Two long years ago
the probe began and many thought
that someday it would make them smile.
And those who said it had no chance
were scowled upon and seen askance
so desperate was the hope to see a trial.

But February made them shiver
as it came clear he’d not deliver.
The news that they desired
was not to be acquired.

I know that many people cried
when they read the news, it hurt their pride,
so deeply in the pipe dream mired
the day collusion died.

So bye, bye to the collusion lie,
Russian Agents, Putin’s Puppet and a plot to deny.
From each new event how the conjecture would fly.
Can they let it go and just let it die?
Let it go and just let it die.

We all know that he’s corrupt
and his list of crimes is building up
so I’ll just list them down below.
While emoluments could’ve kicked the goal
collusion was their chosen roll
investigating all of it real slow.

Well, the Media then lost their mind
as they blundered backward fully blind.
Collusion became news,
evidence not vital for clues.

The other news stories all were then chucked
while collusion filled every news truck
But I knew they ran out of luck
the day collusion died.

But they kept singing
Bye, bye he’s a Russian ally
Putin Puppet, Russian agent and a treasonous spy
and every day, more wacky theories would fly.
Time to let it go and just let it to die.
Let it go and just let it die.

Now when Mueller issued his report
the media could not contort it
to save face though they did try.
They lost all credibility.
Embarrassed is what they should be,
and the damage done they cannot deny.

They gave victory to the president,
validation as if heaven sent.
The courtroom was adjourned,
no verdict was returned.
And now when he screams about fake news
he’ll be correct thanks to their ruse.
The “Witch Hunt” he’ll rightfully accuse
the day collusion died.

‘cause they were singing
Bye, bye he’s a Russian ally
Putin Puppet, Russian agent and a treasonous spy
And every day, more crazy theories would fly
time to let it go and just let it to die.
let it go and just let it die.

I met a girl who sang the blues.
She she asked me for some happy news.
I offered but she just turned away.
Those who followed actual facts
instead of “liberal media” hacks
would know that Mueller knew the only way.

He farmed out criminal indictments
to seven districts, there’s excitement,
all of them pardon-proof,
not like the collusion spoof.
So carefully he did anoint
a prosecution starting point
the outcome couldn’t disappoint
the day collusion died.

Yet they’re still singing
Bye, bye he’s a Russian ally
Putin Puppet, Russian agent and a treasonous spy.
The Russian hysteria was misplaced outcry.
Time to let it go and just let it die.
Let it go and just let it die.

So, bye, bye to the collusion lie,
Collusion obsession-gave the press a black eye.
And if they persist the damage will amplify
Time to let it go and just let it die.

HT: Vanderleun.

Peggy Noonan, in the WSJ, blamed Trump for the failed Coup (!).

Don Surber responded:

She wrote, “I’m thinking of the old ambassadors, mostly men in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They’re woven into the town, solid citizens, friends of journalists, occasionally sources, and they know things. They’re mostly retired, and at lunch at clubs in town often begin sentences with ‘And so I told Zbig . . .’ There’s a bit of lost glory with them, but they care about America, are personally invested in it, love it with an old-school love, and respect systems, knowing that creativity — in art, science and diplomacy — can only be born within a certain immediate order.”

Zbig is Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, who advised LBJ and was Carter’s national security adviser. On his watch, we doubled down on Vietnam (LBJ) and lost Iran and the Panama Canal under Carter.

But he made the cocktail circuit.

President Donald John Trump does not curry DC’s favor. He does not need them. He is a garish playboy billionaire who saved Manhattan only to be resented by Manhattan’s elitists who look down on his Outer Borough ways.

He is saving the country and the people who will in the long term benefit most — the elitists — are spitting angry.

She wrote, “Pretty quickly and to the entire edifice of Washington, it became clear Donald Trump was not a Jacksonian shock to the system, which is what his supporters think he was. He was a daily system overload, a one-man frying of the grid.”

If one man, even a president, can overload a grid, then you need a better grid.

But the fact is, they did this to themselves and refuse to accept responsibility. Anyone can cut you off in traffic; you decide whether to turn that into Road Rage.

We know what she (and they) decided.

Noonan wrote, “Their fears about him weren’t assuaged by trusty old hands inside the White House because those hands weren’t there. They didn’t join the administration, because they didn’t want their résumés tainted or they thought wise counsel would never be heeded. Or because they’d signed a letter opposing him in 2016 and would never be forgiven.

“So a lot of good people didn’t come in or weren’t allowed in. And those who did work for the president came to seem strange — fierce, emotional, half mad themselves. There were good people there — the generals were solid — but one by one they left.”

The message from DC is clear: work for The Donald and you end your career.

So much for her illusion of this crowd being public servants. If you love your country, you serve when called.

Hers is a roundabout way to blame President Trump for the attempted coup by the Deep State and the Fourth Estate, which awarded her a Pulitzer for her contributions to this effort.

She wrote, “It was all this — the president’s disdain, his well-fed resentments — that not only left Washington thinking Mr. Trump was crazy. It made Washington itself a fertile field for crazy. It was in this atmosphere that the Steele dossier, with its whacked out third-rate spy fiction, became believable, that sober-minded officials reportedly wondered if they should wear wires when they met with the president.

“He destabilized the entire town.”

No. The town’s Road Rage against him comes from their refusal to accept the will of the people and the policies that serve America and not Washington.

