Eli Lake often reminds of a man who kisses ass for a living yet insists on complaining about the farts. Eli gets paid by Michael Bloomberg to be, basically, the voice of the Likud, relentlessly advocating a “firm” U.S. position on just about every aspect of foreign affairs, a “U.S. and Israel against the world” mind-frame intended to guarantee continuous conflict and crisis (and sky-high defense budgets) for decades to come. Which means, at the present time, basically kissing Donald Trump’s ass.
In his most recent column, “The Whistle-Blower Is Not a Traitor, Mr. President”, which carries the subhead, “Trump’s appalling suggestion shows yet again that he is his own worst enemy”, Eli expresses a sentiment that is at least marginally true—true in the way that a murderer is his own worst enemy, because if he didn’t insist on committing murders, we wouldn’t have to put him in jail.
Eli’s complaint, which, from his perspective—and from his perspective only—is “sensible”, in a half-assed, ass-kissing, ass-covering way:
In the morning, the White House released the whistle-blower complaint that kicked off the Ukraine scandal. It largely confirmed elements of earlier news reports, but also showed that the whistle-blower was piecing his information together from secondhand sources inside the White House. There were no promises to a foreign leader or an explicit quid pro quo.
In a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was calm and credible. He didn’t besmirch the whistle-blower or the inspector general. But he stood his ground and explained his rationale for seeking guidance from the White House counsel and the Justice Department before sending the unprecedented whistle-blower complaint to Congress.
Then, at about 1 p.m., reports began to surface of Trump’s remarks earlier in the day to the U.S. mission at the United Nations. The whistle-blower and his or her sources, Trump suggested, should be executed. “I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information, because that’s close to a spy,” he said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart, right, with spies and treason? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”
Yeah, it’s “amusing”/tacky that Trump wants to execute anyone who gives him a hard time, but let me point out that this isn’t the first time that Trump has played the death card while responding to a smart mouth, viz, back in, you know, May of this year, he accused then FBI director James Comey of “treason” for the way he handled the FBI’s investigation of both Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Trump campaign’s Russian connections, prior to Trump's election, “even after being reminded that treason is punishable by death” moaned fellow Trump rectum romancer Ramesh Ponnuru, so that, clearly, Donald Trump has long held that “treason” consists of, not giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States, but rather bad-mouthing Donald Trump.
Afterwords
One has to chuckle—because one can’t throw up one’s hands in hapless despair while typing—at Eli’s “timeline” of l’Affaire Ukraine, which is to say, totally leaving out the “rough transcript”, in which Trump repeatedly gave Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky the following message: “See, the way it works, Volodymyr, is this—you play ball, or you lose ball. Am I getting through to you?” Furthermore, Eli fails to mention Trump’s mysterious halt to U.S. aid to Ukraine just before the now-famous phone call, which he ordered without explanation to his own staff and for which he gave conflicting explanations to Congress. I’m afraid that Eli’s definition of an “explicit quid pro quo” is limited to a written document signed by both parties, with three witnesses, duly notarized and filed as a public record.
Perhaps most astonishing of all, Eli has been a firm opponent of Trump’s “let bygones be bygones” approach to Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine, ignoring the fact that Trump is using Ukraine’s vulnerability to Russia as a weapon to force Ukraine to do his bidding, and is very likely to discard Ukraine like a squeezed lemon once he’s been re-elected. Or maybe Eli thinks that if only Trump would just execute people informally, without all the publicity, it would make both their jobs a lot easier.
UPDATE
Trump now has, uh, "trumped" himself, ha, ha, by accusing Rep. Adam Schiff of "treason" for criticizing Trump on the floor of the House of Representatives. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, that's quite likely an impeachable offense in and of itself.
