This one is way overdue, but the whole damn process is still dragging on loudly and obnoxiously, so why not?
There has been a suffocating amount of time and energy put into writing and articulating the various developments, reactions, and implications surrounding the Mueller investigation, but as always I'd just like to try to get my arms as far around the thing as I can at the moment.
The behaviors of the whole professional political and media establishments have been curious to follow and think about. Such as say, the white-knuckled relationship everyone has with words and their intended effects.
It's like when you learn how to mix a little water and vinegar together and soon enough you're spraying water and vinegar on every possible surface to clean everything, which probably does work most of the time.
But now they're just throwing a couple of choice words in a spraybottle and then spraying their mixture over every surface they can reach, in the hopes of those words doing their usual expected jobs. Which in the near past probably worked most of the time.
So you have the administration saying, "welp, exonerated then, all and good," and you have the investigators saying "no no there are problems here," and then you have everyone in between echoing and arguing over these respective claims.
And you have all sorts of individuals in the administration engaging in all sorts of corrupt and criminal activities - that is if you want those terms to have any meaning - without completely taking over and going full dictator, and then their supposed "check and balance" opposition just sort of letting everything happen while they engage in symbolic acts of concern and inquiry of their own.
You can almost see the investigators just doubled over with their magnifying glasses, searching the bare earth for clues where there is nothing really happening, deliberately restricting their searches to some contrived and constricted malfeasance, petrified to actually look up and face what is right in front of them. Why doesn't someone just do something?
Well, there is probably a good answer to that one. It is probably that a good portion of the elites know in their hearts that the edifice is rotten.
Elites know the edifice is rotten. They've heard the creaks, they've heard those stomach-turning cracks in the major foundational supports. Perhaps they sense that it is all ready to come down, and that it should be somebody else to make the wrong move.
After all, calling someone guilty of corruption and then actually acting on it when you and all of your peers are guilty of the same thing is kinda like playing with fire, except with dried old trees doing the playing. If you're a jerky little kid who accidentally starts the fire, you at least have the opportunity to make a run for it. If you're a tree and you're ready to go up in flames and you can't make a run for it, well.
And there appears to be so much precarity in the hotseat. The ends that Republicans are going to in order to stay in power, and the ends that Democrats are going to in order to get into power again, yikes. Whatever side comes into power will have to hold it with a deathgrip against the other side coming up against it, and so on oscillating until the process is exhausted, or at least until something really gives.
