Feeling Odd About Feeling This Good

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

20 July 18

am having a beautiful summer and I don’t know why — after all, I am a liberal Democrat obliged to be concerned about the oppressed, the underpaid, the critical shortage of honeybees, greenhouse gases, plastic waste on the ocean floor, meanwhile right-wingers in giant pickups with Confederate decals on the bumper and rifles in a gun rack in the cab go merrily along without a twinge of guilt, and now apparently so do I.

I read the newspapers, and there was our man in London hobnobbing with the queen at Windsor Castle and exulting in it — “We had a great feeling. I liked her a lot. She is an incredible woman, she is so sharp, she is so beautiful, inside and out.” — which echoed what he’d said about U.K. manufacturing: “They have product that we like. I mean they have a lot of great product. They make phenomenal things, you know, and you have different names — you can say ‘England,’ you can say ‘U.K.,’ you can say ‘United Kingdom’ … the fact is you make great product, you make great things.” And they have a great queen and she and he had a wonderful tea together and the tea was tremendous and so were the scones, inside and out.

That’s how I feel this summer, very happy, though I’m a Democrat and know I should be troubled.

One reason for my cheerfulness is that I’ve stayed indoors except for walking to and from the car. I’ve preferred the indoors since I was a child but was shamed into taking long hikes in the woods because, as devout Christians, we should look upon nature as God’s handiwork, the trees, the birds, the firmament, the whole thing, but now that I’m 75 I just do as I wish. Indoors is where the coffeemaker is and my laptop computer. It’s where one finds a nice clean toilet rather than a public restroom that looks like Paleolithic people have been using it to eviscerate their goats.

A second reason is that I’m in the midst of writing a book. Work is a necessity of life. Retirement can be fatal.

Another reason for my cheery demeanor is that my wife is the critic in the family; she has better taste and discernment, she talks out loud to other drivers on the road (“If you’re going to turn, turn, bozo.”), she casts a critical eye on architecture (“That’s not a church, that’s a warehouse”) and the clothing of passersby (“Look at that man and promise me you’ll never wear a bright orange shirt with a blue tie and white polyester slacks”), and she is absolutely right on the mark. This leaves me free to coast along in easygoing contentment.

This weekend we were in Greenville, S.C., where I enjoyed phenomenal shrimp and grits, great iced tea, incredible company, and a beautiful hotel, beautiful inside and out. We attended a birthday party. There were other people in attendance who may not have been liberal Democrats, just as in any large group you may find people who don’t love grand opera or haven’t read Proust, but in my current live-and-let-live mood, I didn’t bring up the subject. And at the end of the day, my wife and I saw an ice cream stand and walked up and stood in line at the counter. An enormous pickup truck went by, tailpipes roaring, bumper stickers proclaiming the driver’s loyalty to the Confederacy. Fine by me. The war ended a hundred and fifty years ago, but if it’s that important to you, bless your heart. We ordered our ice cream, vanilla and Moroccan mint for her, caramel with hazelnuts for me.

It was only ice cream, but it took my mind off whatever may be happening between Putin and our man in Helsinki, whether Putin has our man’s credit cards and car keys, or just his Twitter password — that ice cream gave me a good feeling. The product was phenomenal, so good I thought maybe the cows were English or British or from the U.K. or all three.

I ate my ice cream slowly. Scripture says, “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God,” which is an extremely high standard of behavior, but I did my best. My wife sat next to me, her thigh against mine. I thank Him for her, for the firmament, and also for caramel ice cream. If it be His will, I intend to have a hot fudge sundae tomorrow.

Donald Trump Doesn't Give a Damn About the Legitimacy of His Presidency*

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

20 July 18

It's the spin du jour from the West Wing, but the idea doesn't hold up.

"We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists."

– Amos Lawrence, Boston philanthropist, 1854.

hings can change in a hurry; sometimes before you realize it, the world is new, with new terrors and new opportunities. Amos Lawrence saw that. He was speaking in regard to the kidnapping of Anthony Burns, a young black man who had fled to Boston after escaping slavery in his native Virginia. Under the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law, Burns was captured by his former owner and, eventually, having lost in court, sent back to Virginia, but not before Boston had exploded in rioting, and not before 50,000 people lined the streets to support Burns as he was marched back into bondage.

I thought a lot about Anthony Burns on Wednesday when I considered the situation of Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia whose return to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin the current president* of the United States actually is considering seriously, instead of spitting in Putin’s eye, which is the proper response from any American president. If they come for McFaul, I think something in the country’s psyche explodes.

