Democrats are, without question, worse off now than they were before former special counsel Robert Mueller gave his five hours of testimony.
Anyone who watched the back-to-back hearings Wednesday got exactly nothing new from Mueller. He said again that there was no proof of a conspiracy between Russia and President Trump’s 2016 campaign. He reiterated that his office was never going to determine whether the president had committed a crime. And he said that his investigation was never “curtailed or stopped or hindered” by the White House.
We did learn that Mueller, contrary to the projected Democratic fantasy of a white knight, is really just an ordinary, 74-year-old man. He needed almost every question asked of him repeated and he had trouble recollecting information from his own report. That should shock precisely no one, given his age and the task he was given to retain two years-worth of information, which he in any event should have been allowed to forget four months ago when he turned in his 400-page report.
But Democrats thought it wise to drag out this never-ending nightmare. It got them nothing. Mueller was a dull witness, with nothing new to offer, and Democrats were weak in their questioning. They were so weak that they did what was previously thought impossible: They turned New York Times columnist Charles Blow against them.
Blow spent Wednesday on Twitter berating committee Democrats for what amounted to a colossal waste of time for any liberal, like Blow, who thought Mueller might come in and shank the president with an original call for impeachment.
What could possibly have led liberals to that fantastical idea? Oh, just the national media’s portrayal of Mueller as an omniscient saint who could reverse the results of the 2016 election.
It’s not his fault that Democrats have, again, come up short in their quest. It’s their fault. They beat this dead horse, resurrected it, and then beat it to death again.
If they’re upset with the outcome of Wednesday’s hearing, they can blame themselves.
