The people who are close to William Barr, who really know him, know that he only ever turns off Fox News when an opportunity arises to run outside and yell at kids on bikes. What a gift that he managed to make that a full time gig as attorney general of the United States!
He essentially applied for the job by convincing the president that he had a plan for shutting down the Mueller investigation. Now he has been tasked with undermining the entire rationale for the Mueller investigation by “proving” that it wasn’t Russia that helped Trump but Ukraine that helped Clinton. It’s the ultimate get-off-my-sidewalk move.
Here’s some reporting from Philip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post:
Barr’s role in the investigation into the Russia probe’s origins, which is being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut, is extraordinary in part because the probe seeks evidence of misconduct within his own Justice Department to support the conspiracy theory — embraced by Trump and advanced on Fox News — that the Russia inquiry was corrupt and predicated on undermining Trump…
…The White House and Justice Department have defended this review of the investigation into possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign as appropriate; Barr told Congress in April that he believed “spying did occur.”
Barr’s interest in the probe is unsurprising to several of his associates, who said this week he is a headstrong and deeply conservative man who at this point in his career has grown disdainful of the Democratic Party, the federal government and the news media, criticizing them in private as biased and skewed against the president.
In other words, Barr came out of retirement after spending a couple of decades marinating his brain in Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly every night. He’s grumpy and reality-challenged, and whatever moral compass he ever had has atrophied into dust.
The story has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times, all over the country. You hear about it all the time. “I can’t even talk to my father anymore.” “My mother is so bitter.” “My brother never used to be a racist.”
That’s what Fox News consumption will do to a person over time. Before you know it, they’re nodding in approval when the president says we should shoot asylum seekers in the legs to slow them down or build a moat on the border filled with snakes and crocodiles.
Rucker and Costa continue, explaining how Trump’s Fox News-inspired worldview has taken hold throughout the government.
But taken together, they illustrate the sweeping reach of Trump’s power and the culture he has spawned inside the government. The president’s personal concerns have become priorities of departments that traditionally have operated with some degree of political independence from the White House — and their leaders are engaging their boss’s obsessions.
“Barr and Pompeo are stuck in the fog machine. They seem captives of the president’s perverse worldview,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “Authoritarian regimes have this problem all the time . . . when all government activity is the product of the id of the leader. But in a republic, that’s unusual.”
There are some obsessions of Trump’s that seem independent of Fox News, inspired perhaps by even loonier regions of the interwebs. But it’s mostly untrue that people like Barr and Pompeo are buckling to a foreign perspective. They hold their current positions precisely because they, like the president, have lost the ability to distinguish between truth and propaganda. Spending twenty years watching Lou Dobbs wet his pants over Mexican immigration will do that to even sturdier stock.
Anyone in the Trump administration who still retained the ability to be skeptical when Laura Ingraham is talking was quickly sacked. The lemmings replaced them.
Some of these lemmings, like Barr and Pompeo, are borderline brilliant in terms of their raw intelligence. Their reasoning ability didn’t collapse overnight or completely, so it was also necessary for their morals to collapse. It’s this second piece that allows them to plod ahead over the objections of that little voice in their head that still knows they are peddling bullshit. It doesn’t matter because they have to beat the other side. It doesn’t matter because they’re the last hope for white people.
It is an urgent problem that these people are running the most powerful government on Earth, armed with enough radiation to destroy all life on the planet. And none of this would be possible without the influence of Fox News.
Donald Trump will be gone someday, but half our country will still be yelling at kids on bikes.
Amazing the power of Fox News
Dobbs railed against the Iraq war the first few months of 2004, and also pushed a few left-leaning issues and then went back to yelling at clouds. CNN probably told him that it was required for balance.
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“without the influence of Fox News…”
Reichsfuhrer Barr voluntarily entered the National Trumpalist regime because of sympathy for, and agreement with, the wholly unqualified and mentally deranged reactionary Donald Trump. Incredible, but looking more and more likely that this is actually the case. This is exactly the mentality that animated support for Hitler.
Over the past 20 years or so, The 46% (i.e. Trump voters) have been radicalized to such a degree that this reactionary faction no longer has any shared democratic underpinnings with non-“conservatives”–as National Trumpalism is now demonstrating. They think that every democratic norm can be breached in order to “save” the country from the illegitimate Democratic Party and the various (non-white) demographics which it represents. Thus, a popular vote-losing prez can first suborn the electoral aid of Russia(!) and then seek to coerce a hapless pygmy nation under (Russian!) threat to open an “investigation” into his likely political opponent–with “conservatives” arguing that this is literally of no concern. He need not respond to Congressional subpoenas, or have officials show up for hearings, or respect the legal appropriation of funds. His officials and creatures can insult elected Congressmembers with impunity. Dozens of instances of reported executive lawbreaking are dismissed or fraudulently denied to exist. Even the hapless corporate media is declared an “enemy of the people”.
Popular vote-winning prezes cannot obtain hearings on their (moderate) Supreme Court nominees, while openly partisan extremist(s) can be nominated as “Justices” by popular vote-losing prezes, and confirmed by senators representing 44% of the citizenry, because “states”. The Prez can do nothing but blather demonstrably preposterous lies 24/7, with no real-time refutation. The senate can be permanently held by a “majority” of “states” representing 30% of the populace and block all legislation in perpetuity (this is precisely where we are headed). And all this hopeless dysfunction is cheered on by the minority political faction and its propaganda outlets as “The Genius of The Founders”.
This means that the “conservative” movement has driven the country into a complete dead end, and necessarily sailed the hapless, antiquated 18th Century constitution onto the barrier reef, where it is now in the process of breaking up before our eyes. In the absence of that document, there is no conceivable basis for the continued “unity” of the country, but also absolutely no mechanism for an organized dis-unification to occur. We are like Wile-e-Coyote, standing literally in the air and not realizing it, until gravity takes over. Until the day that some completely new democratic political organization can somehow be imagined and adopted, we are paralyzed, although we will continue to go through the “constitutional” motions until some external calamity engulfs us. This will probably be economic–but with an un-checkable lunatic holding the nuclear codes and militarist generals and “acting” defense lobbyists running the Pentagon, there’s no guarantee even of that.
Josef Goebbels formulated the reactionary militarist playbook for keeping an educated populace in thrall via mass media propaganda. Our “conservative” plutocrats and Repubs didn’t have his power, but they were able to create the “conservative” Noise Machine, and we can see that ultimately this was enough to wreck the constitution and paralyze the national government, rendering impossible anything but bloated militarism, plutocrat tax cuts and democratically-illegitimate judges. This was enough for our patriotic, Constitution-luvin’ “conservatives”.
“This means that the “conservative” movement has driven the country into a complete dead end, and necessarily sailed the hapless, antiquated 18th Century constitution onto the barrier reef, where it is now in the process of breaking up before our eyes. In the absence of that document, there is no conceivable basis for the continued “unity” of the country, but also absolutely no mechanism for an organized dis-unification to occur.” I hope you’re wrong, but fear you’re right. Excellent summary of our current dilemma.
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“Some of these lemmings, like Barr and Pompeo, are borderline brilliant in terms of their raw intelligence.“
Please define what you mean by “raw intelligence”. These people seem thick and stupid to me. They are unable to process any information outside of their bubble.
By what stretch of the imagination am I supposed to believe they are not as intellectually empty as they portray themselves to be?
Is it brilliant to deny climate change?
You are giving them too much credit.