Good morning.
The work week ends for Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 34s of daytime. The moon is full, with 100% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1954, lawyer Joseph Welch, representing the U.S. Army, responds to one of the many baseless charges from Sen. Joe McCarthy, as described at the U.S. Senate website:
At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.
(When Welch mentions Mr. Cohn in the clip, he’s referring to Roy Cohn, chief counsel to McCarthy and later lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump.)
For those who would like a “bare-bones, just-the-facts version of Comey’s testimony today. It’s the 75-minute, distilled version of what we’ve all been waiting to hear,” Matthew Kahn of Lawfare has what you’re wanting in The Lawfare Podcast, Special Edition: Comey Versus the Senate Intelligence Committee with No Bull:
(For those who’d like to hear Comey’s full public testimony, along with transcript and statement for the record, see James Comey Testimony, U.S. Senate, 6.8.17.)
About that testimony, Benjamin Wittes (the editor-in-chief of Lawfare) considers Trump, in On the “Nature of the Person”: Initial Thoughts on James Comey’s Testimony:
It is a clarifying moment whenever an honorable person speaks plainly in public about a person he or she evidently regards as dishonorable on a matter of public moment. And today, a nation not normally riveted by congressional hearings got a chance to see what I was talking about. In three hours of testimony characterized by well-controlled but palpable anger, Comey attacked what he described as “lies” about the FBI and “defam[ation]” about himself; he accused the President of the United States of implicitly directing him to drop a major criminal investigation of a former senior official; he described a pattern of disrespect for the independence of the law enforcement function of the FBI; he alleged that the President made repeated misstatements of fact in his public accounts of their interactions; and he stated flatly that he believed that the President had fired him because of something related to the Russia investigation—an investigation that directly involves the President’s business, his campaign, his subordinates in the White House, and his family.
Throughout it all, the sense that he had spent four months dealing with people who were not honorable was, once again, written on every line of his face and evident in the tone he took when describing the President.
Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman examine 5 Clues James Comey Just Left Behind:
Throughout the three-hour hearing, Comey dropped several breadcrumbs for legislators, FBI investigators, reporters, concerned citizens, and Tweetstormers to follow. Here are five of these enticing potential clues ….[list follows]
David Frum enumerates the The Five Lines of Defense Against Comey—and Why They Failed:
Friends of the president will reply that the Comey hearing did not produce a smoking gun. That’s true. But the floor is littered with cartridge casings, there’s a smell of gunpowder in the air, bullet holes in the wall, and a warm weapon on the table. Comey showed himself credible, convincing, and consistent. Against him are arrayed the confused excuses of the least credible president in modern American history.
I’ve my doubts about a Roomba for your garden, but readers may be more optimistic about it than I am: