Fear and loathing in the establishment state

Every now and then you read a piece which says what you already think but says it in a way that makes it strikingly clearer. Such is For Fear of William Barr by Kimberley A. Strassel.

There is a regrettable herd mentality in the mainstream media. They share a worldview at odds with most people and at odds with much of reality but, like a school of fish, they are adroit at moving as one. It is not always clear why they are pushing a story line. It is usually easier to see that they are pushing a story line than it is to see why they are pushing a story line.

Such has been the case this past week with all the storm-in-a-teacup around Attorney General Barr. It has been a Stein burger week in the news ("There is no there there" Gertrude Stein mashed with Wendy's "Where's the beef?"). It is clear that the Democrats and the mainstream media want you to believe that Barr has done something wrong but when you dig into their claims you quickly realize that it fits Gertrude Stein's description of Oakland ("There is no there there"). The mainstream media is pushing this so hard you think there must be something there, like the little old lady in Wendy's ad "Where's the beef?"

For all the bloviating, I see no evidence of any issue. All his actions appear to follow standard protocol and certainly all are well within the boundaries set by his predecessor Eric Holder.

So I have been passively following the uproar but have been putting it into the Stein burger category until something specific emerges rather than the slavering emoting that currently dominates.

As to why they are focusing on Barr, I had assumed that this was just a natural reaction to their disappointment in the Mueller report and they were simply progressing through the Kübler-Ross model stages of grief. They had spent a couple of weeks in the Denial phase and now they were progressing into the Anger phase.

Strassel shifts the focus a smidgeon and arrives at a different but consistent conclusion which I suspect is also correct.

These attacks aren’t about special counsel Robert Mueller, his report or even the surreal debate over Mr. Barr’s first letter describing the report. The attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light. What do Democrats have to object to?

Some of this is frustration. Democrats foolishly invested two years of political capital in the idea that Mr. Mueller would prove President Trump had colluded with Russia, and Mr. Mueller left them empty-handed. Some of it is personal. Democrats resent that Mr. Barr won’t cower or apologize for doing his job. Some is bitterness that Mr. Barr is performing like a real attorney general, making the call against obstruction-of-justice charges rather than sitting back and letting Democrats have their fun with Mr. Mueller’s obstruction innuendo.

But most of it is likely fear. Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He said his review would be far-reaching—that he was obtaining details from congressional investigations, from the ongoing probe by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and even from Mr. Mueller’s work. Mr. Barr said the investigation wouldn’t focus only on the fall 2016 justifications for secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members but would go back months earlier.

He also said he’d focus on the infamous “dossier” concocted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and British former spy Christopher Steele, on which the FBI relied so heavily in its probe. Mr. Barr acknowledged his concern that the dossier itself could be Russian disinformation, a possibility he described as not “entirely speculative.” He also revealed that the department has “multiple criminal leak investigations under way” into the disclosure of classified details about the Trump-Russia investigation.

Do not underestimate how many powerful people in Washington have something to lose from Mr. Barr’s probe. Among them: Former and current leaders of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities. The Democratic Party pooh-bahs who paid a foreign national (Mr. Steele) to collect information from Russians and deliver it to the FBI. The government officials who misused their positions to target a presidential campaign. The leakers. The media. More than reputations are at risk. Revelations could lead to lawsuits, formal disciplinary actions, lost jobs, even criminal prosecution.

The attacks on Mr. Barr are first and foremost an effort to force him out, to prevent this information from coming to light until Democrats can retake the White House in 2020. As a fallback, the coordinated campaign works as a pre-emptive smear, diminishing the credibility of his ultimate findings by priming the public to view him as a partisan.

Indeed. I suspect that the next year will lead to some unpleasant revelations about the behavior and actions of individuals and loose coalitions of small cadres across the establishment political parties and the federal government. Actions and behaviors which will be seen as illegal, immoral, unethical, and destructive of our institutions. We need to clean the closet and reestablish some acceptable norms in order to sustain our noble and successful experiment in representative classical liberal democracy.

Another Great Revealing is coming and I think the establishment is indeed mortified.