Pardon me
By 
The very latest innovations in bothsidesdoitism:
In July, when Trump was calling for the prosecution of Clinton, he was also insisting he had the “complete power to pardon” himself or anybody else. The two courses of action — neutering investigations into himself, and ordering them against Democrats — seem to be linked in Trump’s lizard brain. House Republicans appear to be intent on generating investigations against Clinton and the Obama administration in pursuit of their spurious alt-collusion conspiracy. (One strand of this plan is a fixation with an insignificant deal to sell non-weapons-grade uranium, with which Clinton had a tangential role.) “This probe of the Democratic Party’s Russian dalliance has a long, long way to go,” reports Kimberley Strassel, the Wall Street Journal columnist and Congressional Republican message conduit.
The endgame for this strategy will be to demand the news media treat both investigations as equally legitimate. Then Trump can “magnanimously” declare that both of them are in the past and both should be ended.
The blessing of the Journal editorial page has enormous political significance. It is hardly out of character for the Journal to endorse abuse of the law for partisan ends. It spent the 1980s railing against the existence of any independent counsel, but once Democrats won the White House, the page flipped and began demanding prosecution of the Clintons for a wide array of crimes that included, the Journal believed, running a cocaine-smuggling ring and systematically murdering their opponents. The Journal editorial page has been insane for decades. But it also represents the party’s financial and political elite. Republicans in Washington call the page “the Paul Street Journal” for its eerie tendency to align with the positions of Paul Ryan.
Ryan, of course, is tacitly allowing his chamber’s investigative bodies to run point for Trump. The systematic elimination of any source of intra-party dissent has been one of the significant developments of recent weeks. Steve Bannon’s plans to purge the party have little ideological coherence, but (I have argued) are easily understood as an effort to cleanse its ranks of any members who might be inclined to uphold the rule of law at Trump’s expense.
At this point, the idea that Ryan would call off his party’s Congressional attack dogs, or hold Trump accountable for grotesque illegality, is little more than a punch line. We are watching an important marker in the GOP’s slow metamorphoses into an authoritarian party.
I retain a perverse admiration for the sort of amoral cunning that understands how to take advantage of the structural necessity, from the media’s standpoint, of providing “even-handed” narratives for every conceivable and inconceivable story.
Ash: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Parker: Look, I am… I’ve heard enough of this, and I’m asking you to pull the plug.
Ash: Last word.
Ellen Ripley: What?
Ash: I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.