Why I Still Have Questions For Bill Barr, One Year After Our Last Conversation

TPM Article Topics
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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1322311
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And what we have seen then is a significant increase in violent crime in many cities. And this rise is a direct result of the attack on the police forces and the weakening of police forces.

Would those be the same police forces whose equipment changed from sidearms and squad cars to grenades and tanks?

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Bill Barr is the Roy Cohn of John Ehrlichmans.

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I hastily looked at your post and liked it…and I, in my haste, took “John Ehrlichman” to be “Adolf Eichmann”.

So I “like” your post and my imaginary one.

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You’ll get honest answers to your questions if and only if live electrodes, triggered to detect a lie, are attached to his gonads. When he lies, he gets zapped.

That’s when you’ll get honest answers (after the first question or two, as he tests whether you really mean it).

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”I Still Have Questions For Bill Barr…”

”What other snack foods do you enjoy besides Klatooine paddy frogs?”

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Barr’s public statements show that he is a zealot with a slanted view of who is good and who is bad. Like Justice Thomas, he basically has a Natural Law view, which you can see in this piece:

this basic tension between justice in the sense of the ultimate outcome versus justice as a process

Good people deserve leniency even if they break the law, bad people deserve the unmarked vans even if they don’t. Judicial process is a means to the end of compelling the bad to respect the good’s property rights. In his mind, he no doubt imagines the good as white, and the bad as brown. And like a more circumspect Lou Dobbs, he sees in Trump a champion with the same priorities, and a gift to manipulate others into giving him power.

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Barr, Trump and the rest of this Keystone Cops administrations seem to have forgotten that the Constitution was created to protect the people from government, NOT to protect the government from the people. They have been trying to invent an entirely new country with a mere minuscule portion of the wisdom and intelligence of our founders and their successor leaders.

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And they are getting entirely too close to succeeding.

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Whoever replaces Barr at the DoJ is going to have to do some housecleaning to build trust in the institution again. They have gone along with Barr and Trump on so many things, things that they really should have set aside instead of attempting to pursue as government positions, and our system can’t be just if it varies wildly depending on who the president is. We will need new barriers to interference in investigations, a DoJ that pursues the law above all else, and the ability to remove a corrupt prosecutor by law instead of depending on impeachment by a corrupt political party.

The damage to the judicial system may be Trump’s most lasting, and most damaging, legacy…creating a questionable judicial system shakes the very foundations of our democracy, and allows bad actors to take advantage of it. That has to be fixed for the nation to survive.

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The DoJ, and really pretty much any institution in the Federal Government, will lack credibility unless some very senior individuals are prosecuted. Barr would be number one on that list.

This aspect is problematic. If the DoJ is corrupt in itself, then prosecution of any individual within that system is unlikely. This is why the human carbuncle is still in place.

Our system of government only works if people play by the rules, and act in good faith.

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That’s the Stephen Miller analogy, two doors down.

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Nice article!

Barr: …but then we had this extreme reaction that has demonized police… And what we have seen then is a significant increase in violent crime in many cities. And this rise is a direct result of the attack on the police forces…

No. It was the direct result of a police murder.

Another one.

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Our financial system depends on that too.

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It kinda makes you wonder if Barr is going to miss the days when he could pass for a decent human being with everyday people…

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So Barr is what Stephen Miller will be thirty years from now - a lackey AG of another idiot criminal President?

What a frightening prospect! Happily, I, being 72 now, will not be around to see the ultimate demolition of the idea of the USA.