The Briefing Room

General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: Bigun on March 12, 2019, 02:58:43 pm

Title: A Tight and Tangled ‘Collusion’ Web
Post by: Bigun on March 12, 2019, 02:58:43 pm

A Tight and Tangled ‘Collusion’ Web
amgreatness.com/2019/03/09/a-tight-and-tangled-collusion-web/
Roger KimballMarch 10, 2019

Most people reading this will know Sir Walter Scott’s famous couplet (from the narrative poem Marmion):

When first we practise to deceive!

Less well known, but undeservedly so, is the excellent completing couplet by J. R. Pope, published under the sly title “A Word of Encouragement”:

But when we’ve practiced for a while,

How vastly we improve our style!

Indeed. You really have to give it to the suits in Barack Obama’s intelligence services and Department of Justice (many of whom, of course, are still strutting about in Donald Trump’s administration). It was quite a web they wove, and tangled with complexity. Yet their prodigious practice also made it nearly impenetrable to anyone not inside their charmed circle.

That adamantine carapace of impenetrability is a sign of their high style, their assiduity, the reason that a “word of encouragement” did not come amiss...

Much more here (https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/y5cpTK)