Billy Is Such A Tool April 20, 2019April 21, 2019 Bill Barr was three years behind me at Horace Mann. He must have missed the motto: Magna Est Veritas Et Praevalet. Contrary to his view that Trump is vindicated by the Mueller investigation — with which, Barr says, the President fully cooperated (a blatant, exhaustively documented lie) — The Mueller Report Should Shock Our Conscience. That’s not the wailing of some left-wing rag, it’s the headline of the country’s leading conservative journal. I’ve finished reading the entire Mueller report, and I must confess that even as a longtime, quite open critic of Donald Trump, I was surprised at the sheer scope, scale, and brazenness of the lies, falsehoods, and misdirections detailed by the Special Counsel’s Office. We’ve become accustomed to Trump making up his own facts on matters great and small, but to see the extent to which his virus infected his entire political operation is sobering. And the idea that anyone is treating this report as “win” for Trump, given the sheer extent of deceptions exposed (among other things), demonstrates that the bar for his conduct has sunk so low that anything other than outright criminality is too often brushed aside as relatively meaningless. . . . . . . The lies are simply too much to bear. No Republican should tolerate such dishonesty. What concerns the Attorney General are not these lies, or the ongoing Russian attack. He’s concerned that the Trump campaign was “spied on,” perhaps improperly. He wants to investigate that. Were we back in high school, it might have been appropriate to say, “you’re such a little tool, Billy” and then shove him in a locker. Fifty-five years later, he is a large and literal tool: of a pathological liar and sociopath. (And thus, by extension, of Vladimir Putin.) . . . The Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion . . . So begins the 448-page report that too few Democrats and Independents and almost no Republicans will read. And that our Russian-mob-connected commander-in-chief . . . well, he believes the denials of his friend, the journalist-murdering kleptocrat autocrat Vladimir Putin. Paul Kroger: “Forget: ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters’ How about: ‘I could let an enemy of our country help me get elected, lie about it, make others lie about it, and obstruct an investigation into it and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”