Aug. 19 Open Thread: You Can’t Corner Someone in an Oval Office

The New York Times got Trump’s dander up yesterday with the story that White House counsel Don McGahn has spent something like 30 hours in interviews cooperating with to the Mueller probe. President Rage Muffin was still at it this morning, claiming Mueller’s probe “makes [Joseph] McCarthy look like a baby,” apparently unaware that it’s Trump who looks like a baby almost every day. At this point I think Republicans won’t impeach him because they want him to suffer.

It’s beginning to dawn on some media people that it’s journalistic malpractice for cable news shows to hire ex-Trump aides when they’re bound by a non-disclosure agreement that forbids them from saying anything critical of Trump. Of course, that presumes that what cable TV serves up is journalism in the first place.

It also presumes that the media, and TV in particular, are smart enough to not get played, when the truth is they get played over and over again. This election cycle they’re getting played by focusing on Democrats who say they won’t support Nancy Pelosi as speaker once they retake the House. As Paul Krugman noted last week, Pelosi is easily the most effective House speaker of at least the past 30 years, a fact that only institutional misogyny can satisfactorily explain.

Why are right-wing nut jobs obsessed with non-existent tyranny by federal troops while they ignore the tyrannical behavior of police forces? Because they know who’s on their side, obviously and they know when violence breaks out, the police can be counted upon to deliver a beat-down to the anti-fascists. Lately they’ve been harassing leftist protesters by arresting them and then dropping the charges, leaving the harassment to employers and right-wing trolls.