Monday, June 19, 2017

First, You Take a Leek (in DC at Least)

Way back before the Food Network was a glimmer in someone's eye, there was a fellow by the name of Graham Kerr.  Mr. Kerr had a syndicated TV cooking show nearly 50 years back, titled The Galloping Gourmet.  The show was actually a pretty funny watch, and I enjoyed it way back when.  Kerr is English (he is still around at 83), and even then his accent carried half the show by itself.

He was known for a few idiosyncracies in his show.  For example, he had a glass of wine with him that he would periodically sip from, a bit curious in its day when you didn't do a lot of drinking on air.  He would tell the audience he would have a "little slurp" and take a drink, sipping from his glass.  "Little slurp" is still in our home conversation to this day.

Another was that when he was preparing vegetables for his dish, he would often use leeks as one of his ingredients, and as he narrated his activities, he would invariably reach into the container of leeks and say "... and then you take a leek ..." and stop and look out to the studio audience with a pause and a smile.

I don't know how old the reporters on the Washington Post and the New York Times are, or whether any of them recall the Galloping Gourmet.  But you would tend to think so, because it would appear that the homonymous "take a leak" phrase appears to be their #1 guidance for how to make a story, or make a story up, if you please.

That came up on Friday morning, when each of the aforementioned "news" outlets (you do have to throw those in quotes; if it ain't news they're printing, they're not really news outlets) had its own article about what the Special Counsel's investigation is doing in regard to their pursuit of ... well, we don't know what.

One, for example, blasted out the word that the investigation was supposed to be digging into the president's son-in-law (and White House advisor) Jared Kushner's financial dealings.  Now, that may or may be true, that they are looking into Kushner's financial affairs.  We might wonder why, since to this date there has been absolutely nothing that indicates that there has been any colluding with Russians in regard to the 2016 election.  No crime, of course, but they're still looking for one.

That's a separate discussion that I've already addressed, that is, does it make sense for the Special Counsel to make a very quick determination that there is nothing that has happened in regard to Russia, and just drop the investigation preemptively.  For me, I would say that if, in two weeks, there is no evidence found of a criminal act, then there is no need for the investigation except for to see what the Russians themselves tried to do (i.e., to get back to a legitimate causality and forget the collusion drama, given that it apparently never happened).

Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director and now Special Counsel, knows a non-action when he sees it.  And given that those pushing the collusion narrative keep trying to involve President Trump, it is pretty important that if there is nothing there -- and clearly there isn't -- Mueller needs to end the investigation pretty quickly, or at least give it back to the FBI to focus on Russia and not on Americans.

But he can't really do that, if he has people on his investigative staff who are leaking stories to the leftist media.  He can't be happy about that, and needs to do some immediate firings after a polygraph test or two.  Of course, he has himself to blame for having engaged lawyers on the investigative team who gave money to the other side.  What are they even doing on the investigation, we might ask.  And we do.

But that's not exactly the whole problem with the leaking.  The real problem is that the leftist media do not expose their sources or name them.  As Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General for whom Mueller works said on Friday, we don't even know what country the leaks are coming from.  It is perfectly within reason that the reporters simply made them up, or one called a friend in Burkina Faso and gave him a text to read back to him to say he "heard that from a source."

Perhaps someone actually did call a reporter -- apparently that goes on a lot in the FBI, eh? -- and they said that in the course of responding to all the left's babbling about Trump associates and family and campaign people, it was simply another avenue that they were forced to look into (albeit with no expectation of anything there).

But we don't know.  What we do know is that Robert Mueller needs to get his house in order and fast.  If he cannot do that, any action he takes, whether to drop the investigation for there being nothing there, or to let it drag on, will be compromised by the leaks.  Otherwise, he will simply be another "little slurp."

And if he is not public and loud with his actions to stop them, he will lose the confidence of the people of the USA.

Mine is on the precipice now.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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