It’s such an embarrassment of riches it’s hard to know where to start.
I could lead with the comatose delivery of Mueller. I mean, the guy looked like he was on multiple quaaludes. Or maybe I will start with the fiery cross examination of Mueller by Republicans that showed up the entire investigation as a sham and Mueller as a man who consistently used a double standard during the whole investigation. In that vein, I thought Gohmert or Jordan were going to reach across the room and throttle the guy. Perhaps I can begin with the whining of the leftist media that their previous savior had turned into a shitehawk in the space of less than eight hours.
But all those take a back seat to the biggest and most spiritually pleasing story of the day. And that is what a total Comet Kohoutek-like bust the Dems strategy of hyping the testimony and report turned out to be. They have been left with a dog that not only won’t hunt, but a dog that has been flattened and then vivisected by Republican House members.
Even hard leftist legal scribe Laurence Tribe called the hearing a “disaster” for the Dems. He went on to say “tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it [the report]” and that the impeachment push has been “set back.” ABC’s Terry Moran agreed, saying “impeachment’s over” because it would “lose with the American people.” MSNBC joined in the self-loathing fun.
Should we stop gloating yet? Nahhhhh…
On top of giving the Dems not a thing they wanted —and he should get credit for that— Mueller had to in the afternoon walk back a statement he made in the morning regarding whether the president could be prosecuted. A Dem House member tried to get him to say that the only reason he couldn’t indict Trump was because the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel said you can’t indict a sitting president. Mueller in the morning seemed to endorse that, it turns out inadvertently. In the afternoon he “clarified” his words, robbing the Dems of even that small morsel of dignity.
Hollywood is, of course, losing their collective minds. Which isn’t much to lose in the first place. Various starlets and has-beens are keening their sorrow and frustration at yesterday’s outcome and promising the end of the republic is nigh. For them as well, Mueller has gone from Prince Charming to the Duke of Disappoinment.
Though really, this wasn’t that hard to predict. We here did it in this column on Monday. How? One, because Mueller said he was going to be boring and stick to his report and, two, the Dems hit the Sunday airwaves with such overkill that it looked like they were pre-compensating for a bad performance by Mueller. Sadly for them it was perceived more like hype and now they are paying for the discrepancy between that overwrought promotional campaign and the deadpan reality.
You’d think this would be the end of the hoax, as it is now an obvious loser for the perps. But no, the Dems will ineffectually try to spin this in their favor and the press will help them. Schiff is already making the pathetic effort to do so.
However, he can’t change what everybody saw on television yesterday or the depressed and frustrated words of his own defeated allies. We’ll be chortling about those for some time to come.
