Summary: Tomorrow is Armistice Day; 100 years ago tomorrow the Great War came to an end with a cease-fire between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. A century later, much of the world as we know it has been ineluctably shaped by the events of those four years which represented the death agonies of the 19th century and the birth pangs of the 20th. We, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long post-World War II peace, live in a world largely shaped by the events of 1914-1918 and by those of 1939-1945. Even now, we owe an incalculable debt to those who fought and died, whose bones are part of the soil over which they fought. From the rising of the sun to its going down, we will remember them.
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Cathedral City - November 10, 2018. One hundred years ago tomorrow the Great War ended, with an armistice signed aboard a railroad car assigned to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on a siding at Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne in the Oise Département, in France. Representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers and representatives of what became the Weimar Republic of Germany signed the armistice document during the predawn hours between 5:12 and 5:20 a.m.
As is now well known, the armistice between The Allied and Associated Powers and Germany would go into effect with a cease-fire at 11:00 a.m. that day, the Famous Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month.
The armistice of Compiègne represented the last in a series of armistices which had taken the other Central Powers, one by one, out of the Great War, starting with Bulgaria on September 29, 1918, the Ottoman Empire on October 30, 1918, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 3, 1918.
Germany, the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice, had suffered the most immediate and far-reaching of the political consequences that befell the Central Powers as a result of the Great War. Germany, at that time a Confederation of various quasi-sovereign states, suffered a more or less complete breakdown of its political structure. The 27 constituent units of the Reich included four kingdoms, including Prussia – by far the dominant constituent of the Empire, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, the three “Free Hanseatic Cities” of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the occupied, formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
As a result of the collapse of the Empire in early November, 1918, only the three Free Hanseatic Cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck emerged at the end of the War with anything even resembling their original quasi-republican forms of government. In the rest of the Reich, Kaisers, Kings, Grand Dukes, Dukes, and Princes had fled or abdicated, leaving the pinchbeck panoply of the German monarchies in dust and shambles around them.
The collapse of Imperial Germany led by stages first to the Weimar Republic, then to the Third Reich, and now, after a second world war, to a new, reunified Germany that has actually incarnated the promise of freedom and democracy represented by the Weimar Republic. Indeed, for more than 60 years, the Bundesrepublik, with its stubbornly Atlanticist statesmen and stateswomen, has been one of the strongest bulwarks of the Atlantic Alliance. The Bundesrepublik has also been one of the strongest and most dependable proponents of a united Europe.
Yet, the history of Europe is not the history of Germany alone. When the Great War ended, it had exacted a fearsome price from the Allies as much as it had from the Central Powers. As Winston Churchill described the end of the Great War in the United Kingdom, “[v]ictory ha[d] been bought at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” In both the U.K. and in France, virtually an entire generation had marched off to war in 1914 singing songs of battle and imagining that they would be home by Christmas. Yet that optimistic generation that had marched off to war in August, 1914 never came home.
That optimistic generation, reared in the self-confidence of the 19th century, became the first casualties of the industrial scale war that has come to be so much the hallmark of our calamitous 20th and 21st centuries. Writing in The World Crisis, Winston Churchill had described “the old world in its sunset[, so] fair to see.” “Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace.” Within four years, from the awful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that price-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, right through to the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, 1918, countless Europeans had lost their lives, many of them in squalid trenches far from the accumulated treasures of the long peace. If the events of Sarajevo were the death knell for the 19th century, the events of the Great War may with equal felicity be described as the birth pangs of the 20th.
But as much as the events of the Great War may be described as the birth pangs of the 20th century, they may also be described as the necessary predicates of the 21st.
For truthfully, we live in a world order that is very much shaped by the events of the Second World War, which in their turn were ineluctably shaped by the events of the Great War. If Germany today is a necessary bulwark of the Atlantic Alliance, it is because of the vision of German statesmen like Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, whose respective commitments to building a united Europe and to laying long-lead foundations for the reunification of the German nation have very much made Europe what is today.
Additionally, we cannot speak of the United States as the world’s “indispensable” nation without acknowledging how the Great War played so large a part in accelerating America’s industrial development and advancing the United States in status from a regional power to an undisputed Great Power. If, in 1914, the United States was considered the preeminent power in the Americas, by 1918 she had become one of the four to five preeminent powers in the world. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the foundations for the post World War II pax Americana were laid at Château Thierry, at Belleau Wood, and in the Meuse-Argonne.
