(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

At the end of another eventful Infrastructure Week, we have Scooter Libby pardoned by the president*, possibly for Obstruction-Signaling purposes. We have Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein adopting quite a fatalistic approach to what appears to be the onrushing end of his employment at the Justice Department. And the president* is bouncing off the walls of the White House.

The Libby pardon is signifying, and not in the way you think I mean it. The president* may indeed be sending a flare up for Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and all the rest of them. But it also fashions an unbreakable link between the malfeasance and misfeasance of the Bush administration and the malfeasance and misfeasance of the Trump administration*. Primary among Libby’s partisans are veteran Republican legal hacks Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing. They’ve been pitching Scooter’s case for years. Now, they’re also working as legal advisers down in Camp Runamuck.

Since I don’t believe that Trump would know Libby if the latter sat in his lap, I’ve got to believe that this pardon is at least partly a little cookie thrown to Libby’s legal team. But this ties it all up in a nice bow. DiGenova and Toensing became famous for being TV lawyers during the Great Penis Hunt of 1998. They’ve since surfed the Republican sewage-treatment plants for clients, finally washing up in the sludge maelstrom of this White House. Their very presence, and what they’ve just managed to bring about on behalf of Scooter Libby, is all the proof you need of one fundamental fact.

Republicanism simply was Trumpism in waiting, and Trumpism is Republicanism in excelsis.

The administration* also had a pretty bad week in the courts. First, the appeal of a lawsuit that argues that Mick Mulvaney’s appointment to head the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is unlawful and illegitimate was allowed to move forward.

And a federal judge took a look at the administration’s plans to dragoon local cops into its immigration cleansing activities and broke out the big old spiked gavel. From The New York Times:

United States District Judge Manuel Real in Los Angeles issued a permanent, national injunction against the federal funding rules, giving the city an important win in a long-running legal battle with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House. The ruling is “a complete victory,” Mike Feuer, the Los Angeles city attorney, said Thursday. “This is yet another dagger in the heart of the administration’s efforts to use federal funds as a weapon to make local jurisdictions complicit in its civil immigration enforcement policies.”
In the ruling, Judge Real said that the funding rules violated the notion of separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and improperly tried to force local police officers to take on immigration enforcement, which legally is the responsibility of the federal government. The department’s action “upset the constitutional balance between state and federal power by requiring state and local law enforcement to partner with federal authorities,” he wrote. He added that Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to control government spending.

A mark, that will surely leave.

So much winning.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Moonburn” (Jon Cleary And The Absolute Monster Gentlemen): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: This weekend is the Grand National at Aintree. (Me? Were I there, I’d drop a bob or five on Tiger Roll, especially at a decent price.) Here’s the 1922 race, the 81st in the competition that began in 1836, held apparently on a completely dismal day. This was a four-mile race in which most of the horses did not finish; it had more in common with a NASCAR race at Bristol than any horse race we’re familiar with here in the states. Thirty-two horses started and only five finished. Two of the starters died. Music Hall won by 12 lengths. Six years later, only two horses finished due to a 35-horse pile-up at the Canal Turn. History is so cool.

Anyway, this happened last week. I think I can safely say that I am the only member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame who has a congressional press pass. Top that, Cillizza! Hah! Thanks to everyone involved. Also, not for nothing, but Villanova is the best college basketball team I’ve seen in 25 years, at least.

Playoff hockey in Vegas! It ain’t Edmonton, you have to give them that.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Atlantic? It’s always a great day for dinosaur news!

By thoroughly comparing 74 early dinosaurs and their relatives, Baron has radically redrawn the two major branches of the dinosaur family tree. Defying 130 years of accepted dogma, he splits the saurischians apart, leaving the sauropods in one branch, and placing the theropods with the ornthischians on the other. Put it this way: This is like someone telling you that neither cats nor dogs are what you thought they were, and some of the animals you call “cats” are actually dogs. “Luckily, most of what we’ve pieced together about dinosaurs—how they fed, breathed, moved, reproduced, grew up, and socialized—will stand unchanged,” says Lindsay Zanno from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who was not involved in the study. Still, “these conclusions lead us to question the most basic structure of the entire dinosaur family tree, which we have used as the backbone of our research for over a century. If confirmed by independent studies, the changes will shake dinosaur paleontology to its core.”

This is like when the NFL went to six divisions. Well, no, it’s not, but some things never change and one of them is the inalienable fact that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

We finally sobered up the members of The Committee sufficiently that they were able to make Top Commenter Stephen Beard this week’s Top Commenter of the Week for his Nostradamian prediction of our political future.

I predict the insistence that everything wrong about the government, the country and the world is owing to Bill and Hillary Clinton will pass its use by date by 2050, but only because it's really hard to blame dead people for putzing up the events of the present day. Obama, by contrast, will be blamed until at least the year 2100 because presidenting while black.

President Malia Obama is going to have a lot of work to do, surely. Anyway, 84.35 Beckhams to you, good sir.

I’ll be back on Monday, which may be more than Mr. Rosenstein may be able to say. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or I’ll reclassify you as a saurischian and you’ll get thrown out of the country club.

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Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.