TWGB: Nothing is Over!

Risk for Dems here is that the public narrative has already been formed and they look like sore losers in keeping the story going. https://t.co/W2HVGIRcWM

— Katty Kay (@KattyKayBBC) April 4, 2019

I'm not trying to single out Katty Kay here for her Tweet; it's simply the most revelatory example of the mainstream media mental universe that was ready to accept the narrative of the Mueller report as summarized (in a summary of a summary) by AG Bill Barr, without probing a little deeper into the context of Barr's previous relationship to the case prior to his nomination, his history of coverup, the umpteen widely broken bombshell stories mentioning meetings between Russians and representatives of the Trump campaign--or indicating that said folks were lying about them, and the poll numbers that strongly suggested that regardless of the narrative, people were going to look at the words "was not exonerated" in the Barr letter and take therefrom that maybe, just maybe, the Mueller report did not exonerate President Trump.

It's stupid, really. Why in the world would Democrats settle for taking a graceful loss when the fucking results appear to have been diddled? That's outrageous! The story is clearly not over.

So, if it does come out that people on Mueller's team have spoken with the media on background and voiced concern that the Trump Administration is taking unwarranted victory laps, perhaps the focus shouldn't be on how Democrats respond, but on why these sources are making that claim. It could only really be settled by the Mueller report actually coming out, but it does not seem the Trump Administration is keen to have that. If Trump is so exonerated--why? What might be the key damaging information that the Trump Administration and associated Republican minions want suppressed? Is it that the Trump Campaign might not have been actively colluding with Russia, but in fact were so sloppy and new as to be "manipulated by a sophisticated Russian campaign".

This, really pathetically, would square with one of the saddest but most frequent protestations the TrumpWorld folks have made in favor of their innocence--that they were too stupid to collude. Jared Kushner said it. Rick Santorum said it. Chris Christie said it. And it is very damn possible that one could very well be not a witting accomplice, but an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, if you will, of a foreign intelligence campaign. It is not damning in the culpability sense of being an accomplice, but it is entirely damning in the competency sense. As in, if a candidate and his cohort are so appallingly dumb, what prevents them from hanging their exposed asses out where foreign entities who know what they are about can play with them at will? Because it is a demonstration of incompetency. It is foolishness. It is playing with fire as if one has never comprehended the concept of "hot".

This actually really jibes with some of the current questions regarding this Administration's approach towards operational security--like the whole Jared Kushner "Whatsapp" thing and whether he and the lovely Ivanka should have ever gotten security clearances at all. Or about the way a rando crashed her way into Mar-A-Lago on her Cindy Yang connections with an all-but "I'm being a spy" sign on her back.

That should actually be deeply concerning. Unsecured devices! Classified shit talked about outside of a SCIF (no really, this was not all performed up in the SCIF, and that scif is cray). Hot and cold running potential security threats at Trump's very commercial property that he uses like a pseudo White House, but it sure is not. And here's how WH spox talk about it:

I wish Democrats and the Media cared as much about the countless security breaches at the southern border - resulting in the assaults, rapes, murders, and drug deaths of hundreds of thousands of American citizens - as they do about the "security breach" at Mar-a-Lago.

— Hogan Gidley (@hogangidley45) April 4, 2019

What the? I sort of work with the public and write a thing or two, and if I were competently statement-crafting, I would try to be reassuring that all efforts were being made to ensure that the President and his staff as well as vital national security information was being protected through the efforts of the Secret Service as well as the security staff at the Mar A Lago property, and that this security breech was being treated with all seriousness and would be investigated to ensure no potential repeat.

That's me, half-assing it. Hogan Gidley completely blows off the idea that such a breach even matters, to change the subject to Trump's fake border crisis. This is ideological brain damage in action, folks. But is it a sign of how very little this Administration preserves and ensures op sec? Like, is this a failure of the Admin to instruct the badly aged boy Hogan Gidley on what they are doing to actually not have further security fuckups so that he can adequately convey this, or is he really conveying their lassitude regarding such things?

I don't know. But I think this administration is so replete in their various fuckeries to only sort of concern themselves with actually publicly answering them. As with the matter of Trump's tax returns, it may well be up to appointed flunkies to just practice denial and try to exhaust our very patience.

But the "narrative" will not control whether the US public feels they have a right to know, as with Nixon, whether their president is some kind of crook. It is clear that if the Trump Administration is not overtly guilty of collusion, they were very well guilty of being too ignorant and allowing certain contacts that should not have taken place, and seem to remain to some extent, foolish. This matters. It looks bad because it is bad.