I interviewed
"This is a story about hubris," is how it begins.
Thoughtful people know that for all our grand monuments carved of granite and marble, a republic is an extremely fragile thing. Especially now, as a cynical establishment seeks restoration, as establishment Kemalist bureaucrats run for cover, and as the divisions in our nation widen and public discourse sounds like rival packs of angry barking dogs.
And in a few weeks, sooner perhaps, the dogs will begin barking even louder upon release of Justice Department Inspector General
It all starts with hubris.
"This is why people who start out with the best of intentions to protect the country get to the point where they forget what the country is about," McCarthy said on my podcast, "
And what America is about, in part, he said, is this:
"A self-determining people that has a government that is supposed to serve the people," he said. "The turnaround here is that high officials think they are a government that happens to have people associated with it, but they are the ones who know what's best for the country."
Certainly, Citizen
But did
Weeks later, on
She said Obama insisted that everything they were doing was done "by the book."
Who talks like that, unless it's someone covering their behinds?
You certainly don't need to say that someone reminded us all that we have to do everything by the book if you've been doing things by the book for the past eight years," McCarthy told me. "You don't have to tell people who are 'by the book' people to do things by the book."
The real collusion was that the Obama administration put the awesome powers of the federal government -- law enforcement and intelligence -- at the service of
The scheme to get Clinton elected had two parts, McCarthy argues. The first was to shield former Secretary of State Clinton from disqualifying and potentially criminal allegations that she violated federal law by having a private unsecured email server and later destroyed the evidence.
And, as an insurance policy, the other part of the scheme was to portray Trump as an agent of
"Ball of Collusion" is a detailed, connect-the-dots read. McCarthy, a former top federal prosecutor in
It looks to me like a
Just as the Steele dossier, paid for by Clinton, was leaked to
"They (
"What happened here is that they decided their judgment about who was fit to be president was superior to the public's, and they weren't going to take the public's determination for an answer," McCarthy said.
And when Trump won, and they were going to be found out, they panicked.
Some readers, who'd like nothing better than to jeer at my sightless head on a pike, keep making a mistake in thinking that I'm a Trump guy because I'm not of the left.
But I was for Republican Sen.
The republic is what I care about. And the only way to keep it is through the
The framers truly understood human nature, the temptations that come with holding awesome federal power, and the problems with factions and blind partisanship.
They understood what would happen if a people lost faith in their institutions, if those institutions were shaped, in grotesque partisan fashion, to serve only the elite, now often called the best and the brightest.
"A republic," replied Franklin, "if you can keep it."
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.