Retreat To Your Far From Neutral Corners

The anti-Trumpers are whining. Forgotten is their mantra about how wonderfully fair and reliable Robert Mueller is; how they are waiting for his Report with open minds and about they will accept his conclusions. Well, that apparently was only if they liked his conclusions.

Look, I don’t like his conclusions myself. But, because of that, I am not going to now claim that he was a fraud all along.  Today, Slate Magazine on-line has an article entitled, “How Robert Mueller Failed Us.” The author makes the disturbed claim that Mueller’s secrecy is what screwed us. He says Mueller should have held regular press conferences and kept the public advised on the progress of the investigation.  Now, there’s theory.  He thinks investigations are best conducted in public – that subjects and potential witnesses need to be kept up to date on what the investigators are thinking. Anyone who has watched even a single episode of Law & Order knows better than that, let alone anyone who has come within miles of an actual investigation.

And then there’s the misrepresentations. The Philadelphia Inquirer headline on the front page today says, “No determination on obstruction.” Not true.  Mueller came to no conclusion but the Attorney General did.  He said there wasn’t any.  Any reader of this story has to get to the fifth paragraph before that little factoid is pointed out.

And what about the Democrats in Congress?  Certainly, they are right to want to hear from Mueller, Rosenstein and Barr and find out how the process worked.  And they, and we, should see the whole report.  If Barr somehow came to his conclusion about obstruction in some corrupt way, we need, of course, to know that. But, those inquiries should not be undertaken from an adversarial posture.  Let’s be objective. 

The reaction of the pro-Trumpers is even worse (no surprise).  Trump himself, as is his repulsive nature, has declared himself exonerated and now wants to re-institute a Hillary Clinton investigation. Lindsay Graham is right behind him. We are hearing again how the Mueller inquiry was a waste of time and money; how it was corrupt from the beginning; how it was only an attempt to “take down” the President.

These people can’t accept a victory without unnecessarily embellishing it into a loss. If Trump got an award from a PTA, he would claim it was a Nobel.

So, what should these people be doing? Having given this only one day’s thought, I would suggest that both sides accept the Report for what it is, and no more.  It is a conclusion that the President of the United States is not a felon. Concede that. 

The pro-Trumpers can have it.  They’ll twist it, to be sure, but the anti’s need not give them what they want – a distracting fight over it. And the pro–Trumpers shouldn’t now dredge up that other concluded battle over Hillary. That would only keep the war between the slates going strong.

The anti-Trumpers  should move on and realize that just because Trump is not a felon, it hardly makes him a Saint. The standard for Presidential conduct is not “criminal beyond a reasonable doubt.” He’s still a liar. He’s still an incompetent.  He’s still a racist. He coddles dictators. He may still be proven to be a tax cheat. Those have to be the fights to take on now and we shouldn’t  taint those fights with sour grapes over the Mueller findings.

Am I optimistic?  No. I’m Pollyannaish.