OPINION:
The best-laid schemes of rats and politicians gang aft agley, as the poet Bobby Burns might put it, and this is a lesson that events have been trying to teach Democrats embittered by losing the 2016 election since shortly after all the votes were counted. But Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and their ilk in the big media just can’t get a grasp on reality. The Cohen show this week was another bust.
Robert Mueller had yet to put the Donald on the “perp walk” the Democrats have been dreaming of for lo! these many months, so Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants in the party set out to do it because the natives were getting restless. Christmas is slow in coming, but the special prosecutor (nee special counsel) could give anybody lessons on how to delay, loiter and linger.
Michael Cohen, who was once the president’s lawyer, was the latest man with all the answers and the House Judiciary Committee gave him a full day and then some to spill what he knew. At the end of the day all we learned from him is that, for whatever reason, Mr. Cohen doesn’t like the president very much. He described him as a con man, a cheat, and in the all-purpose accusation so popular in the current American conversation, a “racist.” He said he had lied about just everything for years, but now he’s telling the truth.
He had nothing to say about a collusion by Donald Trump and the Russians to cook the 2016 election, only “suspicions,” and he didn’t spend much time telling the congressmen about what they didn’t already know. The congressmen assembled — the word includes those of all 232 sexes and genders — did not press him on this, not wanting to digress from their hatred and contempt for the president, the only point of their inquiry. No one remembers the Russian-Trump collusion, if any, anyway.
Mr. Cohen said he wants to get the sordid stuff off his chest before he has to start three years in prison for campaign finance violations, tax fraud, bank fraud and lying to Congress. He says he wants to take a clean conscience to his new life in a cell, which may not be an easy life. Giovanni Gambino, an heir to one of the most fearsome New York crime families, sent a message to Mr. Cohen in an interview with the London Daily Mail: “Inmates love Trump, and hate rats. If he wants to get out alive, he better keep his mouth shut about Trump.”
Sleaze is the mother’s milk in the circles where Mr. Cohen — and, to be sure, Donald Trump — played fast and loose with everybody in an earlier day. Disclosures of Trumpian mischief are hardly disclosures to shock anyone.
Mr. Cohen displayed checks from Mr. Trump as evidence that the president had been on speaking terms with hookers, hustlers, lawyers of low repute and the greatest collection of grifters and rogues since Harry the Horse, Nathan Detroit and others of the cast of “Guys and Dolls” roamed the sewers of Manhattan. Didn’t we already know that?
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