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
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Robert Mueller Remains an American Hero

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