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by Andrew_Archive
It s embarrassing to recall just how absurdly some people elevated Mueller, and how much faith was placed in him. Memes compared Mueller to Superman, or portrayed him as a top cop who was secretly fitting Trump for an orange jumpsuit. He appeared on votive candles and earrings. SNL sang him a Christmas carol. There was an action figure.But faith in Mueller was born of desperation. He was an ageing Republican bureaucrat, with no track record of seriously challenging people in power. He had been an apologist for the Iraq war and mass surveillance, and a reliable servant of the DC establishment. It took a great deal of wishful thinking to envision Mueller as a caped crusader. Looking back, it s quite obvious that people were simply seeing something that wasn t there: œMueller projects a pragmatism “ a political strain of normcore ¦ that has come to suggest ¦ a veiled promise: that shady facts will find their light. There was no such promise, veiled or otherwise. Like the idea that Barack Obama harbored a secret radical socialist deep within, this was simply imaginative fancy. Mueller was a cautious centrist through and through.[...]The Russia scandal was the fruit of a badly flawed political ideology. It is a kind of West Wing view of political power that believes change happens behind closed doors in Washington, rather than as the result of mass mobilization. You don t need to go out and convince new voters to join your party, or offer them a clear policy agenda. Instead, smart, highly credentialed lawyers will save the day. And Donald Trump didn t win because he tapped in to an authentic popular anger that needs to be addressed, but because dastardly foreign agents rigged the game.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nt-fantasy