Once again, Republican actions are explained best by taking their own preferences and plans and then imagining that they projected them onto others. As Jon Chait points out, the logic of the Nunes Memo is entirely backwards. It treats the cause as the effect. The FBI and other parts of the national security apparatus were legitimately concerned about Trump's ties to Russis and how close so many people - including but not limited to Carter Page - were to Russia. This made them worry that a possible president was compromised by Russia. So they investigated.
The Nunes Memo takes the fact that the FBI was freaked out by the evidence staring them in the face as evidence that the FBI was biased against Trump. This logic could be applied further: the DEA is biased against drug dealers; the Secret Service is biased against would-be assasins; ICE is biased against brown people (OK, that last one is true in more ways than one).
People investigating potential criminals tend to be biased against those potential criminals. That is why we don't let the FBI or the local police serve as judge, jury and executioner. They investigate the crimes, because they don't like crime.
The Republican Party, however, has spent an inordinate amount of time investigating nontroversies like Benghazi, Fast and Furious and Solyandra because of their political animus towards the object of the investigation. The point, as Representative McCarthy helpfully told us, of the Benghazi investigation was to harm Hillary Clinton. THAT is why you investigate someone: to create the appearance of wrong-doing, so that you can exploit that politically. Despite something like a half dozen Benghazi committees, the GOP couldn't find any evidence of wrong doing. Just like there was nothing in those damned emails.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter than there was no merit to all the Benghazi investigations after the first one found no wrong doing. What mattered was the political effects of the continuing investigations.
What the Nunes Memo represents is the projection of how Republicans conduct investigations onto the FBI. This has required that they first somehow contort the FBI into some vast leftist cabal, which...damn. Then, they impugn the entire FBI - Blue Lives Matter? All Lives Matter, Dude - in order to protect..Donald Trump? That's Nunes' endgame? Protect a man who would feed you to those sharks he's so terrified of if it got him a three point bump in an opinion poll?
Hell, Joe Walsh - former holder of the title of biggest asshole in the GOP, now elder statesman - has basically said that Nunes is a "partisan hack."
The Republican Party is having an existential crisis. As a political party, it exists to win elections. It's pretty good at that. But it also has to govern once it wins elections. The problem is that the party that was once a "sober, rational right of center" party has become an extension of Alex Jones' InfoWars and can only assume that everyone else in the world thinks and acts the same way.
At this point, even one Congressperson who supports Nunes and his actions getting re-elected would constitute a great national tragedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment