Until the day he walked into a pair of House committees and looked like a lost little boy who couldn’t remember where he left his cookies, Robert Mueller was the strongest, toughest, smartest man who had ever lived. He was the Chuck Norris of Albert Einsteins.
If you don’t remember the way the news media talked about Mueller, go back and read this NBC News story from March 23, 2019. It’s a long swoon in prose form from a reporter who clearly thought, like most journalists, that Mueller was a dreamboat, and please do note that the opening paragraph praises the man’s amazing hair. Mueller “isn’t someone you want to be on the wrong side of.” He was “probably America’s straightest arrow, very by-the-book, very professional.” He demanded that others live by his example, demonstrating “integrity, patience and humility.” Did Robert Mueller walk on water? He probably could have, but he was just too modest to even bother to try.
Because Mueller was so tough and strong and smart and handsome and amazing and glorious and brilliant and wonderful, Mean Orange Man was doomed. This theme was everywhere all the time. Sample Newsweek story: “Donald Trump Knows Walls Are Closing In As Mueller Report Looms, Ex-Presidential Adviser Says.” There was just no way a towering figure like Mueller could investigate someone without delivering a brutal and inevitable justice. Mueller is going after Trump, so Trump is done. We heard a couple years of this, daily.
And then Mueller testified before those House committees, and he was a pathetic human punchline: lost, empty, at least borderline senile, unable to understand questions, unable to give a straight answer under any circumstances.
If someone had asked the man if he was wearing shoes, he would have needed a moment to study his feet.
The effect, after two-plus years of soaring hagiography, was not unlike seeing the little man behind the curtain who pulls the levers to make Dorothy think she’s being addressed by the Wizard of Oz. Spoiler alert about the end of the story: Trump survived the Mueller Report.
A few years later, the stunningly brilliant and breathtakingly accomplished prosecutor Jack Smith began to investigate Donald Trump, and Smith was so tough and smart that the walls started to close in on Trump again. Lather, rinse, repeat. The mindless adult children who type up the narrative of the day for the American political class never appear to notice that they keep getting the same script with new names scratched in.
In both cases, there was evidence that could have been piled onto the other side of the scale. There was at least an appearance of scandal in Mueller’s past, and Smith had a remarkable record of defeat as a prosecutor. But they were going after Trump, so they were brilliant and tough. The media’s pathetic need for someone to get their least favorite president meant that anyone who tried to do the job had to be amazing. If the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man had gone after Trump, the stunningly brilliant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man would have received glowing coverage from Politico and The Hill. The need preceded the evidence, and the stenographers typed up the whatever.
Much as the media has invented a series of fake heroes to boldly go after Trump, they’ve also faked up a set of rising political superstars who were or are about to change absolutely everything about the country’s partisan divide. Brilliant new Democrats emerge seasonally, like pumpkins. Remember how important Wendy Davis was in Vogue and Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine? Today, Wendy Davis is … still alive, I think, but I’d have to check.
Then came Beto, who was about to turn Texas blue in both his failed Senate race and his failed gubernatorial campaign, with the inevitable Vanity Fair cover shot that put him out on a dirt road with an ol’ dog and some jeans.
And so now we get the utterly ludicrous James Talarico, the alleged “36-Year-Old Bible Scholar,” who talks to Texans in a traditional religious vernacular about things that speak to their hearts, like transgendered people needing abortions.
Because he’s an important Bible scholar, Talarico had a deep discussion with Bulwark nitwit Tim Miller this week about God’s penis size: “How big is God’s sausage, would you say?” Miller asked. Remember that everyone at the Bulwark self-presents as the beating heart of true conservative ideology, and Talarico self-presents as the true face of real Christian faith, and then watch these two idiots gibber at each other:
Note that Talarico goes on to say that he made his controversial comments about God’s non-binary gender identity when he was speaking on the floor of the Texas legislature, standing up to “the extremists” and their obscene politics. Specifically, he was fighting to keep trans-identifying boys in girl’s sports, opposing efforts to limit athletic competition on the basis of biological gender. He lost. The extremists had the majority, comfortably, and made law, while Talarico’s decent and responsible mainstream sat out on the cultural margins. See how that works? Like journalists who tell you that Talarico is important, Talarico himself sits a thousand yards away from the Overton Window and depicts himself as a man centered in the narrative windowframe.
Wendy Davis is a rising national superstar, the walls are closing in on Donald Trump because the brilliant investigator Robert Mueller has him dead to rights, and Texas is on fire for James Talarico’s sophisticated religious wisdom. We live with a steady stream of this tiresome trash, and we call it news.
