A world so safe we need hyperbole

I see it all the time on NextDoor and other social media, hear it with some frequency in real life. An exaggerated verbal hyperbole. OMG about the most ordinary of events. "I was terrified" to describe a barely disconcerting event. "I couldn't believe it" for something just barely outside the routine. Its as if life is so safe and stable, people need to exaggerate in order to make it more piquant. To give it some zest.

Whether the mainstream media has created this epistemic noise or is merely reflecting it, I don't know. But my goodness, they should know better.

This morning's example is the headline: In Terrifying Interview, William Barr Goes Full MAGA by Jonathan Chait. Journalists don't write their headlines, but it is easy to see where the editor derived his or her pants-wetting incontinence.

After the legal Establishment had granted him the benefit of the doubt, Attorney General William Barr has shocked his erstwhile supporters with his aggressive and frequently dishonest interventions on behalf of President Trump. The spectacle of an esteemed lawyer abetting his would-be strongman boss’s every authoritarian instinct has left Barr’s critics grasping for explanations. Some have seized on the darker threads of his history in the Reagan and Bush administrations, when he misled the public about a secret Department of Justice memo and helped cover up the Iran-Contra scandal.

But Barr’s long, detailed interview with Jan Crawford suggests the rot goes much deeper than a simple mania for untrammeled Executive power. Barr has drunk deep from the Fox News worldview of Trumpian paranoia.

It is hard to convey how far over the edge Barr has gone without reading the entire interview, which lasted an hour. But a few key comments illustrate the depth of his investment in Trump’s perspective.

Barr, as he has done repeatedly, provides a deeply misleading account of what Robert Mueller found. “He did not reach a conclusion,” he says. “He provided both sides of the issue, and … his conclusion was he wasn’t exonerating the president, but he wasn’t finding a crime either.”

Long detailed interview? It was an hour interview. It is a fifteen minute read in transcript format. I read it yesterday. Why the effort to make it seem more substantive than it is?

My response having read it was, "at last, an adult in the room." The interviewer clearly had not just a script but an agenda. She wanted him to reach her conclusions. When he presented his argument for why there were more valid interpretations of the facts than that which she had made, she became testy. I watched ten minutes of the video of the interview to match the transcript to language and body language. Barr was deliberate and direct and treating the interviewer as if she were doing a good faith interview. It seemed she was exasperated that he was not accepting her version of assumed reality.

And Chait? The man is capable of writing interesting and insightful material. But in this piece he seems in a real and fretful panic for reasons which are unclear if you are focusing on the actual interview.

What would constitute terrifying? Threats to jail journalists and congressmen? Using the apparatus of state to spy on free citizens. Ignoring the law?

None of that is in the interview. Barr lays out his view of the facts, his interpretation. There is way more than enough evidence in the public domain at this point to suggest that there were an extraordinary number of deviances from protocol and norms in 2016/17 in order to facilitate the party in power at the time to sideline the challenging party. While it was a large number of people, I very much doubt it was a conspiracy beyond a shared world view and an increasingly desperate fear of exposure.

Chait makes no real argument to support his contention that Barr's interview was terrifying. He merely reiterates a worldview which Barr rejects. He offers no new information to support his hypothesis but the Achille's heel is the amount of public record evidence which he simply ignores.

Chait continues to believe Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. Barr's interview is terrifying only in the sense that Barr does not share that view.

The astonishing thing to me is that we are two and half years into this administration and the press have produced no evidence of their own to support their contention that there was collusion. They appear to have done no independent investigation. Either they outsourced this to Mueller and are now astonished to find that Mueller did not find what they assumed to exist or they have researched the collusion themselves and have not found anything. Or both. They are trying fan flames into embers which were long ago exhausted.

I am further surprised that this weak Russian Collusion hypothesis is the hill upon which the mainstream media is willing to die. I have always assumed that if anyone was going to find anything in the nature of legal wrong-doing, it would be in Trump's past dealings in real estate in New York. Neither NYC governance nor real estate development are arenas of moral probity.

