THE MUELLER REALITY, AS ACKNLOWLEDGED BY TWO HONEST TRUMP-HATERS

Matt Taibbi is a solidly leftist, solidly Trump-hating writer.

This is how he starts yesterday’s lengthy commentary on the mueller report:

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

Allow me to rewrite that in my own words:

A lot of people don’t need to hear this because they already know, but the news that Special Prosecuter robert mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is another confirmation that American news media have destroyed their own reputation.

Mr. Taibbi then goes on to detail what a bitter pill this is for venues like the New York Times to swallow (with its “damning page one admission” that, after two years of salivating at the thought of Trump being nailed by mueller, there’s no there there).  And – just one more excerpt for you – he continues by saying:

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic error by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…

Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

Exactly right.

As noted earlier, Matt Taibbi has written a very lengthy commentary.  I urge you to use the link I’ve provided and read it all – always keeping in mind that Mr. Taibbi is a Trump hater of the first order.

The importance of this piece, apart from the fact that it makes loads of sense, is that it offers something that has, for the most part, been notably, disgracefully, absent for the past two years;  journalistic integrity.

The same can be said about equally leftward, equally Trump-hating Glenn Greenwald.  Here is what Mr. Greenwald said on the Laura Ingraham show last Monday – before the mueller report came out:

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS: Is reality finally sinking in for the Democrats or some of these new polls about Mueller are really what they’re thinking about?

GLENN GREENWALD, THE INTERCEPT: We actually saw this during the 2018 midterm where the victorious Democratic candidates, knowing the local districts really well, almost never mentioned what the Democratic National Committee and MSNBC, excuse the redundancy, have spent the last two and a half years obsessing on to the exclusion of virtually everything else, which is not just the claim that Trump colluded with Russia, but that Russia actually controls Donald Trump in some sort of, you know, Tom Clancy type of espionage way as a result of blackmail or other kinds of leverage. 

That disappeared from the winning campaigns of 2018 because they know that people don’t wake up in the morning worried about Putin. And the 2020 candidates now see that the wheels are falling off the cart of the Mueller investigation and barely mentioned it at all in recognition of that fact.

And here is what Greenwald said about Nancy Pelosi’s ludicrous, obviously bogus claim that she is not interested in impeaching Mr. Trump:

GREENWALD: Just please think about how stupid that is, what [Pelosi] just said. The overriding theme of the Democrats for a two and a half years, going back to the 2016 election, as I said earlier, is that Donald Trump is blackmailed by or controlled by the Kremlin and forced to do things against the interest of his own country of the United States and in favor of this for an adversary. 

Now if that were true at all, if Robert Mueller had any evidence of that and hasn’t shown it to us he would almost be guilty of treason. If Nancy Pelosi really believes that Donald Trump is serving the interest of Russia and decides, oh, we’re going to take our time in removing him from control over the nuclear arsenal and the executive branch and the military, until we feel like we are ready to do it. You would wonder, does Putin have something on Pelosi too. Why would you leave in place somebody controlled by the Kremlin for two years if you really believed it, if you really have that evidence for it? And of course they have none and they don’t have the integrity to just admit that.

When people who despise President Trump as much as Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald say things like this, it is more than clear that mueller’s findings are pretty definitive/there is no realistic way to tar President Trump with collusion or obstruction of justice.

But the fact that mueller tossed a little meaningless red meat to Trump-haters by saying he is not “exonerated” is going to be seized upon by Democrats because it is all they’ve got left – even though, in reality, it is nothing with nothing. (How is it possible to “exonerate” someone for something there is no evidence he did?  Isn’t that trying to prove a negative?)

If this is what hopeless hacks like Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler intend to spend the next two years obsessing on, they will look even more ridiculous than they already do – which is quite an accomplishment.

But, one factor in their favor, is that the same media whose credibility has been so completely decimated by their “reporting” on Trump, will probably help them along anyway.

Like Ahab chasing Moby Dick, they will chase some – any – vestige of possibility that Trump did something collusive or obstructive.  Something to justify their last two years. Somewhere.  Somehow.  Please, God, toss me a bone here.

It won’t be pretty.