In the latest Andrew Heaton newsletter, a brief ode to CSI: Robert Mueller, which didn’t get enough of a ratings boost from this season to get renewed for next year:
The biggest news of the week is, of course, that the Supreme Court ruled a guy in Alaska can continue moose hunting on his hovercraft. (Thank God — if we can’t blast away at megafauna from a floating disk, why did we even bother fighting the British to begin with?!) After that spectacular work of jurisprudence from the highest court in the land, the second biggest news item is probably the Mueller report.
[…]
Back to the Mueller report. I didn’t really follow CSI: Robert Mueller over these last two seasons. For one thing, it seemed very complicated. One character got indicted over rugs. Another character got indicted over porn hush money. These always struck me as convoluted plot devices.
Secondly, I suspected that the Mueller report would wind up being more smoke than fire, so I decided not to do daily play-by-play’s, and instead focused my prodigious analysis on things like hover board moose hunting. (For example, if you shoot a moose while levitating, does the activity fall under FAA jurisdiction, or is it still under the purview of the Federal Moose Department, like everywhere else?)
My friends who breathlessly and repeatedly stated that Trump was hours away from a Watergate-level scandal seemed very confident the walls were closing in, and very eager to accumulate any and all ammunition to fire at the White House. For them, the Mueller investigation did not exist to determine whether or not the president colluded with Russia. Its purpose was to broadly accumulate sufficient material to impeach Trump with, on any charge capable of pulling it off. But that was never the remit of Mr. Mueller — nobody ever said, “Hey throw some spaghetti at impeachment charges until something sticks.”
To be clear, I am not a fan of Mr. Trump, nor would I hesitate to support his impeachment if presented with good evidence that he broke the law or unlawfully shot a moose from an unregistered hovercraft outside of designated moose-killing zones (MKZ). But if we’re going to go down the impeachment route, there needs to be a smoking gun and a clearly outlined felony charge. Removing the head of state from office through political guile and vague technicalities wouldn’t alleviate the staggering divisiveness Mr. Trump has bequeathed us, it would bake it in for two generations.
Despicable man-child though he may be, overall it’s a win for our country that its leader turned out to not collaborate with our arch-rivals to undermine democracy. That’s a net positive. I’ve become more Burkean during the Trump years, and worry about the institutional damage his relentless tantrums are inflicting on constitutional restraints, the veracity of courts, and the role of the media. I don’t want to add the validity of American elections to his collateral damage.
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