Open thread for night owls: Adam Gopnik takes another look at impeachment of you-know-who

At The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes—Another Look at Impeachment, After the Mueller Report:

[...] That the scale of the danger Trump poses is becoming clearer to more and more people is due to the paradoxical truth that, despite Trump’s endless claims to the contrary, the Mueller report is the least witch-hunt-like witch hunt in the history of witch hunts. Painfully, dutifully, at times in ways almost unduly dainty, the report works its way through the intricacies of its charge, of Department of Justice standards and practices, of what it can fairly conclude, and of what can’t be legitimately pursued. [...]

The finding of the Mueller report, ably occluded by Attorney General William Barr, isn’t that there was no collusion and no obstruction—it’s that there isn’t enough evidence to rise to the legal level of conspiracy, and that obstruction was not a charge that the office was permitted to pursue, in any case, because Trump is a sitting President. And then that—a rather convoluted piece of reasoning—the accusation cannot be unambiguously stated even if it is true, since it is also against the rules to accuse of a crime someone who can’t defend himself in court. The actual point of view of the authors, though, is made clear in their repeated, and rather ornate, return to an otherwise bafflingly opaque formula: if we could conclude that the President was exonerated of the charge of obstruction we would say so, but we can’t. In cash-value, or real-world, terms, they are saying that they can’t properly say that they found obstruction, but they did find a lot of evidence and are passing it along to those who might be allowed to act on it. It’s a heavy hint in the form of a labyrinthine legal argument. [...]

This is why the idea that Mueller cleverly engineered his report to force Congress to act misses the point. Mueller didn’t intend it. The rules did. This is why impeachment—at least attempting to remove from power someone obviously unfit to hold it, whatever the outcome may be—has, within a week, passed from a distant speculative possibility to what seems to many like a primary moral duty. It is being miscast as a prudential act, or even as an act of overdue partisan aggression. Right now, it seems more like collective self-defense against a common danger.

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BLAST FROM THE PAST

On this date at Daily Kos in 2003—"Crying wolf": basing war on lies

One has to remember that this war would've been a hell of a lot more difficult without Kuwait as a staging area. The US needs allies to undertake complex military operations far from its shores. Yet this war has shaken US credibility throughout the globe, and now that the US has cried "wolf", it may be increasingly more difficult to rally world support the next time we face conflict (even if legitimate).

So that's why it's so important for the US to find the WMDs Iraq supposedly possessed, regardless whether the Might Wurlitzer and administration officials try to shift the discussion to Iraq's "liberation". The world is still waiting to see whether the US lied to get its war on.

Which is why the administration continues its pathetic attempts to confuse the public about the lack of WMDs in Iraq. The latest effort surrounds the barrels found in northern Iraq that supposedly tested as nerve agents. News reports this morning (predictably) indicate the barrels did not contain banned weapons.

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from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2Pybla0