Pardon me, hint hint
[ by Charles Cameron — in which an unforgivable lapse may nonetheless be forgiven? ]
.
Scooter scot free?
**
I believe this is called reading between the paragraphs. The piece begins:
President Trump is expected to pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby, according to a senior administration official, giving an olive branch to a George W. Bush administration staffer that the former president declined to grant.
It is unclear why Trump is making the move, but the pardon has been under consideration for several months, two people familiar with the president’s thinking said.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Twelve paragraphs later, we read the closing para:
John Dowd, a former Trump lawyer, floated pardons to former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, The Washington Post has reported. Manafort has since been charged with more than a dozen offenses, while Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
**
Is that, perhaps, a hint of a reason — and an analogical one at that?
April 13th, 2018 at 6:06 pm
Ah, yes — plainly stated!:
April 14th, 2018 at 2:11 am
And this is more forthright, also from the WaPo:
.
April 16th, 2018 at 12:46 am
My point in posting here was to encourage readers to make the leap from Libby’s (decade-old) pardon to (the prospect of) similar pardons for Manafort, Flynn, Cohen and others — signalling, messaging — which to my mind is a far subtler mental move than the simple echoing so sadly evident in his use (“appropriation”) of the Bush quote, “Mission Accomplished”.
.
From my POV, the latter is a simple-minded matter of having heard Bush’s cry repeated, repeated it himself with little or no awareness of its associative penumbra as a lamentably failed prediction — while the former involves a far subtler mental capacity, that of analogical thought.
.
Which makes me wonder whether one is playing to his audience, while the other gives us a glipse of his private, subtler, thinking — as Nicole Wallace puts it, “that Trump and his media cohorts are conditioning the public for more pardons to come.”
April 16th, 2018 at 1:29 am
O hell how shall I ever explain this to my own satisfaction?
.
The mind-frame through which I view this sort of thing zeroes in on the mental capacity it reveals, and to my mind making an implication via analogical thinking is vastly more subtle than simple repetition — got it? Maybe if you then withdraw from the high focus to a normal viewpoint, the difference may seem very slight — but I stick by my interpretation.
April 16th, 2018 at 3:16 am
Rosenstein:
.