Not Very Bright Guys Getting Caught

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand...
- Deep Throat in All the President's Men, talking about Nixon's underlings responsible for the encompassing Watergate scandals.

Hold our beer.
- trump's underlings responsible for all the shit coming out now

The revelations today have been dropping on about an hourly basis, people. I can't keep up.

I have to keep referring to Balloon Juice and even that crew can't keep up. The best I can do is refer to John Cole's take here:

Every now and then you see a story on News of the Weird or something else about a really stupid criminal who shows up to their DUI sentencing drunk or brings an ounce of coke with them to their sentencing for intent to deliver, and you say to yourself, “How fucking stupid is this guy?”

He then quotes the New York Times article getting his Irish oop:

President Trump pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation, according to two American officials with knowledge of the call.

The White House restricted access to the call’s transcript to a small group of the president’s aides, one of the officials said, an unusual decision that is similar to the handling of a July call with the Ukrainian president that is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump. Like that call, the discussion with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia shows the extent to which Mr. Trump sees the attorney general as a critical partner in his goal to show that the Mueller investigation had corrupt and partisan origins, and the extent that Mr. Trump sees the Justice Department inquiry as a potential way to gain leverage over America’s closest allies.

And then Cole updated his post to include this:

Jesus Christ, I literally just posted this and this showed up on my news feed:

Attorney General William P. Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

Barr’s personal involvement is likely to stoke further criticism from Democrats pursuing impeachment that he is helping the Trump administration use executive branch powers to augment investigations aimed primarily at the president’s adversaries.

We got Barr not only implicated by trump's own statements trying to interfere and discredit the intelligence / security agencies our nation relies on, but he's been documented meeting with foreign agencies to do just that. It's a twofer: Barr can't deny one and ignore the other.

Our own Attorney General is trump's most trusted foot soldier in committing crimes against our own nation. How the hell can he be allowed to stay in office one second longer?

And Barr's just the newest recruit, he's barely been at his job since February (!). Just think of all the other idiots getting caught doing trump's dirty work - Pence, Giuliani, Pompeo, Mulvaney - have been at it for years. And we're not even talking about the guys who already got caught and pled out to jail time like Michael Cohen.

These were not very bright guys...

I grew up reading Doonesbury - much to my father's horrified chagrin - and while I was a child during the Watergate years I had no memory of it. I relied on understanding the events in hindsight, trying to learn how in real time the nation handled a national crisis like that, and Trudeau's coverage helped me come to terms with some of it.

In this moment, today, all the madness being unleashed, I thought of this strip:

from July 23, 1974

Just like Popehat tweeted: if only these bastards were caught dealing blue meth, this would be so much easier to deal with...

None of this is defensible. None of this can be waved away. Our nation's highest offices are not only filled with crooks, those crooks are idiots.

This is more than just kakistocracy. This is malignant stupidity that usually gets people killed.

We are so very royally extremely godforsakeningly fucked.