Krauthammer on Don Jr.
I tweeted this link out yesterday, but if you missed it, it is worth a read: Charles Krauthammer, Bungled collusion is still collusion
The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)
Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.
Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.
Perhaps with persons such as Krauthammer making these observations, some cracks in partisan solidarity will form with those who rely heavily on Fox News.
See, also, Shepard Smith.
Only a small portion of the Republican electorate cares about facts, the Republican intelligentsia, such as it is. The party generally overlaps significantly with evangelical Christians – people perfectly capable of believing in angels and devils and a God who loves us and threatens us with eternal torture if we don’t love him back. A mind prepared to believe that will believe whatever it wishes to believe, reality be damned.
I just peeked over at Trump Central, i.e., Lucianne.com. The reaction there to this article was predictable, falling into four main areas:
1. Collusion isn’t illegal.
2. Krauthammer is a Commie liberal elitist who loves Obama.
3. Nobody watches Fox News because it’s as bad as MSNBC.
4. People like Krauthammer are jealous of the Trumps.
Disheartening, but not surprising.
@CSK:
The main stream conservative media NEVER stops spinning and creating the talking points that motivate and feed their base.
On my commute drive home I tuned in to Sean Hannity for 10 minutes, just as he asked us if we were aware that Obama spent taxpayer dollars trying to influence the Israeli election?
@michael reynolds: “a God who loves us and threatens us with eternal torture if we don’t love him back.”
Now that you mention it, isn’t that pretty much Trump’s MO as well?
@CSK: I was going to post in with “Meh… probably not. Thank you for fleshing out my comment so well.
We also only have the word of a bunch of liars that the meeting was a bust.
They’ve lied about everything else in that meeting, why would we assume they are telling the truth now?
Okay, the latest from the Trumpkin Asylum: Junior was set up by the Democrats, who hatched the plot with Veselnitskaya back in…2015.
@wr:
AHA! You have come up with the answer to the question of why so many Evangelicals voted for a Godless psychopath: They think he’s God!
Trump is on Twitter now raving about the fact that the Fake News Media is “scorning” his son Don.
What Chuckles Krauthammer wrote here is uninteresting. That he wrote it is fascinating.
Chuckles is the most thoughtful person on the right, his lies are always well thought out and very carefully constructed. A few years ago he was an active climate denier. He was big on the ‘no warming since 19 whenever’ meme that was big among those too innumerate to read a graph with noisy data. Then we had a clearly hotter year and he quietly dropped it. He realized that continued denialism was going to make him look stupid sooner rather than later, and looking stupid is bad for his brand. Now he’s recognized that continuing to defend the Trumpskyites on Russia would also end up bad for his business plan. Other conservatives should take note.