Loretta Lynch’s off-putting testimony
I have rarely felt so repulsed by Congressional testimony as I did yesterday on watching some of Loretta Lynch’s answers before the House. I used the word “answers,” but they were really the most astoundingly verbose double-talk I’ve ever heard. Maybe double-talk isn’t quite right, either; another phrase that comes to mind is from the fictional character Holden Caulfield, and it’s one of his favorites: “slinging the old bull.”
Well, it’s hard to imagine someone slinging the old bull any better than Lynch did yesterday. If you want to take a look, here’s hours and hours of it (I only watched a series of brief clips, myself, and that’s all I could stomach):
Did Lynch actually answer any questions with a substantive answer of any sort? I don’t know; as I said, I didn’t wade through the whole thing or anywhere near it. But most Americans aren’t about to do so, either. Most Americans who pay any attention to the news at all will probably see about what I saw, and it occurs to me that an awful lot of people (perhaps even a certain number of Clinton fans, and certainly quite a few “undecideds”) will be similarly repulsed by it.
So in that sense, although I believe that Lynch thought what she was doing would help Clinton, Democrats, and the liberal cause, I’m not sure sure that her non-responsive tap-dancing isn’t as harmful or even more harmful to that cause than any truthful or at least substantive answers she might have given. People don’t like being flipped off, especially in such a controlled-yet-somehow-testy way. Lynch was unfailingly polite, but her affect was like a steel trap tightly shut, and one could hardly escape the idea that she doesn’t feel that anyone is entitled to know anything about anything she does.
The Clinton email controversy is an issue in which a lot of people are interested, even if they weren’t at first. And—although lots of you are always criticizing the Republicans in Congress, and although nothing will come of this in terms of indictments or impeachment or whatever else would be an obvious result that you might want—I think it does have an effect, and that effect is to show the American people what an imperious, non-transparent presidency they have.
This cannot help Clinton. It cannot.
And interestingly enough, at the same time we have Donald Trump rising in the swing state polls. Those polls were taken before the Lynch testimony, of course. But portions of them were taken after the Comey announcement. Polls are fluid and the hour is early, and there will no doubt be many twistings and turnings along the way before November. But my gut feeling on watching Lynch is that anyone who actually decides to view even a few minutes of her testimony cannot help but become angry at the stonewalling combined with the condescension.
Whether that will translate into Trump votes is another question. Many Hillary voters are NeverTrump voters, so it may be that none of it will sway them.
[NOTE: I also think that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s intemperate anti-Trump mouthing off will annoy quite a few people, and that Trump’s extremely on-point response (even the NY Times agreed that he was correct!) can only help him with those who aren’t already totally in the bag for Clinton.]
[ADDENDUM: And get a load of this.]
What is a shame is that we do not have to listen to what was said, in order to have a good idea of what was said.
Her answers were basically along the lines of: “I don’t know; that would depend”
And upon what?
“Well, that would depend too”
On the law?
“Well, that would depend … though I would never myself … blah blah … unless blah blah.
The only proper response to that kind of log-jam building crap is to try and blast the vermin out of their beaver dam with something very direct and very rude and very insulting.
But we are not likely to see anything along those lines
I guess it wouldn’t be politically correct to characterize her testimony as “shucking and jiving”…
The narrative will be that, faced with a hostile, partisan, grand standing republican congressional committee, AG Lynch was rightly cautious.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” George Orwell
As I said a week or so ago, they are becoming so blatant in their lying, storytelling, and general demeanor because they know there are no consequences to fear. They have won, they know it, and now are shoving it in everyone’s face. Lynch, Ginsburg, etc. are dancing their victory dance.
Meanwhile, despite what Eric claims, I don’t see much I can do about it here in marxist Connecticutsky. Unlike high school soccer (which I ref) when a player taunts the other team, you can throw them out of the game, but we can’t do that to these people as they sneer and taunt us. It is depressing.
Geoffrey Britain — I thought the language of Comey, Lynch, and Clinton was perfectly clear: “We’ve got this country by the balls, and there isn’t a goddam thing you can do about it.”
