I can be slow at times but it's dawning on me why Rudy Giuliani is running around, saying things that don't make sense and which contradict what he said last week. It makes perfect sense if you figure he's playing to an audience of one.
It doesn't matter to this man if most people think he's a major weasel and a lawyer who doesn't know much about the law. All he cares about is if Donald Trump pats him on the head. Trump judges people by how fanatically they fight for him, not whether they succeed. I wonder what reward Rudy thinks he's going to reap but he's probably wrong. Chris Christie tried the same blind subservience and you saw where he is today. (By the way: Where is he today?)
I call your attention to two articles. The first is the best piece I've read about where we are after the Fast News Day we had yesterday. It's by Matt Yglesias and here's a key section…
…the Mueller investigation exists fundamentally not because Trump/Russia is the only thing worth investigating but because it happens to be the only thing that a handful of congressional Republicans wanted to see an investigation of. They've been comfortable sweeping everything else under the rug — Trump's shady business dealings, post-election financial conflicts of interest, and alleged sexual assaults.
A fluky confluence of circumstances elicited Cohen's confession, and now it's not clear what the system can or will do with the evidence he's provided. But what is abundantly clear is that the essentially uniform unwillingness of House and Senate Republicans to undertake any kind of meaningful oversight of the executive branch has left the country teetering in a state of perpetual crisis.
So that may be what the upcoming election will be about…do you want your representatives to tolerate and hide any crimes Trump and his mob may have committed? We're going to hear the word "accountability" a lot.
And then read this one by Matt Taibbi. It's not about Michael Cohen or Paul Manafort. It's about what's becoming the style of the Republican candidate and about Corey Stewart, Virginia's Republican candidate for the Senate. Key section…
If anyone were to try to articulate a political theory of Donald Trump, this might be it: lying-ism. It's not so much about policy — Stewart runs to both the left and right of traditional Republicans, depending on the issue — as it is about using aggression as an electoral strategy.
You turn everything into a fight, renouncing decorum as a trick of the establishment (Stewart actually promised to run a "vicious, ruthless" race). Then, court voters' secret resentments by relentlessly ripping your opponent as the Fucker Responsible for Everything, using accusations that are true, not true, doesn't matter, just make sure you never stop.
As I was reading Taibbi's piece, I came across a speech on CSPAN-2 — Celebrity Lawyer Michael Avenatti out in some rural community, giving a speech somewhere that sounded like a presidential campaign speech while all the time insisting he hasn't decided if he'll enter the race in 2020.
It also sounded like a Democratic version of the kind of speech Taibbi describes except that Avenatti's a Democrat and he's a lot more careful with the facts. But the selling point was not his policies. It was what a tough, take-no-prisoners kind of fighter he claims to be…and I don't know how I feel about that. I do know I don't like the emphasis on aggression over accuracy and how little that seems to matter to some people.