph that came to mind recently:
The Republicans, in alliance with Fox News, will suddenly declare that the president is subject to the rule of law, and although they will have nothing valid on Biden, they will continue to spin conspiracy theories. William Barr will get a respectful hearing on CNN as he argues that a special prosecutor should be appointed to pursue those theories, and that Joe, seeing as he’s a Democrat, is not entitled to the benefits of the unitary executive theory. Come 2023, when the Republicans have taken back the House, and likely the Senate, they will move to impeach Biden on specious grounds, or at the very least, threaten to do so while conducting interminable investigations to distract from their primary goal of transferring our money to the already rich.
I was a bit wrong about the Biden impeachment, as one of the newly elected whackjobs intends to introduce articles of impeachment as her first official act. But, really, I think a serious effort in that direction will have to await the Republican return to majority status.
This post is about Bill Barr, who has let it be known that he heroically called bullshit on Trump’s lies about the election. He is apparently looking to get the mainstream, or at least Fox, to sanitize him so he can pontificate. He hopes, and there is a better than even chance his hopes will be fulfilled, that the catalogue of horrors and abuses of his office will be forgotten, now that he’s shown his true resistance colors. As the linked article suggests, the sanitizing has already commenced.
You have to hand it to him that he saw the way the winds were blowing, and did what was in his own interests. But in his case, he had few options. As attorney general, had he climbed on the “stop the steal” bus, he would have had to put up or shut up. The put up part wasn’t in the cards, so he chose to shut up. He had the smarts to realize that Trump would be history, whatever Barr might do, so he figured he might as well come out looking like he’d done the right thing (for once).
Guys like Hawley and Cruz had a more difficult decision to make. They aren’t looking to get punditry jobs, or otherwise pose as elder statesmen (or statesmen of any kind, for that matter). They want to be president, and they made the calculation that adding fuel to the fire would be in their best interests. It may turn out that they were right, but we won’t know for a while. It can’t help Cruz, for instance, that just about every newspaper in his state is calling for his resignation and Hawley is losing contributors, though that may be a passing fad.
Anyway, don’t be surprised if you soon see Barr on CNN telling us about the limits of presidential power. And don’t forget that if you see him there, it will be as the result of massive journalistic malpractice, for Atrios makes a good point here:
The reason to push for the shunning of everybody who worked with Trump is that we know that they knew – even more than we did – just how dangerous it was to leave that man in charge of a superpower, our superpower.
And they didn’t care.
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