Robert Mueller Remains an American Hero

7/25/2019

Still my go-to cup

No reason to give up my cup, a gift from last December.
No, I did not smash it with a hammer or shatter it against the kitchen wall.

We watched the hearings Wednesday to see if anything had changed, and nothing had. Robert Mueller was not going to tell us what to do. He is a prosecutor, not a politician, and, bless the difference.
Mueller was going to leave it up to Congress, and the people, which is too bad, but that’s all there is.

I still have the image of Mueller as the Marine officer, taking a bullet in the thigh in Vietnam while leading his platoon. He serves his country, still.

He is more than a veteran prosecutor. Robert Mueller is a concept, an ideal -- Paul Revere riding through Massachusetts, warning “The Russians are coming! Hell, the Russians are here! -- and they have a friend in a high place."

He did that again on Wednesday and, instead of the Vietcong taking potshots at him, he faced some distempered legislators who seemed offended at being thusly warned.

I give the Democrats this much credit: they actually planned their questions. I am sure the Democratic elders had been shamed by rookie legislators like Katie Porter and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who asked informed questions in recent hearings rather than make self-serving speeches like most mossbunker legislators of both parties.

Mueller was generally inscrutable, just getting through the day –his plan for his 89th and 90th visits to Congress, and with any luck at all, his last.

Mueller clearly was not going to deliver an “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” rant. Through the eyes of somebody half a decade older than he (that is to say, me), he looked like I felt – he needed a nap. So I took one.

After a day of reflection, I wonder, even more strongly, if there should be some self-imposed limit, whether elders like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders should try to “run the country,” as the cliché goes, for the next four years.

I also look at the disturbed old man now currently the President, his already meager brain cells obviously crammed with memories of being a reality TV star for the millions, plus the fat from a zillion Big Macs. Incoming senility – or fast-food grease – or malicious intent -- or some toxic combination?

(Elizabeth Warren turned 70 on June 22, but she clearly has the physical and psychic and mental energy of a 50-year-old, plus she has done her homework. She knows stuff. Every case is different.)

Meantime, the septuagenarian Robert Mueller delivered a warning that the Russians are coming.

Most of the country is on vacation, watching videos on smartphones or summer movie sequels, clearly not reading newspapers, much less 444-page reports (mea culpa on that one.)

Robert Mueller has tried. Whatever happens next, not his fault.
He is an American hero, and in my mind remains one.

Paul Moses quotes Horton the Elephant (by Dr. Seuss) to stress the Semper-Fi values of Robert Mueller.
Please see the follow essay from Common-weal Magazine:
www.commonwealmagazine.org/i-said-what-i-meant

bruce

7/25/2019 11:07:41 pm

george,

it's too bad that much of the mueller's appearance has focused on his hesitations and halting speech.

the message was pretty much that trump was unfit for office.

as an aside, it might've been worth a mention that mueller came from an affluent family and could've, i'm sure, skipped vietnam entirely.

wouldn't really blame anybody for deciding 'hell no, we won't go' but it galls me to see trump and the bush2 chicken hawks being so belligerent now when they had 'other priorities' back in the day.

bruce

Alan Rubin link

7/26/2019 11:28:35 am

I believe that the Democrats miscalculated in what they expected to gain from Mueller’s testimony. They should have taken him at his word and realized that he was not going to do their job for them in exposing our president.

Also, they would have been well served had they read former FBI director Andrew McCabe’s book: The Threat: How the FBI Protects American in the Age of Terror and Trump”.

McCabe’s book is an interesting insight into what it is like to become an FBI agent. He also touches on James Comey and some of his actions.

However, his description of Robert Mueller the man and how he quietly and meticulously operates fits our public image of him. The Democrats should have either avoided having him testify or zeroed in on any criminality of Trump’s and his campaign’s actions.

This was not a performance that would have changed any of the electorates’ hard positions.

The Democrats will not regain the presidency unless all their candidates, whether for state or national elections, essentially avoid attacking Trump and focus on how issues that his policies are hurting them locally. This would include health care, employment, infrastructure, education (and so much more) and how it relates to the voters locally.

bruce

7/26/2019 11:47:31 am

alan,

I always enjoy your posts and agree with this one.

however, I think you give too much credit for rational thought to the millions of 'folks' who are trump supporters.

the dems dun good in the off year elections, but el trumpo wasn't personally on the ballot.

I see he's telling Sweden to ignore its legal system in a cheap ploy to, he thinks, gain some black support.

I can imagine how americans/trump would respond if an ally told them to release a swede who'd been charged with what A$AP etc was charged with.

the american legal system be damned.

bruce

Ed Martin

7/27/2019 12:49:09 pm

On target as Usuall, GV, Alan, et.al.

