The Stages of #Russiagate Grief

I wish I could say that the long-awaited Meh Report, in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy and no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, spells the beginning of the end of the corporate Neocon wing of the Democratic Party and all its associates in the zombie establishment media.

 But I'd be fooling myself. Elite failures rarely go away. They simply fail upward. At the very worst, they temporarily disappear or go into propaganda rehab until such time that the public has moved on to the next new narrative or scandal. The more blatant cases will simply double down on their delusions for the foreseeable future.

Since Donald Trump is nothing if not a gleeful scandal of his own making, he will very likely make it ridiculously easy for the liberal failure class not only to survive, but thrive. He will scream "total exoneration!" and "witch hunt!" so many times that his words will lose their impact.

 Meanwhile, the primary media stakeholders of the #Russiagate franchise - MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post - are all churning violently in their various Five Stages of Grief whirlpools. As students of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross should know, the duration and the order of these stages are not set in psychological stone. They vary from person to person. They often overlap each other. And oftentimes, just when sufferers think they're finally cured, they revert back to the earlier stages.

This whole "closure" thing is a lot of malarkey.  

Therefore, just because Robert Mueller has gone from revered Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad who couldn't or wouldn't bring home the Siberian bacon doesn't mean that "the Russians" aren't still out to get us. After all, we have thus far only seen a synopsis of the report written by Trump-friendly Attorney General William Barr. There could be enough hidden nuanced nuggets lurking in the actual report to at least partially satisfy hungry true believers.

As the editorial board of the Times, wallowing in its own initial denial phase of #Russiagate grief, plaintively insisted:

We know that the Russian government interfered repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election, by hacking into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. We know that it did this with the goals of dividing Americans and helping Donald Trump win the presidency. We know that when top members of the Trump campaign learned about this interference, they didn’t just fail to report it to the F.B.I. They welcomed it. They encouraged it. They made jokes about it. On the same day that Mr. Trump publicly urged the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails, they began to do just that. And we know that when questioned by federal authorities, many of Mr. Trump’s top associates lied, sometimes repeatedly, about their communications with Russians. None of this is in dispute.

The Times continues to parrot the conventional wisdom that it was "the Russians" who hacked the Clinton emails, even though the Democratic Party relied on its own investigators to reach this conclusion and refused FBI access to its computer servers to prove the Russian connection one way or another. The newspaper still refuses to believe that there was no collusion, even though Trump was more of a passive partner than they originally claimed. He may have been the bottom half of the missionary position, but he still had relations with those Russians. At the very least, he lusts after Putin in his heart, and therefore he is still guilty as sin.

The second traditional stage of grief - Anger - is not yet the overwhelming symptom evident in the Media-Political Complex. #Russiagate grievers were still too shell-shocked on the morning after Mueller's death-knell to get overtly mad at him personally. Mueller has been too elevated to mythological, godlike status for too long for people to immediately turn against him. On the contrary, many are making excuses for him. As valiantly as he strove to cure the Trump cancer, the disease was too far advanced for even a prosecutorial Marcus Welby to tackle. This is especially true given that the body politic under attack by the Trump malignancy was in such horrible shape to begin with.

Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer pleads that Mueller couldn't indict Trump on obstruction of justice for the simple fact that the president has been acting out in full public view. The tumor was just too large and too slippery to excise:

This was apparently a significant consideration in the decision by Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosenstein not to prosecute (along with the determination that there was no underlying “collusion” legal offense). Here, once again, the president who is a demagogue — who is fully prepared to flout well-established, vitally important expectations about how American presidents faithfully execute the laws — can safely bring self-interested, self-protective pressure on the Department of Justice and undermine its public standing and authority.

In other words, Trump wasn't sneaky and occult enough. This is like claiming that it's easier to catch an embezzler than it is to nab an armed robber bumbling with guns a-blazing in broad daylight. Bauer's op-ed represents the overlapping stages of denial and bargaining, as he suggests that if only we had a stronger penal code, Trump might yet go to jail. All we need is the right legal miracle drug to catch this guy, juxtaposed with major changes in our legalized lifestyle regimens. It's the normalized shameless corruption, stupid!

Democratic politicians are similarly in bargaining mode. If only they can subpoena more miracle documents, then maybe, just maybe, the lucrative #Russiagate enterprise can remain on life support. If only they can raise enough money through a barrage of email appeals demanding that Barr "release the report now!," maybe the outcome will be different.

There's also a fair bit of pragmatic acceptance going on along with the understandable depression. Some pundits know when they're beat and already are urging the country to get over itself and move on.

And some Democratic leaders, like New York's Hakeem Jeffries, seem downright relieved that they finally have permission to collude with Trump, while they simultaneously investigate him, now that their manufactured Russia scare has largely outlived its political and monetary usefulness to them. The Mueller report has served the desired purpose of tamping down all that pesky impeachment talk and vindicating Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to go that route.

I hate to sound heartless here, but it's not as though the Russophobes weren't warned that their disease was terminal. As long ago as last October, legal experts were trying to impart the bad news in the gentlest possible terms. As Politico reported, 

The public, they say, shouldn't expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump -- not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths. Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller's findings may never even see the light of day.

And as recently as a month ago, Senate investigators themselves were trying to hammer home the sad fact that as hard as they'd tried, they too had found no evidence of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. All eyes then turned to Doc Mueller as the last best hope to come up with some factual crimes to fit their beloved conspiracy theories.

It must indeed be a buzzkill, after having spent more than two years of your life steadfastly performing conspiracy nursing duty, to suddenly discover that your seemingly viable patient has suddenly upped and died on you.  The demise of #Russiagate, to its devotees, must feel like losing a beloved family pet. To the most extreme among them, it might even feel like losing a child. 

So while I am not going to gleefully stomp all over irresponsible propagandists and #Russiagate birthers like Paul "beware the Siberian Candidate!" Krugman and Rachel "the Russians will freeze us to death!" Maddow, I do sincerely hope that they and their ilk will at least just quietly fade away for a week or a month and do their grieving and their bargaining and their teeth-gnashing in a dark closed room somewhere. Because thanks to them and hundreds of other handsomely paid corporate group-thinkers like them, this country has entered into another Cold War, complete with a renewed nuclear arms race.

Trump may have dodged an existential bullet. But the country and the world have not.