And some people supposedly on our side are so into self-righteousness that they’ll actively work to let these scum stay in power. Go figure!
physicsguy,
The view changes once you, which is to say, you and your team, begin competing in earnest in the arena.
Competing for your preferred paradigm, making a difference, is not magic. It’s not dominoes. But it is sequential. You try, you lose to your more-experienced, better situated, and equipped opponents, you learn, you apply what you learn, you find yourself making incremental progress amid the setbacks, you establish a beachhead, which becomes a center of gravity, you progress to your team tangibly warping the culture and social dynamics, and if your social activist movement keeps it up and string together enough wins, you make a difference.
Activism, the power of the people – it works. Not just for them. For you, too. It’s just human competitive endeavor, like any other kind of social competition.
Richard Saunders:
“And some people supposedly on our side are so into self-righteousness that they’ll actively work to let these scum stay in power. Go figure!”
They’re right in principle to oppose the Trump phenomenon.
They’re wrong in practice to not oppose it effectively – ie, with a zealous, smart, opportunistic, aggressively competitive social activist movement that plays the game to the hilt and relentlessly takes the fight to all sides in the arena.
A viable 3rd option is realistic this time, but it requires a – long overdue – permanently competitive social activist movement. Yet they don’t seem to be trying to establish what’s needed to compete for real.
Instead, even with the activist character of the game obvious, they’re still handicapped by the same activism-averse mindset that self-sabotaged versus the Democrat-front Left, then with the same glaring weaknesses exploited by the same formula, lost the GOP itself to the Left-modeled Trump phenomenon.
Lynch is not the first to take the “it’s too complex to give a simple answer” dodge. IIRC, Eric Holder used it, so did the IRS people, and I think the VA sequentially-useless-department-heads.
They can’t give a straight answer because they will either be (1) lying outright; or (2) admitting they are corrupt.
The problem for many of the conservatives is that in order to play the kind of activist game you (seem to) envision, (instead of the kind of traditional rule abiding activist game they were taught in civics class, and which under Demo administrations gets the IRS investigating you) is that you have to look at other “fellow citizens”, or many of them, as essentially, irremediably irrational creatures fit only for manipulation, rather than for fellowship and moral respect as political peers.
And if the Demos keep it up, they may just get conservatives to the same hostile point they have been at for decades.
Now, as we all know or have come to realize the left has no problem with this attitude in the first place. They shrug at the death of right reason, never considered conservatives as moral peers in the first place, and see all existence in terms of the mere conflict of self-justifying (or unjustifiable) appetites. “We like the direction of our urges better than we like yours, and we will use freely emotive language and political subterfuge to get what we want. End of story.” That, is the mental precursor or catalyst of modern liberalism itself: Neurotic resentment, free floating “values”, and a manipulative spirit.
However, accepting this activist enabling “principle” if you will, [and I am making serious assumptions about what you really mean when you say “activism,”] cuts across the grain of conservative moral sensibility in such a way that once embracing it, they no longer recognize what it is they are confronting anthropologically. To respect the opposition’s fellow humanity, is to refrain from “unjustly manipulating” them, is their cardinal moral rule. But to be activist, is to violate the restraints imposed by the rule.
To conclude then, that unjustly manipulating these opponents makes no moral difference, is to also to seemingly conclude that either these opponents or the system itself are no longer worth preserving in relationship, and that a more radical retrenchment is necessary.
That may not address your point squarely, but it is part of the equation. Recall the activism of the Boston Patriots. And then think about whether they were concerned about integrating loyalist punks back into their circle of associations, once they had won.
Conservatives, unlike the left, or the original patriots, imagine that we will have to be friends again when this is all over, and that trampling over the supposed agency of the opposition, is wrong.
Part of what they, conservatives, confront is their own moral inhibitions Eric, not just a lack of verve.
I think Clinton is going to blow Obama out of the water in terms of seeing just how horrible a person can be and yet still win the Presidency. God have mercy on this country.
And if we do not defeat the Left in the polls, we will eventually have to defeat them on the battleground.
Eric, you’re a very smart guy. How you can think that a 3rd option is viable at this time is beyond me. Even Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t win on a third party ticket. Anybody around today with the stature of Teddy? Puh-leaze!
