This must be the strangest article I’ve ever posted. Not what usually appeals but, like watching ice cream melt down a hand, and then an arm, and onto a shoe, it was compelling and finally I decided I loved it.
Michael Cohen fired his shots, but there was no magic bullet to end our national nightmare
By Matt Welch
Holster the toy cannons, people. Cancel those refresher courses on the 25th Amendment.
For all the fireworks, grubby details and rageaholic outbursts at Michael Cohen’s Capitol Hill public testimony Wednesday, it took just 11 short words from the felonious fixer’s opening statement to ensure that our long national nightmare will not, in fact, soon end: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress.”
So concludes last month’s momentarily tantalizing notion — originally reported by BuzzFeed, unprecedentedly disputed by the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — that President Trump “personally instructed” his thuggish capo to perjure himself. Some in Mueller’s carol-singing fan club had convinced themselves that his legalistic rebuttal of the story still left plenty of room for Cohen to deliver a knockout blow if he was ever allowed to testify in public.
...
The logic of extreme polarization militates against self-reflection. After all, there’s always a new social media ruckus, foiled North Korea peace pact or Trump tweetstorm to scream at each other about.
That’s too bad. Because the elites of both parties, and of the politically adjacent professions (including — yes — journalism), actively helped create the unhappy conditions that made fit-throwing look like an attractive option to millions of voters, and not just those who chose Trump.
A magic bullet is extremely unlikely to take out either Trump or Mueller. Even if it could, the maladies that made them antagonists would still be with us. We’ve got a whole lot of work to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toSyoZkaNoo
Jim Jordan takes him apart pretty well,
but Painful to watch cohen.
About 7 minutes.