Why do Republicans in D.C. act like a battered spouse, allowing Democrats to continually impugn their motives and decency?  And why do they so often surrender control of the institutions of the state to Democrats, even when Democrats are in the clear minority, as the donkeys are now?  Through the sort of passivity and weak-mindedness that leads bruised women to claim they fell down the stairs, Republicans let themselves be bamboozled into accepting, via recusal, the definition of the first period (at least) of the Trump presidency as an age of scandal. Against all odds, the Democrats managed to have a special counsel, with unlimited budget and no constraints on his investigatory scope, appointed to see if any crimes can be hypothesized – or even fabricated via "process crimes" – to damage, if not end the Trump presidency.  (See Clarice Feldman's brilliant Sunday column explaining how some of the current cast of characters traded...(Read Full Post)