Are you going to let these criminal scum destroy the Constitution? Are you going to let them sell off any asset of our country, any favor that can be granted, to line their own pockets? Are you going to let them continue to make us weaker and our enemies stronger?
The Evil Empress and her toadies are laughing their heads off at the Never Trumpers — “Can you believe these fools are working to get ME elected? Cackle, cackle, cackle!”
To quote Cher in Moonstruck, “Snap out of it!”
The Evil Empress and her toadies are laughing their heads off at the Never Trumpers – “Can you believe these fools are working to get ME elected? Cackle, cackle, cackle!”
Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it?
All it took was the STUPID PARTY to nominate someone who is not an authoritarian strongman with seemingly zero knowledge of the constitution (remember when conservatives cared about the constitution, five minutes ago?).
There’s almost no Republican nominee I wouldn’t support against Hillary, except for the one that the stupid party actually nominated.
Of course, this is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN OUR LIFETIMES and if we don’t fall for the Trump blackmail WE WILL ALL BE IN GULAGS and HILLARY WILL NAME HERSELF DICTATOR FOR LIFE and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, DIE, DIE!
We’ll survive. No way I vote for the arrogant, bloviating, bullying, know-nothing, winking racist, war-crime enthusiast, money-printing, trade war, self-promoting narcissist. No way I vote for HRC either. We’ll be better off in 2020 if we can dodge the alt-right bullet this time and maybe learn a few things.
Bill:
But Richard Saunders knows better. So fall in line.
A.G.Lynch beclowned herself, but her testimony is important: there is no Law. It doesn’t apply to people like Ms. Clinton.
Let me remind you of another Attorney General, A.G. Reno, who was confronted with an obvious violation of election law by V.P. Gore. Specifically, he admitted to using publicly funded infrastructure (telephones) for his campaign. Reno refused to prosecute or appoint an independent counsel. When asked about what the law said and what was actually done, Reno responded that it wasn’t against the law because she said so.
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
RE: “This cannot help Clinton. It cannot.”
And yet that doesn’t matter: she will be elected President. I hope that I’m wrong, but I don’t think that I am.
Bill – “We’ll be better off in 2020 if we can dodge the alt-right bullet this time and maybe learn a few things.”
Good luck with that!
Reading recently biography of Andrew Jackson I was astonished to recognize how closely he resembled Donald Trump in character, temperament and political instincts (such people hardly possess any political philosophies to speak about, but their political instincts are sharp and unmistakable, which gives them huge advantage over anybody with elaborate philosophies).
When Lynch’s confirmation hearings came up, I knew as Holder’s replacement she would be a partisan hack, and corrupt too since that’s what’s required to cover for Obama.
Every single person he’s appointed has been a hack or liar, usually both.
The more I think about it, the more I think the Dems made a big mistake. What they should have done was allow her to cop a plea to a misdemeanor Public Records Act violation, give her a fine like Petraeus, and the whole thing would have blown over.
But by letting her off scot-free, they made this an open sore which will last until the election, and, as the latest polls show, resounds with everybody except the total nitwits — anyone see Geraldo Rivera (the “news” person formerly known as Gerry Rivers) on Fox News Outnumbered yesterday?
“But by letting her off scot-free, they made this an open sore which will last until the election, and, as the latest polls show, resounds with everybody” – Richard S
Right. My theory is that it is part of the “calculus” behind Comey’s decision.
It is not as “open and shut” as we’d all like to believe, in large part because of the resources Clinton is able to bring to bear – financial, legal, and political. That’s the reality.
An acquittal would be a bonanza for Clinton (if it was early enough), and certainly for the Democrats overall (undoubtedly, they and the MSM would play this up as a modern day “lynching”).
Besides, if one doesn’t want the Dems to win the election, why risk knocking out one of their weakest candidates in a generation? As you point out, having this hang over her head leaves great dissatisfaction and reinforces her trust issue.
AND, it takes the weight off of Comey’s shoulders, as being the focal point of blame.
Was surprised to see a similar theory by conservative pundit Krauthammer…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/comey-a-theory/2016/07/07/297f9bd0-4478-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html