In short, as we commemorate the Centennial of the armistice at Compiègne tomorrow, we, in our 21st century world, lapped in the accumulated treasures of a long post-World War II peace, must not forget the debt we owe to our dead, many of whose bones have become part of the soil on which they fought. They were the attendants at the birth of the 20th century in which we still, numbers on the calendar notwithstanding, live. Those of us of a certain age, who may be old enough to remember the 50th anniversary of the Armistice, should know and appreciate the meaning of the Eleventh hour of the Eleventh day of the Eleventh month.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
-Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, St. 4, 1914
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Thursday, November 8, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: NOVEMBER 8, 2018
Summary: With the 2018 midterms now all over, “bar the shouting,” Democrats seem to have done passably well. Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped, but nevertheless, it delivered us control of the House of Representatives, numerous state governorships, and results in some local races that merit further discussion.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
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The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
* * * * *
Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
--------------------------------------------
The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
* * * * *
Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
KEEP THE CAMEL IN THE TENT, PISSING OUT
Summary: It did not take long for the reality show huckster masquerading as the president of the United States to manifest his anger over the results of last night’s midterm elections. The Democratic recapture of the House of Representatives demanded, in Trump’s mind, a sacrifice to be laid upon the altar of his psychopathology. Thus, the long expected ouster of Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions can respond either by slinking back to Alabama to lick his wounds, by writing a tell-all opus akin to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, or by disclosing everything he knows about Trump to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Trump, who apparently hasn’t got the common sense God gave an axolotl, seems to have forgotten the old-fashioned Washington wisdom distilled by Lyndon Johnson in the unforgettable phrase “it’s better to have a camel inside the tent pissing out then to have it outside the tent pissing in.”
The “Kremlin watchers” who study The Donald and The Donald’s reality show of an administration predicted, with almost uncanny accuracy, what the reality show huckster masquerading as President of the United States would do if Aonami (the Blue Wave) materialized in yesterday’s midterm elections.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had to deal with the junior hominids commonly referred to as children. Unlike puppies or kittens or ducklings, junior hominids are not cute or cuddly. In fact, the toddler stage is particularly obnoxious, both for adult and child. Sadly, the Republic has been oppressed for the last two years by the existence of a toddler in the Oval Office. The toddler in the Oval generally communicates his displeasure with untoward events through temper tantrums and relationship-sundering terminations. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who tried to trademark the phrase “you’re fired!”
So, in the wake of Aonami, when Donald Trump let his temper go, the first casualty, the first sacrifice upon the altar of The Donald’s insensate ego was his much-maligned Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions may be the first casualty of Aonami in the executive branch, but he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he goes the way of numerous senior Administration officials who have somehow displeased the Maximum Leader.
However, with Sessions having departed from the administration, we may wonder what the quondam Attorney General’s response to this unceremonious dumping may be. At one end of the spectrum, Sessions can return to Alabama to lick his wounds, soliciting a position on the faculty of the law school at the University of Alabama and finding himself involved in bitter bickering with faculty members who will have no reason to hold him in much, if any, regard, and every possible motivation to seek discipline of Sessions’ professional licensure up to, and potentially including, disbarment.
Or, not desiring to incur the enmity of an outraged professoriate, Sessions may seek, and possibly find, a position with either a white shoe Washington City law firm or as a highly compensated K Street lobbyist. Such employment would free Mr. Sessions to write the inevitable tell-all book, somewhat like Bob Woodward’s recent opus Fear or perhaps Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s slim volume entitled Unhinged. If Sessions were to pen such a work, it would no doubt quickly find itself on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.com.
The third option, and the one most damaging to Donald Trump and his administration is that Sessions may decide to make a clean breast of things with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It is known throughout the government that prior to the Trump Administration taking office, Sessions did have meetings with representatives of the Russian State which he then denied having during his Senate confirmation hearings.
That’s perjury.
In addition to being an offense for which an attorney can be disbarred in his jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure, perjury before the Senate about contacts with representatives of the Kremlin also puts Sessions fairly in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation.
It would not be surprising therefore to find that Mr. Sessions, presumably desiring to avoid either incarceration or professional discipline in his jurisdiction of licensure, would want to make the best possible deal with the Special Counsel. If, as is been suggested, the entire thrust of Japanese diplomacy after November, 1942, was to bring about an end to the Pacific War on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, so too, in the instant case, Sessions may find himself in negotiations with Special Counsel Mueller to obtain the best terms he can. After all, it would be a hell of a come down for a former senator and a former Attorney General of the United States to find himself rusticating in a federal correctional facility somewhere.
