Saturday, December 08, 2018

Knows What He Has


Today's "Donald Trump is smarter than a 5th grader" installment is the Attorney General Edition.

Rob Reiner, right about almost everything, including Donald Trump and Donald Trump and the Special Counsel investigation. However, he probably is wrong when he remarks

There is something wrong with Donald J. Trump, but more likely of a physical than of a psychological/mental nature. Moreover, suggesting he is delusional (or stupid)  is counter-productive, presenting a bar to recognizing and appreciating the truly vile nature of the man and his presidency.

Was that "bar" or "barr"? Most likely, a delusional president would not have decided to nominate

William P. Barr, a skeptic of the Russia investigation who served as attorney general in the first Bush administration a quarter century ago, to return as head of the Justice Department.

Mr. Barr, 68, would become the nation’s top law enforcement official as Mr. Trump and his associates are under investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for whether they conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election and help elect Mr. Trump. Mr. Barr would oversee the inquiry as key aspects of it are coming to a close.

Known for his expansive vision of executive power, Mr. Barr has criticized Mr. Mueller for hiring too many prosecutors who donated to Democrats and has cast doubt on whether Trump campaign associates conspired with Russians. Mr. Barr has also defended Mr. Trump’s calls for a new criminal investigation into his defeated 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, including over a uranium mining deal the Obama administration approved when she was secretary of state.

Barr possesses a measure of establishment credibility among Republican senators, and possibly a little among Democratic senators, because he served as Attorney General for a couple of years for the recently (absurdly) canonized President George HW Bush. Further

In that role, Mr. Barr advanced a strong view of executive power. He told Mr. Bush, for example, that he could deploy troops to Panama, Iraq and Somalia without congressional approval. He also urged top lawyers at departments across the executive branch to be vigilant about congressional encroachments on executive power.


primary focus was on domestic law enforcement, particularly street crime — this was, after all, during the peak of the crime wave of the late 20th century. But he was also extremely concerned about the influx of unauthorized immigrants into the US — largely Mexican immigrants looking for work — that ultimately grew the unauthorized population to 2 million to 4 million by the time Barr and Bush left office in 1993....

Barr rolled out a multimillion-dollar plan to beef up security in the San Diego/Tijuana area where crossings were then concentrated. One component of that plan: building a steel fence with the assistance of the Department of Defense

So Barr checks all the boxes because he is obsessed with candidate Trump's opponent,  legitimate (especially in contrast to Matt Whittaker), hostile toward immigration, enthusiastic about the concentration of Executive power, and critical of the Special Counsel's investigation.

Although the last item is the most important to Trump, the next-too-last is critical. Whatever the President's physical or mental health, he may be dangerous. That is if  "may be" is spelled "is incomparably."








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