that stood at least some small chance of altering the inexorable momentum against impeachment. It came in the course of questioning by California Democrat Ted Lieu.And all across the nation progressive hearts sank and hopes of ridding themselves of this president were dashed once more. Love him or loathe him President Trump has taken on the aspect of the Great White Whale Moby Dick in Herman Melville's classic novel, and all the Trump-haters are, with each day that goes by, looking more and more like Captain Ahab.
“I’d like to ask you the reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Lieu asked Mueller.
Mueller responded simply, “That is correct.”
Combined with Mueller’s testimony that the president could be charged after he left office, this exchange created an implication that only the presidency was saving Donald Trump from a criminal charge that any other American citizen would face. This was an unambiguous, explosive claim.
And then Mueller walked it back. Early in the afternoon, he told the House Intelligence Committee, “I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by [Representative Ted] Lieu, who said, and I quote, ‘You didn’t charge the President because of the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion.’
That is not the correct way to say it,” Mueller said. “As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime.”
And just like that, Democratic dreams of impeachment died. Again.
Ahab, you'll recall, was in the grip of an obsession to slay Moby Dick, and his irrational obsession, a fixation that would brook no demurral, led to the total ruin of his ship and the deaths of almost his entire crew, as well as himself.
In the climactic scene Moby Dick rams the ship, sinking it. Ahab is entangled in the ropes from the harpoons that have been launched against the huge beast and finds himself hopelessly strapped to the whale's body. As the whale rises from the water, the drowned captain's free arm motions involuntarily, as if beckoning others to follow him to their deaths in the depths of the sea.
The fixation the left, and some on the right, have with Donald Trump's destruction often seems as monomaniacally bizarre as Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick.
Over and over, one hears on MSNBC and CNN how President Trump is destroying the country, how the harm he's doing will take years to repair, yet it's never explained exactly what harm he's actually doing.
Is it economic harm? We're enjoying the best economy in the last sixty years. Is he embroiling us in foreign wars? If anything, he has demonstrated remarkable restraint and patience in the face of provocations. Is it that he's an inarticulate boor? That hardly accounts for the degree of hatred he elicits in his foes. Is it that he's a racist bigot? The entire evidence for that charge is the left's persistent misrepresentation of a single awkward sentence Trump uttered in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy.
No, the reason for the left's deranged rage is none of these, rather the reasons they're frantic to get him out of office distill to two that they rarely mention, except among themselves, because they know that these reasons would not win them much sympathy with the masses.
The first is that Mr. Trump is in the process of undoing all the progress they've made since the sixties in fundamentally changing this country. The left has for over a century had as its goal the destruction or reshaping of many of the institutions, traditions and cherished values that Americans have embraced since before its founding, and they've made substantial progress in achieving this transformation.
Indeed, the end was in sight and they seemed to be pushing against an open door, even when Republicans were in the White House.
Their chief ally has been a compliant judiciary, including the Supreme Court, that could be counted on to circumvent the will of the people and codify the will of the progressive minority. But Trump and senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell have in two short years not only stalled the progressive cause but have begun to unravel its accomplishments through the appointment of jurists who believe in the rule of law and the wisdom of the Constitution.
This is why there was such desperate eagerness to destroy the career and reputation of Brett Kavanaugh and why there'll be even worse to come if another Supreme Court vacancy arises within the next year.
The second reason for their hatred is that by undoing President Obama's executive orders and freeing up the economy Mr. Trump has allowed the markets and average household income to rise, unemployment to drop to historic lows for all ethnic groups, and welfare rolls to shrink.
This not only makes his predecessor look incompetent, it also discredits for all to see the progressive economic nostrums - high taxes and onerous regulations - that had kept our economy in the doldrums for so long.
In other words, the Trump presidency is a standing rebuke and indictment of the left that could be seen as metaphorically similar to the crippling of Ahab by his earlier encounter with Moby Dick, and just as losing his leg to the whale fueled Ahab's dementia so, too, Trump's blow to the left, as well as his imperviousness to their assaults against him, have stoked the fires of a white hot, irrational rage against him.
And, like Ahab, nothing will stop those driven by their hatred until either they destroy, politically, their Great White Whale or they destroy, politically, themselves.