Cut through the noise

After watching the highlights of last Thursday’s Congressional sideshow, er, hearing, with former FBI agent Peter Strzok and dissecting the media reaction on either side of the spectrum, I couldn’t help but feel the need to take a long, hot shower. Is this all that’s left of the Grand Experiment?
           
Strzok, as you probably know, is the new Republican boogeyman in the Russia fiasco because of the anti-Trump text messages he sent agency lawyer Lisa Page—his former mistress—in the run-up to the 2016 election on a government-issued cell phone. Stupid, yes. Pertinent to the actual investigation? Not by a long shot.
           
At this point, the GOP will stop at nothing to divert attention from what actually matters and the facts this probe is supposed to be uncovering. We don’t yet know whether the president himself had any involvement in direct collusion with the Kremlin (if you recall, the tape that nailed Nixon for the Watergate scandal wasn’t discovered until nearly two years after the 1972 election), but with the way it’s going down, we’ll never find out.
           
Republican Representative and Steve King clone Louie Gohmert provided the most memorable exchange of the afternoon when he personally excoriated Strzok for his infidelity and declared him nothing short of a sociopathic liar as conservative media, on cue, proclaimed that he had OWNED and TOTALLY DESTROYED the Libs. Even Jim Jordan, who’s embroiled in quite the dust up of his own, decided to get in on the action.
 
Neutral observers, however, couldn’t help but wonder if they were witnessing a 64-year-old man losing what was left of his mind on live television. Strzok is no angel (and, one could argue quite convincingly, a moron), but Gohmert’s idiotic line of questioning somehow made a smug government stooge with an ego the size of Texas a sympathetic figure by comparison. 
 
Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. continues to prance around the globe with his new girlfriend and tweet insults at Strzok himself, despite the widely known fact that he actually met with Russians promising dirt on Hillary at a building his father owned just four months before the election. If he’s afraid of the storm on the horizon, he certainly isn’t showing it.
 
Whatever happens from here on out, placing arbitrary deadlines or constantly demanding that an active investigation be shut down is patently absurd, and it’s time to call it what it is. Let it run its course, and if Trump and his inner circle can answer “no” to these questions, he can keep on governing and doing whatever it is he does between his morning briefing on “Fox and Friends” and “Hannity” at night.
 
1.                    Were Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort actively seeking “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from agents of a foreign government? (Side note: There was plenty available right here in the U.S.A. I’m not sure why they went to all this trouble)
2.                    Did President Trump know about and/or authorize the meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016?
3.                    Did Trump’s son-in-law attempt to set up a “backchannel” for communication with Russia at the president’s urging or, at the very least, with his blessing?
4.                    Was Trump’s request that Russian hackers dig up Clinton’s 33,000 deleted e-mails during a campaign rally shortly before it happened a coincidence?
 
Richard Nixon would likely have won a second term in 1972 regardless of which candidate he faced in the general election (he carried a now unheard of 49 out of 50 states), but as we’ve since learned, his primary goal was to make sure that it was George McGovern—the peace freak from small-town South Dakota. More than any practical need for the information revealed by the DNC wiretaps and break-in, paranoia and insecurity ultimately did him in.
 
As the indictments roll in and the “witch hunt” clips along—echoing the slow burn of Watergate at every turn—Trump’s most ardent defenders just keep on tipping their hands about what the real endgame is. One thing’s for sure: it isn’t closure.