Another busy day for Mark…maybe not a lot of posting. And I seem to be doing a very poor job of not paying attention to the man who was our 45th president and is looking like he'll be the first to do hard time.
I keep seeing articles wondering why, in spite of so many folks advising him to return the classified documents, he insisted on keeping them. I don't see this as hard to figure out. He felt they would represent in some way future power and/or money…and he didn't have to have a specific plan as to how either of those goals might happen. Why is that not the answer?
I was talking with my pal Shelly Goldstein the other day and I think I was the one who made this point: Back when it turned out that Bill Clinton had actually had the rumored affair and said what he said about it in a deposition, a lot of us who thought he was a good president were deeply disappointed in the man. We didn't say this to pollsters but to each other, we said things like, "Gee, I thought he was smarter than that." You can fault someone for their moral transgressions and also fault them for the poor judgement they showed by making those transgressions when (a) there was a strong possibility they'd be caught and (b) they'd be letting down an awful lot of people who supported them.
What Clinton did was way, way less of a crime than what Trump's being charged with but I've got to think that Donald's supporters — the ones who really, really, really want to see him back in office — are feeling the same way. They want to slap the guy and scream, "How could you let us down like that!!!?" They won't tell pollsters that either. Most of 'em will cling to the idea that he's being railroaded, witch-hunted, personally prosecuted by the evil mastermind/senile Joe Biden, etc. But deep down, no matter what else they feel about Their President, they've got to think he was really, really, really stupid to let it come to this.