Bill Barr Has Trump Derangement Syndrome?

  

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump." Trump to Bill Barr last December

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” -Falsely attributed to George Orwell

In light of the GOP's breathtaking mendacity of late, it hardly rises to the level of irony that even when a Republ8ican tells the truth for a change, there's some self interest underpinning it, if not some criminal intent. Take Mitch McConnell's phone calls late last year to Bill Barr. In a bombshell article for the Atlantic, Jonathan Karl wrote,

 

          "Barr told me that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell had been urging him to speak out since mid-November. Publicly, McConnell had said nothing to criticize Trump’s allegations, but he told Barr that Trump’s claims were damaging to the country and to the Republican Party. Trump’s refusal to concede was complicating McConnell’s efforts to ensure that the GOP won the two runoff elections in Georgia scheduled for January 5."

     

     In fact, this is what Moscow Mitch had said to Barr through his Russian interpreter:

 

    “Look, we need the president in Georgia and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

 

     That's a lot to unpack from this admission and not a single bit of it looks flattering to either Barr, McConnell and especially Trump. In fact, this bombshell admission is so potentially legally actionable, it's difficult to parse why Barr thought saying this out loud to a reporter of Karl's standing was a good idea. So let's unpack it a little:

     McConnell, semen-flecked Russian fuck doll or not, isn't so far 'round the bend that he couldn't read the tea leaves from November 3rd. He knew Biden won, although he was loathe to publicly admit it for several weeks lest the orange baboon in the Oval Office have a brain seizure and start flinging his feces at McConnell's office door (which, of course, he wound up doing, anyway.)

     Knowing Biden would be the new president, McConnell wanted to hedge his bets by ensuring that either David Perdue or Kelly Loeffler would retain their seats so McConnell could remain Majority Leader and thwart Biden's agenda. So, rather than "frontally attacking" Trump, still seen at that moment as a useful idiot in the January 5th runoff elections, McConnell tried to use Barr as a political operative to shore up Republican voter confidence in the electoral process and especially regarding the mail in ballots that Trump still disparages to this day. Barr would do this by telling the American people the truth about the 2020 election:

    Namely, that there was no widespread voter fraud that would affect the 2020 election results. Barr had admitted as much to Michael Balsamo, a DOJ beat reporter at the AP. Later, Barr would repeat these asaertions on TV.

     Predictably, when the aforementioned baboon in the Oval Office heard about it, he called Barr on the presidential carpet and demanded to know if he'd said what he'd had to Balsamo. When Barr simply said, "Yes", the conversation kind of went downhill from that point on.

          “Did you say that?”

          “Yes,” Barr responded.

          “How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?"

          “Because it’s true.”

          The president*, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”

 

     In the third person, of course. Because he is, after all, the Donald. The Trump.

     The Donald, first and third person alike, wound up going off on McConnell, calling him "a dour,  unsmiling political hack" without the slightest trace of irony and would, of course, go on to sabotage both the Georgia Senate runoff races, thereby giving the Democrats the slightest possible advantage in the upper chamber.

    It was the biggest gamble ever taken in Moscow Mitch's long career and it blew up in his triple-chinned puss like a prank cigar the size of Long Island.

   So, Mitch's gambit cost Barr his job, although he would've been out in seven weeks, anyway, McConnell lost his position as Majority Leeder and the GOP lost control of the Senate for at least the next two years.

   And this is the guy, this political suicide vest bomber, to which the establishment GOP is still clinging in 2022?

     Yeah, good luck with that, old boys.