Andy Divine’s Political Moralizing, Episode CCCXXIII: Andy joyously wallows in the muck of ‘Russian-Gate’! Political Observer comments

Andy Divine latest essay focuses on ‘Russia-Gate’? The indictments of ‘Russian Trolls’ & ‘Russian Spies’ – but Show Trials in absentia are not what Mueller, Rosenstein and Comey have in mind. Of more import are Trump’s machinations & coverup of his sexual escapades & corruption, that all of a piece, add up to unfitness to hold the office of the Presidency.

The whole point of the Russian Meddling propaganda being the removal of Trump from office. The political allies of the Mueller, Rosenstein, Comey  are the Clinton coterie’s featured players are Brennan, Clapper and their allies in the ‘Deep State’ and in American Corporate Media.

But Andy’s foray into the muck, of this  detour from the stated purpose of the Mueller Investigation, is his portrayal of Trump:

It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard down. It really feels like the actual Trump, the man behind the curtain. And this Trump is quite clearly in charge. He’s not some addled 70-something, delegating large swathes of responsibility for day-to-day operations to underlings. He’s clearly aware of everything that’s going on: “Let me know what’s happening, okay?” he says to someone — Pam (Bondi)? — on the phone at first. He talks about how some issue will blow over: “I think this goes away quickly … in two weeks; it’s fine.” He then asks Cohen, “Can we use him anymore?” referring to an Evangelical pastor, and Cohen says absolutely.

Then they briefly discuss “the financing” for the National Enquirer’s capture and withholding of the McDougal story. “So, what do we got to pay for this? $150?” Trump asks at one point, meaning $150,000. The question of “cash” is raised by Trump (the precise wording is hard to make out from the audio), and Cohen strongly rules it out: “No, no, no.”

Andy makes it read like television melodrama of the black and white 21 inch screen era. But Andy shifts into deep analysis mode, or as deep as Andy is capable of going:

What this tiny glimpse into reality reveals is something quite simple. It’s not that it’s a shock that Trump has been lying about this incident from the very beginning. That has long been clear. But there’s something about listening to his voice acknowledging this in such a breezy, matter-of-fact tone that exposes the purity of the cynicism behind the lies. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks, had, after all, originally told The Wall Street Journal when it broke the story days before the 2016 election. The idea that Trump had had an affair at all, let alone organized hush money to the National Enquirer, was “totally untrue.” And yet here, as the curtain is pulled back, we hear Trump himself figuring out how to finance its cover-up.

Mr. Divine’s unslakable verbosity, his jejune moralizing  go on for paragraph after paragraph, and is fully demonstrated in his latest political encyclical. He fancies himself as possessing some valuable political/moral insights, yet he exhausts the readers patience and forbearance with his self-congratulatory pose as a wise man in search of truth: the end point, for this reader, is to demonstrate his status as bourgeois political chatterer.

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/andrew-sullivan-portrait-of-the-president-as-a-con-man.html

 

 

 

 

About stephenkmacksd

Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer. 'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.' https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.