It’s true! Mr. Three Names is never, no, never! going to forgive you guys for the way you lied about the Mueller Report! Reason gal Elizabeth Nolan Ryan summarizes Bret's cri de cœur/podcast thusly:
"I want to state that I am not a Republican, I am not a conservative, I am not part of the right wing, I did not vote for Trump, I am not part of the alt-right, I am not interested in politics." ... Ellis said he doesn't "care enough about" Trump to defend him against allegations of Russian collusion, but his beef is with "the crazy dishonest press" and "being lied to" by members of it. "There is no way to get around the fact that the mainstream media misled the country for the last two years. Period," Ellis added. "I'm not saying that as a conservative, or as a liberal. I'm saying it simply as a witness." These outlets "should be humiliated by what they were perpetrating."
Well, as George F. Will was wont to say, “well”. I confess I’m not up on the details of the ravings of talking heads like Rachel Maddow, and that I thought the “speculations” by supposedly more responsible folk like James Clapper that Donald Trump was a “witting agent” of Vladimir Putin were pretty ridiculous, and that Jonathan Chait’s now notorious “plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion”, which he recently tried to explain away in the manner of Rush “Just Putting It Out There” Limbaugh, was so mind-bogglingly boring that I stopped reading it after the first few paragraphs, but (if you’re still with me), I’d like to point you in the direction of a handy-dandy interactive graphic supplied by, yes, the New York Times, with the snappy title “Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With Russians Before the Inauguration”, a great many of which were frequently lied about by Trump and his minions.
I’m still amazed that it was considered “okay” for a retired three-star general (Michael Flynn) to accept a gratuity from Russian sources to sit at a banquet table with Vladimir Putin, even if he didn’t repeatedly yell “Lock her up!” in public with regard to a former secretary of state, and also “okay” for him to work secretly as an agent of the Turkish government, writing, for example, an op-ed supporting Turkish policies without disclosing that arrangement, and also okay for such a man to be appointed as the president’s national security advisor.
I’m also still amazed that it was considered “okay” for the president to fire the head of the FBI, and to arrange for and publish a cover story to disguise the fact that the firing was meant to discourage the FBI’s investigation into Flynn. I’m also still amazed that it was considered “okay” for the president’s son, working in the president’s election campaign, to have a meeting, in the company of two other principal campaign officials, with Russian nationals for the express purpose of obtaining information from Russian intelligence that could be used against Hillary Clinton in the campaign, a meeting about which both he and the president lied in public.
I repeat the old—old and accurate—comment that if President Obama or Hillary Clinton had fired the head of the FBI for any reason, a Republican House of Representatives would have impeached them for obstruction of justice. Since Donald Trump in fact fired Mr. Comey in order to obstruct justice, then he damn well did obstruct justice.
I think impeachment is a terrible idea, and I don’t think that President Trump, on the record before us, should be impeached. But the notion that his nauseating record of corruption and deceit can and should be swept under the rug on the grounds of “Oh, golly, I’m just so sick and tired of hearing about all this stuff!” is simply a matter of what a not very PC mayor of New York1 once called “rape by acquiescence”.
Afterwords I
If Mr. Ellis doesn't trust the Times, perhaps he could consider a column written six months ago by David French in the National Review, Republicans Must Reject ‘Russia Hoax’ Conspiracies and Examine the Evidence. Opined former U.S. attorney French:
The more we learn about Trump World’s contacts with Russians or Russian operatives, the more astounding it becomes. Consider this partial summary:
Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, lied to Congress about his contacts with a Russian government official as he tried to negotiate a Trump Tower Moscow deal deep into the 2016 presidential campaign.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, an alleged asset of Russian intelligence.
Longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone (and Stone’s sidekick, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi) allegedly tried to communicate with WikiLeaks, a “hostile intelligence service,” to obtain advance information about Julian Assange’s planned document dumps.
Donald Trump’s son, campaign chairman, and son-in-law met with a purported Russian representative with the intention of receiving “official documents” as part of a “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about his own contacts with a professor who “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials” and who claimed to have access to “dirt” on Hillary in the form of “thousands of emails.”
Mr. French thoughtfully provides links for each of these items in case Mr. Ellis still retains some doubts.
Afterwords II
I've never liked Mr. Ellis very much. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a review for the Bright Lights Film Journal of the film American Psycho, based on Bret’s novel of the same name. I looked at the novel, intending to quote a chunk of it so that readers could have a taste, but Mr. Ellis’ prose was so vicious and repulsive that I just didn’t have the stomach for it. So I summarized his effort instead:
When Ellis wrote American Psycho back in 1991, he probably had no higher motive than to write the most disgusting, and thus the most profitable, book he could imagine. Unfortunately for Ellis, he overshot the mark. It turned out that filling a book with appalling depictions of misogynistic torture wasn’t the shortest road to fame and riches.
At the time I wrote my review, Ellis had a new book out, described by his publisher as follows: “Glamorama, Ellis’s latest vehicle, ventures deep inside the world of celebrity, a world that jet-sets from coast-to-coast, from champagne flute to vial of cocaine, all the while sacrificing humanity for image.”
Write about what you know, eh, dude? Write about what you know.
1. Fiorello La Guardia, the “Little Flower”.
