Josh Marshall: The Gravity Is Strong

[babylonsister]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-gravity-is-strong

The Gravity Is Strong

By Josh Marshall
Published March 2, 2017, 8:52 AM EDT


I don't have a clear sense of how big a deal last night's Jeff Sessions news will turn out to be. And I mean that both substantively - how much does it really matter? - and more generally - how will it be perceived, what effect will it have on the course of the broader story? As I wrote last night, this is much more about Sessions' need to conceal the meeting than the meeting itself.

My biggest takeaway is that this scandal has all the attributes of the vast and shattering scandals in which people who at least appear to have only indirect or limited roles themselves keep getting pulled under or compromised by it. I know "vast and shattering" is a pretty portentous phrase. Certainly, this revelation itself doesn't shake anything to its foundations. But why did Sessions have this meeting at all? It seems at best ill-conceived, coming in the heat of allegations of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia last Fall.

Far more baffling, why did he choose to conceal it?


snip//

We've all heard the old saw: It's never the crime, it's the cover-up. This is almost never true. Covering scandals for any length of time is enough to tell you that. People are generally able to make judgments about how much trouble they're in. We think the 'cover up' is worse than the crime because it's actually very seldom that the full scope of the actual crime is ever known. The cover up works better than you think. The other reason the cover up is a logical response is that it usually works. You only find out about it when it doesn't. So it's a good bet.

Astronomers can't see black holes directly. They map them by their event horizon and their effect on nearby stars and stellar matter. We can't see yet what's at the center of the Trump/Russia black hole. But we can tell a lot about its magnitude by the scope of the event horizon and the degree of its gravitational pull, which is immense.

[CincyDem]

1. Totally off subject but..."the event horizon" has always been one of my favorite phrases. lol n/t

[alterfurz]

6. we crossed the event horizon of the Trump Singularity...

...sometime back in the Reagan era, and to outside observers in Europe and elsewhere, American democracy long ago disappeared deep down the rabbit hole.

[wishstar]

7. Yes, and the reference to Trump's win as a "Black Swan event"

[Wounded Bear]

2. Good read...nt

[vlyons]

3. Gravity never stops working

If you don't keep your feet under you, you will fall. Looks to me like Trump world is tottering mightily. Trump must have crapped his pants a load last night.

[littlemissmartypants]

13. Doubtful. Sociopaths are convinced they're invincible.

He might be honing his 'A' game blame game though.

[Eyeball_Kid]

4. Do we want to get closer to the "event horizon"? We'll get closer with "TAX RETURNS".

[lagomorph777]

12. We need a patriot inside the IRS.

There is surely somebody in there who is nearing retirement, and can take no more of this crap.

[FarPoint]

5. I totally agree...

But, but...Congress and this Mafia Administration...they will do everything to prevent this from happening...How do we actually make this come to the legal system?

[babylonsister]

8. Judging from what I am seeing on the tube, this

is probably going to be the case that you can't get that toothpaste back into the tube. It's getting way too much play to be swept under the rug.

[FarPoint]

9. Fingers Crossed!!

[Bernardo de La Paz]

10. JM has a crucial point: "Why did he choose to conceal the meeting?"

The coverup is the keyway into the crime. The coverup cracks before the core is discovered.

Why did Sessions need to lie to coverup the meeting.

But also, and perhaps even more importantly, why did Sessions answer a general question about the campaign's contacts with a specific answer about his contacts?

Was Sessions trying to direct attention away from other deeper campaign contacts that he knew about?

Sessions did not get to where he is by being careless, but he may have gotten involved deeper than he ever expected, due to the gravity of the situation, if we may say it that way.

[lagomorph777]

11. Fantastic analogy.

That's also the way Dark Matter is mapped, and in this case (as in the rest of the Universe) there appears to be a whopping huge amount of Dark Matter.

[Demsrule86]

14. I think they were plotting the Russian hacks at that meeting as Sen.Amy...

Klobuchar pointed out, the timing is very suspicious...the guilty flee where no man pursueth.

[gratuitous]

15. Once again it turns out proper

I don't remember specifically who tweeted it a few weeks ago, but the gist of the tweet was that everything you hear about the Trump administration always turns out worse than was first reported.

[Cha]

16. "Far more baffling, why did he choose to conceal it?"

Exactly. Is he just a little chickenshit.. or is there more nefarious shite behind it?