I was wondering whether Trump getting Session’s resignation refuted my previous claim that Trump was deliberately playing up conflict with his Attorney General so liberal media would rally behind the Attorney-General that ends up prosecuting somebody. It was certainly strong evidence that I was wrong as the Democrats didn’t seem to make much of a fuss after having claimed any move to replace Sessions would be obstruction of the Mueller inquiry and a constitutional crisis.
Despite Trump’s best efforts the Democrats did not carry on much about Russia during the mid-terms and seemed resigned to the fact that the Mueller inquiry doesn’t look like delivering them from Trump.
But now it looks like they are falling for it AGAIN:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-22/donald-trump-jeff-sessions-mathew-whitaker/10517430
Scheduling acting appointments during vacations to avoid obstruction in the Senate is a long established practice. Obama needed it a lot because of a hostile Senate. If there was to be any replacement of the Attorney-General it was certain to be during the vacation after the midterms as even some GOP Senators had indicated they would hold up confirmation of any replacement. But I didn’t think there would actually be a replacement.
Now it turns out that Democrats have found a way to help Trump’s effortless maneuvers to get them to keep digging that hole.
There are over a 160 instances where a vacation appointment has promoted a replacement who has never been confirmed by the Senate for any office at all. So three Senators are asking the Supreme Court (which no longer has a liberal majority) to declare the latest such appointment unconstitutional.
If they succeed, they will have driven home the message that Jeff Sessions should be treated as trustworthy. That could be embarassing if he gets reappointed to fill the vacancy.
But there is little danger of them succeeding. The point is simply to make a fuss and carry on about the vital need to protect the Mueller inquiry thus further embarassing themselves when it winds up without saving them from Trump. Looks like they are committed to keeping the Trump obstructing justice “Russia thing” in the news just as Trump keeps begging them to. What I didn’t guess was that the way to ensure they kept digging that hole would be to follow up months of threatening to sack Jeff Sessions with actually doing it after merely repeating the threat had worn thin.
Wait there’s more…!
“The Independent” now has a name for the genre. It’s “curatorial journalism” folks:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/22/trump-russia-too-complex-to-report-we-must-turn-curatorial-journalism
Not just yet another book on Trump, the story too conmplex to just report or investigate, but an entire new genre that will tie disparate incomplete and occasionally erroneous twitterings into full blown theories about conspiracies that:
“…can be replicated for other complex conundrums, such as America’s ongoing healthcare crisis; the scourge of gun violence oppressing our elementary, middle and high school students; and the slough of increasingly dire global climate changes that will, in short order if not already, be irreversible.”
First installment:
“Proof of Collusion, my just-released book on the Trump-Russia investigation, is a work of curatorial journalism that began with an attempt to master the timeline of the Trump-Russia case, continued on Twitter to a daily curation of relevant news sources the world over, and culminated in the development of a “theory of the case” that relies entirely on well-sourced facts and evidence rather than my own opinions or speculation.
That theory holds that years before the announcement of Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Kremlin, anticipating the New York City businessman’s political future, successfully bribed him into adopting a foreign policy distinctly beneficial to Russia and harmful to America. Once in-campaign, this money-for-policy quid pro quo led to a series of collusive meetings and agreements that both aided and abetted Russian cyberwarfare against the United States and illegally solicited monetary and in-kind donations (including stolen digital materials) from both Kremlin agents and Russian cutouts.”
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