She is rooting for Democrats to offer a safe choice who will calm the waters, this shaming the legacy of Ronald Reagan for whom she once worked. Oh well, she always said Dan Rather was her favorite boss.

Hers is a cry from Versailles for Sloppy Joe Biden to save them from this Orange Man who wants to Make America Great Again.

Biden’s slogan is “America’s Coming Back Like We Used To Be.”

By America, he means the people who chatted with Zbig at cocktail parties.

But that is not going to happen. It’s over.

RTWT

Peggy, Catholic, Irish, and of working-class origin, is still bedazzled by the charm, prestige, and life-style of the American Elite Establishment. She fails to recognize that they are too commonly just like Scott Fitzgerald’s Buchanans:

““They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

When Progressive Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone says the Mainstream Media screwed up royally and Trump was in the right, that is really something remarkable!

You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.

He didn’t just “fail to establish” evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”

Not only was there no “collusion,” the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!

In March of 2017, in one of the first of what would become a mountain of mafia-hierarchy-style “Trump-Russia contacts” graphics in major newspapers, the Washington Post described an email Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sent to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. They called it “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.”

The report shows the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.

That was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government”!

As outlined in his initial mandate, Mueller explored “any links” between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump. His conclusion spoke directly to the question of whether there was any kind of quid pro quo between the two sides:

“The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future.”

In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those “walls are closing in” reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit “turning point” after “turning point” leading to the “the beginning of the end,” with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached.

The “RNC platform” change story was a canard, according to Mueller. The exchanges Trump figures had with ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” The conversations Jeff Sessions had with Kislyak at the convention didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.” Mueller added “investigators did not establish that [Carter] Page conspired with the Russian government.”

There was no blackmail, no secret bribe from Rosneft, no five-year cultivation plan, no evidence of any kind of any relationship that ever existed between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Michael Cohen “never traveled to Prague.”

The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” document “needs to be investigated.” The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that “people familiar” with Steele’s work began to have “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.”

Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation. They didn’t imply vast criminality that wasn’t there, or hoodwink audiences into thinking a Watergate-style ending was just around the corner, or routinely blow meaningless episodes like the Sessions-Kislyak meeting out of proportion, or regularly smear people who not only weren’t part of a conspiracy but had no connection to anything (see here for an example).

They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners like Malcolm Nance and Luke Harding.

That’s fine. In the short term, a significant portion of the country will probably agree coverage was appropriate, probably the same sizable plurality of poll respondents who say they disagree on some level with Mueller’s findings. A lot of people out there despise Trump, and at least right now will be inclined to sympathy for broadcasters and editorialists who gave full quarter to the most damning theories of conspiracy and criminality in the Russia case.

… [N]ews audiences over time lose trust in news organizations that tell them what they want to hear politically, but get the substance of things wrong.

The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren’t there.

Reporters should be furious about being fed these red herrings. They should be outraged at all those people who urged them to publish the Steele report, which might have led to career-imperiling mistakes in print. They should be mad as hell at CIA chief Gina Haspel and the other unnamed officials who told them disclosing the name of already long-ago exposed government informant Stefan Halper would “risk lives.”

More than anything, reporters should be furious at the many sources close to the various investigations who (it now seems clear) must have known pretty early there were serious holes in many areas of this story, and that a lot of these “dots” were dead ends, but didn’t warn their press counterparts. For instance, the papers should be mad those who supposedly had misgivings about the Steele report didn’t warn them earlier.

But they’re not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money. Media companies earned boffo ratings while the Mueller probe still carried the drama of a potential spectacular ending, with blue-state audiences eating up all those “walls are closing in” hot takes.

This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls “underlying crime” make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we’re there, and the press is a big part of that picture.

RTWT

I cannot help comparing the way this one came out with the Anti-Bush Intelligence Operations, the PlameGame (in which the Bush Administration was blamed for supposedly leaking the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame, and Scooter Libby convicted of lying to prosecutors, when Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew all along that it was the disloyal-to-Bush Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who revealed Plame’s identity to Robert Novak), and the “Bush-Lied-People-Died” Missing Iraqi WMDs view of the war, which successfully discredited both the Iraq War and the Bush Administration with the presently concluding “Stolen Election/Russian Collusion” attempted coup against Trump.

The difference is that Trump fought back, while George W. Bush stood there like a punching bag, taking every hit, and treating the hostile media and his Deep State opponents as if they were the legitimate authorities.

Trump may not be the ideal President in every respect, but at least he is a fighter.

An unknown commenter wrote:

. .But the charges against Cohen, like those on which Paul Manafort was also convicted on Tuesday, have nothing to do with Russian meddling or with collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. The Mueller investigation is still what its critics have always claimed: an attempt to bring down the duly elected president of the United States by any (legal) means possible.”

“The most significant lesson of the Trump era in American politics is that no one actually cares about so-called ‘norms’ or ethics or hoary phrases like ‘separation of powers.’ The same people who feign outrage when the president directs his attorney general to consider investigating the conduct of Obama-era officials would have no problem with Attorney General Kamala Harris prosecuting Trump under any imaginable pretext. The elaborate machinery of our judicial system — prosecutors, indictments, hearings, judges, verdicts — is simply an extension of the ruling party’s authority. It cannot be directed against the head of that party, as we were shown during the Clinton administration.”