The Driftglass report on Brooks’ latest: We can’t investigate Trump because look at all the misery caused by investigating the Clintons!
Instead, Mr. Brooks turns the entire Republican attempted-coup-by-impeachment scheme — from Whitewater through Blue Dress — into a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger cautionary tale about the consequences of investigating presidents generally:
If past is prologue, this investigation will drag on for a while. The Clinton people thought the Whitewater investigation might last six months, but the inquiries lasted over seven years. The Trump investigation will lead in directions nobody can now anticipate. When the Whitewater investigation started, Monica Lewinsky was an unknown college student and nobody had any clue that an investigation into an Arkansas land deal would turn into an investigation about sex.
This investigation will ruin careers far and wide. Investigators go after anybody they think can yield information on the president. Before the Whitewater investigators got to Clinton they took down Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Webb Hubbell, Susan and Jim McDougal, and many others.
But of course, The Past can only be prologue for those who remember it fully and clearly. So how perfectly ironic it is that doing this very thing — remembering The Past fully and clearly — is also the greatest single existential and financial threat to Conservatism generally, and to Mr. David Brooks’ ability to afford his new multi-million dollar Capitol Hill retreat specifically.
The media are trying desperately to exonerate Republicans and blame the Democrats for our current situation — and I agree in part with the latter, because the Democratic party has lost its soul in a mad scramble for corporate dollars — but we cannot allow this kind of selective amnesia. The Republican party is a treacherous swamp of greed and treachery, and the people who voted for Trump are…
I would say much worse things about David Brooks.
I sincerely hope the investigation will “ruin careers far and wide”. People committing fraud, laundering money, cheating on taxes and committing treason **SHOULD** have their careers ruined.
Mark Twain once ruminated on the beautiful, impossible Past — if I remember it correctly. If there’s one thing Americans are really good at, it’s the ability to instantly forget. The lessons of The Past hold only if they preserve beliefs that Americans want to think is true; otherwise, they’re forgotten.
Remember when your liberal college buddy proved that the birth stories in the gospels of Matthew and Luke were irreconcilably contradictory, and you began to wonder if the Bible was truly the inerrant Word of God you always cherished? But your friend moved away, and you forgot all about it. Or when that U.S. Army Major said it was necessary to destroy the Vietnamese town of Ben Tre in order to save it, or when William Calley ordered the massacre of 500 innocent civilians, or the 60,000 U.S. troops killed in Vietnam for nothing, or the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Iraqis killed like sitting ducks outside Baghdad during Desert Storm? These were all recent events, but they’ve all been forgotten now. And they’re all just the tip of a forgotten iceberg.
Myers is so right — The Past is the greatest threat to conservatives today because it holds uncomfortable truths about who we are as a nation and a people. I think Trump’s election was more about Leave It To Beaver than the nationalistic hubris the conservatives felt when Trump said he preferred Grab the Beaver.
A rather obvious difference between Whitewater and the present situation is that Whitewater was never anything but a hoax to begin with; whereas Russia really did mess with the election and put the Pumpkin Panjandrum in office. So there are plenty of careers that should be ruined. Let’s hope for it.
Isn’t it ironic when Republicans who called for repeated investigations of Obama and Clinton start complaining about an investigation of their men in the White House. Boo hoo.
BTW: Washington Post is reporting that Adam West has died.
An old Historian saying : “They who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it, and they who do study the past are doomed to watch in helpless anger as they who do not study the past repeat it.” Trump has outdone Nixon. He has brought racketeering back into the White House, in a big way. He needs to be stopped, and those who’re dirty in it with him need to be stopped also.
I’m thinking this is the direction McCain TRIED to go in the other day, probably at someone else’s coaching.
instead he apparently had a stroke.