Mueller’ report tells the story for thinking and reading, I might add, people. The people who voted in 2012, and did not in 2016, have been shown to have won for trump. (Polling data, in all the key states.)

Alan is correct, I believe, in emphasizing Dems need to concentrate e on what policies and programs are going to speak to the swing voters in Mid-west and PA, that had supported Obama initiatives, jobs, healthcare-not extreme, I might add.

It is a difficult in practice, because many who stayed home were also minorities and, in some instances, “progressives” who shot themselves and us in the foot. We know some Dems who actually had been Bernie supporters, who stayed home, not many, but enough? A few thousand votes in close states would have swung the election.

Two Mueller sound bites would make tv ads, one dealing with the Russians operating now and in 2020. The other answering, “No,” when asked by the Chair if he had exonerated trumpery.

Drill those messages home, short and not so sweet.

7/27/2019 12:52:30 pm

Please forgive typos, my fingers have a mind of their own these days.

George Vecsey

7/27/2019 05:33:35 pm

Edd: No prblm wit typg. My too. GV
Note to all: The amazing thing is that Gohmert (rabid owl) and Jordan (rabid raccoon) and the rest have no shame, none at all, for overlooking Mueller's message.
GV

bruce

7/27/2019 05:40:28 pm

george,

the amount of typos and words i omit regularly makes me shake my head.

my spelling, always top of my class, has deteriorated.

as for the two buffoons you mentioned......you're absolutely right, but they were only the worst of bad republican seeds in that farce.

bruce

bruce

7/28/2019 11:30:41 am

george,

...plus the fat from a zillion Big Macs...

thought i'd wait a bit before asking if the sellers of big macs have decided to sue you for denigrating their fine product?

that piece de garbage is an american icon.....

breakfast of champeens and the 260 pound pear shaped potus.

bruce

George Vecsey

7/29/2019 11:40:12 am

Bruce: If they were going to sue me, they would have done it in 2004 at the Olympics in Athens when the Media Center was catered by, you guessed it -- "salad" meaning a piece of lettuce and a section of tomato, in plastic. This in a country of fresh food (one of first things I learned in Greece was how to say "Roast chicken and Greek salad."
I complained...and I alluded to the crap we had to buy, or go hungry. Some young PR weasel from MickeyD came by, and I told him to go away. Next time he wandered past our bureau in the Media Center, I had brought in takeaway for colleagues, from a South Asian street (Pakistani,Indian, etc.) nearby. I told him he couldn't have any. Imagine, that stuff being an icon of the USA. GV

bruce

7/29/2019 12:08:41 pm

george,

I forgot to mention I was in Greece during 2004 american election.

woke up to find out, incredibly, that bush2 had been re-elected.

I was in state of shock that a man I thought didn't have the capacity to do the job would be re-elected after the judicial coup d'état of the 2000 election put him there..

little did I know how soon he'd look like a reasonable choice.

bruce

bruce

7/29/2019 12:02:47 pm

george,

nice story.

unfortunately, sir, you obviously are not a true patriot.

i suspected such with all those trips to france covering the tour de france and with the Olympics on top of that.....

passport filled with trips to foreign places--every single one of them filled with furriners.

i suspect you're beyond rehabilitation.

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
"Among the things that have long fascinated people about Jesus and explain his enduring appeal is his method of dialogue and teaching. "He asked a lot of questions and told a lot of stories in the form of parables. In fact, parables form about a third of Jesus’ recorded teachings. The Gospels were written decades after he died, so his questions and parables clearly left a deep impression on those who bore testimony to him....
"Some of Jesus’ questions were rhetorical; others were meant to challenge or even provoke. In some cases, Jesus used questions to parry attacks by religious authorities who set traps for him. In others, he used questions to enter more fully into the lives of others and to help people look at the state of their hearts. He asked people about their fears and their faith. Jesus used questions to free a woman caught in adultery from condemnation and to inquire whether people considered him to be the Messiah. He probed deeply into questions not many had asked before him, like “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
---(Peter Wehner, long-time White House consultant and writer, in the NYT last week about Jesus Christ’s method of teaching by asking questions.)

"Would that I could mention all the illuminating details in this biography, for example, why Wells praised Black Americans so highly, saying, 'I took a mighty liking to these gentle, human, dark-skinned people,' and 'Whatever America has to show in heroic living today, I doubt if she can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast efforts hundreds of black and colored men are making today to live blamelessly, honorably and patiently, getting by themselves what scraps of refinement, beauty and learning they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.''
-- "How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century," Charles Johnson, NYT Book Review, Nov. 19, 2021. ***".

...the monsters arrive."
"They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.
"Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry."

---The great Margaret Renkl, from Nashville, one of my favorite NYT bylines, Oct. 26, 2021.
(She describes our Long Island enclave to every decibel, every stink.)
lwww.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html
---

Robert Mueller Remains an American Hero

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