The deep blob

I reckon that editors at our former paper of record have been thinking wistfully of the Mikado’s song, in particular this bit about the fate of the billiard sharp who’s ‘made to dwell/ In a dungeon cell/ On a spot that’s always barred.’

And there he plays extravagant matches
In fitless finger-stalls
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls!’

Here The New York Times has spent the last three years running interference for the Democratic party, skirling hysterically against candidate Trump, then President Trump, and minimizing every evidence of wrongdoing by the Hillary-Fusion GPS-rogue intelligence and law enforcement contingent while simultaneously coming down like a ton of bricks against anyone associated with the President, from Michael Flynn on down.

And now we have Andrew McCabe, former Acting Director of the FBI, beginning his book tour with an interview on 60 Minutes in which he admits that he was at the center of a plot to unseat the President of the United States. The Times put it this way: ‘McCabe Says Justice Dept. Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’

There follows a few hundred words of brow-wrinkled prose about their ‘so alarmed,’ ‘dire concerns’ that the President had just fired their guy, FBI director James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey, that they got together and wondered how they could entice the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to collude (ooo, there’s that word!) to invoke the 25th Amendment and jettison a guy they didn’t approve of.

The Times story is cast in their best anodyne prose, carefully tilted to make it seem as if this was perfectly reasonable, business-as-usual stuff.

But it wasn’t reasonable, and it is business-as-usual only in a banana republic or a polity that is essentially ruled by hyper-bureaucratized administrative apparatus.

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Even for the Times that must have been a twisted cue.

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Think about it. On May 9. the President fires his employee, James Comey. Panic in Bureau. Scarcely a week later, the Big Boy Scout, Robert Mueller is appointed by Rod Rosenstein to be Special Counsel in charge of the Get Trump battalion. It’s a real flood the zone operation. Pre-dawn raids, full-press intimidation, careers ruined.

It’s been going on so long, and has involved so many nefarious characters in such high positions in the Obama administration and our intelligence and law enforcement services, that it is hard to keep the main fact, the overwhelming point of the episode in mind.

It is this: people in the FBI (aided and abetted by elements in the CIA and the Obama administration) decided that they didn’t like the person who had been elected President of the United States. Their anger and frustration boiled over when the President had the temerity to fire their man, James Comey. So they plotted to get rid of him.

The FBI didn’t like the President. so they plotted to remove him from office. That is the irreducible minimum, class, that you should take away from this whole sordid lesson. Top figures in the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not approve of the President. Therefore, they took steps to destroy him. Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General, several times offered to wear a wire to entrap the President.

The fact that this all took place in May 2017 has led many observers to compare the FBI’s actions to the movie Seven Days in May, which described a plot by the military to take over the government.

What we have here is nothing so melodramatic. There’s no Burt Lancaster or Kirk Douglas. And there is certainly no Ava Gardner. No, it’s all gray on gray. The oozing, engulfing, suffocating metastasis of the administrative state, a bureaucracy drunk on its own prerogatives, fired by a misplaced sense of election (‘higher loyalty,’ remember) conveniently indistinguishable from its own entitlement and quest for power.

The reality of this slow-motion, suit-and-tie style attempted coup is difficult to keep front and center of one’s attention partly because of the non-stop media collusion (that word again!), partly because the forms, but not the substance, of Constitutionally sanctioned activity are observed. Andrew McCabe, who lied to the FBI about important matters, is at the beginning of a big book tour. Michael Flynn, briefly President Trump’s National Security Adviser, set-up by the FBI and in short order found himself bankrupted by legal fees and out of a job. He may face jail time.

Meanwhile, Paul Manafort languishes in solitary confinement without billiard balls of any description. And the Mueller investigation grinds slowly on, playing out its fierce games on a cloth untrue. As I have said many times, this plot to destroy a presidency is the most serious political scandal in our history. If the media were not so corrupt and beholden to The Narrative, you’d know that and we’d have our own species of gilets jaunes crowding the streets. The blob-like activity of the administrative state smothers any opposition that is too vocal, too effective. But it is possible, just, that Andrew McCabe’s momentary burst of candor, together with the confirmation yesterday of a serious-minded Attorney General in William Barr, will rip the lid off this teeming, pus-ridden boil on the face of the republic.