I swear, these people have lost their ever-lovin' minds. They have snipped their last tethers to reality and gone floating off into a fantasy land of their own creation.
Take our own U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, Republican from Georgia. In a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Collins joined his GOP colleagues in confronting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein over the supposed partisan, anti-Trump conspiracy that is the Mueller investigation. Like his colleagues, Collins focused his questions on one Peter Strzok, a top FBI counterintelligence official whom Mueller removed from his investigation back in July.
According to the Justice Department, Strzok was reassigned after private emails surfaced in which Strzok had been critical of then-candidate Donald Trump. Justice officials have said repeatedly that his reassignment was a precaution, not a punishment, but that didn't satisfy Collins, who demanded to know whether Strzok's security clearance had been revoked or suspended as a result of those emails.
No, it had not, Rosenstein said warily, uncertain where this was headed.
"Why would it NOT be"? asked Collins, who also went on to ask whether Strzok had been forced to submit to a polygraph test.
Why would it not be?
By what possible thread of logic does expressing criticism of Trump in private conversations during a heated presidential campaign mean that you later ought to be stripped of your security clearance and thus your career as a top U.S. expert in counterintelligence?
You strip someone's security clearance when you have reason to doubt a person's loyalty to the country, or their honesty, not because of insufficient loyalty to some politician. If expressing doubt about Trump's competence and judgment are grounds to disqualify somebody from intel work, then you've written off most of the American people at this point.
And unfortunately, Collins was hardly the worst. In that same hearing, to cite just one more example, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio not only demanded that the Mueller probe be ended immediately, dead in its tracks, but that a second special counsel be appointed to investigate the criminality of the first special counsel.
“I’m here to tell you, Mr. Rosenstein, that I think the public trust in this whole thing is gone,” Jordan said.
And of course, all of this is being echoed and amplified at Fox News, which is parading an endless string of conspiracy nuts before its cameras. "I think the FBI's been compromised," says Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, one of the marchers in that parade. "Forget about shutting down Mr. Mueller. Do we need to shut down the FBI because it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration?"
Again, these people are lost in their own conspiracy-addled minds, and they're not even very good at it.
A successful conspiracy theory is generally constructed on a series of believable assertions that lead the unwary to an otherwise unbelievable conclusion. Do parts of the American Southwest look like a moonscape? Yes. Did astronauts train in places like that for a moon landing? Yes. Therefore, the moon landing was a fake filmed in the American Southwest.
In this case, however, the conspiracy theory requires you to buy, as an opening premise, that a conservative institution such as the FBI has been transformed into a nest of treacherous liberals. Then you have to believe that this nest of treason is being led by the likes of Mueller, a Republican of the old-school variety who was initially appointed as head of the FBI by President George W. Bush. You also have to believe that they are being protected by Rosenstein, a Republican appointed by Bush as a U.S. attorney and to the federal bench, and by current FBI Director Chris Wray, a Trump appointee who over the years has donated at least $35,000 to political candidates or causes, all of them Republican.
The right-wing fantasy extends to their belief that their delusions about Mueller are widely shared, meaning that they have no idea how isolated they really are politically. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, for example, "American voters say 60-27 percent that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is conducting a fair investigation." A Washington Post/ABC poll found similar numbers.
And in a new Pew poll, 59 percent of Americans say the Trump campaign definitely or probably had "improper contact with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign." That's almost twice the percentage who say they doubt such contact occurred.
Those numbers tell us nothing about the actual level and extent of contact between the Trump campaign and Russia. That's something that we need Mueller's investigation to reveal. However, those poll numbers do tell us a lot about public sentiment. They tell us that outside the Fox bubble in which these people reside, nobody is buying this conspiracy nonsense. They also tell us that as Republican politicians and conservative media whip each other into something approaching mass hysteria, the vast majority of Americans would strongly oppose any effort to fire Mueller and try to short-circuit his important work.
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