I don’t get old school Republicans – they somehow think that they can enjoy a tour exercising power as a Republican and then harken to the comfort of the (failing) institutions by dumping on us cons in the media, thinking that somehow they will be accepted back into the boring Borg collective that is our garbage elite. It’s like Charlie Brown landing on his back after the football gets pulled away yet again and then asking Lucy to come and kick him.
Bill Barr, the all-talk/no action attorney general who has to go on the long list of possible nominees for “Worst Trump Personnel Pick,” just gave a tell-all interview to some liberal media outfit – by which I mean a media outlet that is not expressly conservative – and the results are exactly what you would think.
He kept up the grumpy truthteller act, posing as a lonely fighter swimming in a sea of duplicity, and spun a tale about how he was the only thing that kept Trump from…what? Fighting the manifest injustices associated with the 2020 election?
Yeah, there were some nuts involved in the election aftermath, charlatans who did grave damage to the attempt by real lawyers to try and address the myriad formal and informal wrongs that occurred, but Barr’s pose as THE LAST HONEST PUBLIC SERVANT is a bit much to bear. When did he ever right a wrong? What did he fix at a DoJ he left more corrupt than ever? Durham has done nothing. Comey, that looming doofus, is wandering about unindicted after all his activities, but hey, the DoJ is leading a manhunt against grandma’s clicking selfies in the Rotunda.
The establishment has a problem defending itself by citing its achievements and accomplishments, of which it literally has none in decades, so it can hardly push back on elite apostates like Barr who go work for those horrible Republicans like Donald Trump or whoever else is in office at the moment by selling itself.
Instead, more and more, it relies on informal discipline to keep the elite ranks in order – “If you dare work for one of those awful GOP literal Hitlers, we will kick you out of polite society!” And usually, these timeservers want back in the club – sometimes literally the country club – and their course of action is as lame as it is predictable. They turn on the conservatives and start sucking up. Instead of dancin’ with the one who brung them, they go find the one who brung them’s chubby friend and go make out under the bleachers.
John Roberts did it by ruling in ways that won’t get him shunned by his fellow swells, or at least that’s what he hopes. Others, like Barr, seek to repair their reputations – by which I mean beg for reentry into polite society – by trashing those who trusted them. In this way, they hope to avoid the dirty looks and social awkwardness that comes with having collaborated with their class’s enemies.
It never works. You can never suck up to them enough to make them not hate you.
The Mitts of the world try to cloak themselves in the mantle of public service when they serve us up to the people who hate us, but the people who hate us also hate them. Barr gives an interview in which he is the hero who resisted the Bad Orange Man and what was the reaction?
It was not what he likely hoped for.
Some blue check named Elie Honig, a “CNN Senior Legal Analyst,” as if that is a real thing, tweeted, “I don’t curse on Twitter but it’s necessary here: Bill Barr’s effort to launder his image is straight b*******. Truth is, Barr was one of the most influential peddlers of the big lie. An exclusive excerpt from my book, to set the record straight.”
I’m guessing your book will do at least as well as that of your network-mate Brian Stelter, who is a potato, Elie. Of course, it’s hard to imagine one doing worse (my latest, Crisis, got to #29 on Amazon – just saying).
The oft-married, infrequently read, assistant deputy adjunct conservative cruise director Charlie Sykes sent this tweet: “Recognizing that the Jenna Ellis/Rudy Giuliani/My Pillow Guy conspiracy theories were a s*** show in a clown car was the bare minimum level of responsibility we should expect from an attorney general.”
What is it with these people and feces, though I guess that’s kind of your wheelhouse when you work for CNN or The Bulwark.
And Joy Reid took time away from not being watched on her MSNBC show to tweet: “Anyone else rolling their eyes at William Barr’s attempt at laundering his reputation after turning the DOJ into Trump’s personal law firm and enemies persecution laboratory? [Eyeroll emoji] If so, post your favorite eye rolls in the replies.” I think she’s just mad that Barr failed to get the FBI to do its job, in her case, to investigate who those insurrectionists were who planted all that bigoted stuff on her accounts. We feel your pain, Joy.
There’s more, of course, a lot more. Barr should lose his law license, he should go to jail, he should be drawn and quartered and the pieces sent to the far corners of the land to be displayed as a warning to those who would betray their caste.
You can’t come back from being complicit, as in complicit in opposing the garbage elite. You can never suck up enough. So why the hell do these saps keep trying?