Trump has been in the mainstream media public eye for decades. If there is any dirt to find, surely they would know where to look.

The only interesting element of Chait's article is what his concluding paragraph's reveal.

The most frighteningly clarifying comment comes at the end, when Barr lays out his belief that President Trump poses no threat whatsoever to democratic norms. The threat is the “resistance”:

I think one of the ironies today is that people are saying that it’s President Trump that’s shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven’t seen … particulars as to how that’s being done. From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and, you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.

In fact, the opposition to Trump has been marked, on the whole, by its fastidious restraint. At times Barr has used their restraint against them. Because Mueller believed his role prevents him from labeling Trump’s actions crimes, Barr says Mueller couldn’t decide if they were criminal or not. He says the relatively mild steps taken to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia during the campaign prove the concerns couldn’t have been serious. (“I’m wondering what exactly was the response to it if they were alarmed,” he sneers to Crawford. “Surely the response should have been more than just, you know, dangling a confidential informant in front of a peripheral player in the Trump campaign.”) If the FBI was investigating Trump, it proves they were out to get him, but if they tread lightly, it proves Trump was innocent.

As far as Barr is concerned, Trump has done nothing wrong, and all the shredding of norms has been done against him, not by him. Trump’s calls to jail all his opponents, his non-stop lies, his demands to punish independent media and satirists, his open conviction that law enforcement should operate at his personal command and follow him loyally, not to mention the repeated obstruction of justice detailed by Mueller — none of it concerns Barr even slightly.

Everything Barr has said and done during this investigation tells us he is not lying about this belief. The terrifying truth is that he all but surely believes every word.

I agree with Barr. For all the claims, there is nothing I am aware Trump has done which has not been routinely done before by earlier presidents. Including Presidents who were Democrats. There is nothing in Trump's policies which have not been pursued in the past or even been past law. Sometimes in the very recent past and sometimes in the Democratic Party platform itself.

But use of foreign agents by a major party to create a disavowed report of tissue-thin accusations with no verity and then using that manufactured and unverified document to spy on the political campaign of the other major party? The vowing to impeach a new president even before he has assumed office? A past Secretary of State working with the nation's enemies to counter US negotiations? Efforts to remake the constitutional structure of our republic in order to make it easier for one party to win? Rejecting the findings of a two year long investigation led by Democrat's own chosen investigator and staffed by Democrats? The mainstream media now advocating strongly for there not to be investigations or declassification of relevant documents? All these seem to me to have little precedent.

And look at Chait's itemized indictment of what Trump has done wrong:

Trump’s calls to jail all his opponents, his non-stop lies, his demands to punish independent media and satirists, his open conviction that law enforcement should operate at his personal command and follow him loyally, not to mention the repeated obstruction of justice detailed by Mueller

Part of this is simply Chait mouth-breathing ideological spittle. The rest, though, are examples of Trump's long known predilection towards hyperbole. He is, after all, a salesman.

As Salena Zito originally observed back during the campaign to explain Trump's success with the public and failure with the Mandarin Class, especially the members of the mainstream media Mandarin Class.

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Chait is not indicting Trump for anything he has done. Chait is indicting him for hyperbole. A hyperbolist accusing a hyperbolist of hyperbole.

But in the whole fevered article, this is the sentence of such astounding delusion that it sorts of stuns.

In fact, the opposition to Trump has been marked, on the whole, by its fastidious restraint.

So is Chait, and by extension the mainstream media, just following a national trend of hyperbole, or are they setting the tone? No idea.

Most of what is in Chait's article is not reporting but opinion. Fair enough. That might be all the MSM can afford these days. But it has more than a whiff of fear about what revelations might be coming down the line. It is not clear to me which fear is greater. 1) Fear of revelations of government malfeasance and mainstream media complicity or 2) Fear that all the things which the mainstream media had wished to be true simply aren't true. Would it be hyperbole to claim that that would be . . . shattering?