(It is Putin’s contention that McFaul is somehow tied up in the phony scandal involving Bill Browder and the late Sergei Magnitsky, the accountant who was beaten to death in a Moscow prison cell, and for whom a sanctions bill was named. In other words, the president* is considering rendering a former ambassador to a KGB thugocrat to be interrogated concerning a case in which somebody already has been murdered.)

In Helsinki, the president* called this a good deal. On Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the loathsome public face of a loathsome administration*, responded to a question about this preposterously treasonable proposal by saying: “He said it was an interesting idea. He didn’t commit to anything. He wants to work with his team and determine if there’s any validity that would be helpful to the process…It was an idea they threw out.”

It’s not an “interesting idea.” It’s not an “incredible offer.” It’s not something that needs consideration. It’s nothing about which you have to work with your team. It’s an invitation to an act of insanity. It’s a proposal that commits the president* to a monumental international act of malfeasance in office, an act that’s worthy not only of impeachment and removal, but of sandblasting his name out of American history forever. You don’t need to talk this one over. You tell Putin to pound sand and tell him to go back to managing a collapsing kleptocracy with a GPA smaller than that of California.

All right, so that took up most of the afternoon. Then, in the evening, The New York Times took a 40-pound dunghammer to everything the president* has said on the subject of Russian ratfcking since election night in November of 2016 and left nothing but rubble behind.

Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

Every time he’s denied it has been a lie. Every time he said he didn’t know what happened has been a lie. Every time he said he wasn’t sure who did it has been a lie. He took the oath of office knowing precisely how the Russians came to help his campaign and on whose orders they did so. The entire political and intellectual infrastructure of this administration* has been a farce. Everything this administration* has done—from swearing itself in to taking the country to Helsinki in a handbasket last week—is rendered utterly illegitimate. This is now an outlaw regime for all to see. And this is the guy who is chatting over with his “team” whether or not to send Mike McFaul off to Lubyanka? This guy should be on the sidewalk in front of the Willard right now, his belongings piled in boxes around him. More from the Times.

In the run-up to this week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political system. His fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful Russian attempt to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his presidency.

I don’t know if I buy this entirely, although it seems to be the spin du jour from the anonymous voices inside the West Wing. I don’t think the president* gives a damn about the legitimacy of his presidency. I don’t think he’s given it a second thought. I certainly don’t think he’s afraid of it. He’s grabbing all he can for as long as he can and the Constitution be damned.

He might care about the legitimacy of his victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton. I could believe that—Winning!—but, even if I did, I can’t see that as motive enough to sell out to Putin and Russia as obviously as he has. No, there’s still something in Putin’s whip hand that the president* fears. As always, I think it’s something to do with the Russian money that’s kept his empire afloat, and his reputation as a shrewd businessman from going completely to tatters.

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

...

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role. That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.

These revelations cast a dark shadow over subsequent events that, at the time, seemed to be unrelated. Nineteen days after the president*-elect got this briefing, the top Russian cybercrimes expert was arrested and charged with treason. From the NYT:

Mr. Mikhailov served in the F.S.B.’s Center for Information Security, the agency’s cyberintelligence branch, which has been implicated in the American election hacking. But it is not clear whether the arrest was related to those intrusions.

He was detained along with one of Russia’s leading private-sector cybersecurity experts, Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of computer incident response investigations at the Kaspersky Lab, which makes antivirus programs.

Was Mikhailov Brennan’s “particularly valuable source”? And, if he was, who blew his cover? And why? Deeper down in this particular rabbit hole, it’s important also to remember now that, within nine months of the president*’s inauguration, and also within nine months of the intelligence briefing that preceded it, nine prominent Russians died in various ways. In addition, in March of 2017, Sergei Magnitsky’s lawyer nearly died after falling from his fourth-floor balcony. Meanwhile, the president* reacquainted himself with his former host for the Miss Universe pageant and demonstrated that you can make this president* believe almost anything.

In July 2017, just after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time, Mr. Trump told a New York Times reporter that the Russian president had made a persuasive case that Moscow’s cyberskills were so good that the government’s hackers would never have been caught. Therefore, Mr. Trump recounted from his conversation with Mr. Putin, Russia must not have been responsible.

He knew. He’s always known. He’s been lying about what he knows since before he began blathering about American carnage on the steps of the Capitol. His lies have become more desperate and more complicated as the baying of the hounds gets closer. Things are moving beneath other things right now. The system, that great indolent beast, now has one eye open and is stirring out of the deep trance that it’s been in for almost two years. The world is becoming new again. We're all stark mad Amos Lawrences now, forced by events to grapple with the unthinkable. They come for McFaul, they come for us all.