We cannot know what political goodies or things of value Jeff Sessions may be able to offer to Mueller’s team. But it is not unreasonable to expect that any proffer from Sessions to Mueller will probably be very substantial. The more substantial the proffer, the greater degree of risk it represents to the Trump administration. For Sessions, the safest course may be to limber up his vocal cords and be prepared to sing like a canary, lest the almost inevitable discovery of substantial Administration wrongdoing leave him with no cards to play.
He should do so quickly, and secure some measure of protection from congressional subpoenas, before incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff or Incoming House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings can have a chance to make mincemeat of him on national television.
Trump may find, according to the line from the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, that "having is not nearly so pleasing a thing after all is wanting;" or put in another, more Lyndon Johnson-esque way, it would have been better not to have fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, because is better to have a camel in the tent pissing out then do have one outside the tent pissing in.
The “Kremlin watchers” who study The Donald and The Donald’s reality show of an administration predicted, with almost uncanny accuracy, what the reality show huckster masquerading as President of the United States would do if Aonami (the Blue Wave) materialized in yesterday’s midterm elections.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had to deal with the junior hominids commonly referred to as children. Unlike puppies or kittens or ducklings, junior hominids are not cute or cuddly. In fact, the toddler stage is particularly obnoxious, both for adult and child. Sadly, the Republic has been oppressed for the last two years by the existence of a toddler in the Oval Office. The toddler in the Oval generally communicates his displeasure with untoward events through temper tantrums and relationship-sundering terminations. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who tried to trademark the phrase “you’re fired!”
So, in the wake of Aonami, when Donald Trump let his temper go, the first casualty, the first sacrifice upon the altar of The Donald’s insensate ego was his much-maligned Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions may be the first casualty of Aonami in the executive branch, but he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he goes the way of numerous senior Administration officials who have somehow displeased the Maximum Leader.
However, with Sessions having departed from the administration, we may wonder what the quondam Attorney General’s response to this unceremonious dumping may be. At one end of the spectrum, Sessions can return to Alabama to lick his wounds, soliciting a position on the faculty of the law school at the University of Alabama and finding himself involved in bitter bickering with faculty members who will have no reason to hold him in much, if any, regard, and every possible motivation to seek discipline of Sessions’ professional licensure up to, and potentially including, disbarment.
Or, not desiring to incur the enmity of an outraged professoriate, Sessions may seek, and possibly find, a position with either a white shoe Washington City law firm or as a highly compensated K Street lobbyist. Such employment would free Mr. Sessions to write the inevitable tell-all book, somewhat like Bob Woodward’s recent opus Fear or perhaps Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s slim volume entitled Unhinged. If Sessions were to pen such a work, it would no doubt quickly find itself on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.com.
The third option, and the one most damaging to Donald Trump and his administration is that Sessions may decide to make a clean breast of things with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It is known throughout the government that prior to the Trump Administration taking office, Sessions did have meetings with representatives of the Russian State which he then denied having during his Senate confirmation hearings.
That’s perjury.
In addition to being an offense for which an attorney can be disbarred in his jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure, perjury before the Senate about contacts with representatives of the Kremlin also puts Sessions fairly in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation.
It would not be surprising therefore to find that Mr. Sessions, presumably desiring to avoid either incarceration or professional discipline in his jurisdiction of licensure, would want to make the best possible deal with the Special Counsel. If, as is been suggested, the entire thrust of Japanese diplomacy after November, 1942, was to bring about an end to the Pacific War on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, so too, in the instant case, Sessions may find himself in negotiations with Special Counsel Mueller to obtain the best terms he can. After all, it would be a hell of a come down for a former senator and a former Attorney General of the United States to find himself rusticating in a federal correctional facility somewhere.
We cannot know what political goodies or things of value Jeff Sessions may be able to offer to Mueller’s team. But it is not unreasonable to expect that any proffer from Sessions to Mueller will probably be very substantial. The more substantial the proffer, the greater degree of risk it represents to the Trump administration. For Sessions, the safest course may be to limber up his vocal cords and be prepared to sing like a canary, lest the almost inevitable discovery of substantial Administration wrongdoing leave him with no cards to play.
He should do so quickly, and secure some measure of protection from congressional subpoenas, before incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff or Incoming House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings can have a chance to make mincemeat of him on national television.
Trump may find, according to the line from the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, that "having is not nearly so pleasing a thing after all is wanting;" or put in another, more Lyndon Johnson-esque way, it would have been better not to have fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, because is better to have a camel in the tent pissing out then do have one outside the tent pissing in.
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