The obligatory DJT Jr. email release post

Actual facts are still hard to come by in this situation, but these seem to be the relevant ones as of the present:

1.) Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she is not nor ever has been employed by the Russian government. She also says she had no dirt on Clinton and had no intention of delivering such at the Trump Tower meeting with DJT Jr., Manafort and Kushner. She was there to talk about lifting the Russian ban on US citizens adopting Russian children, imposed in response to US sanctions against Russian-government officials shown to be abusing human rights.

2.) Veselnitskaya is on record as disputing "the well-documented account of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death at the hands of Russian officials."

3.) DJT Sr. had collaborated on the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 with Aras Agalarov, the Russian figure that Goldstone identified in his email correspondence as the guy with the goods on Clinton.

Last evening, if one watched any cable talking-head programs, one had to sit through innumerable tedious discussions about how DJT Jr.'s expression of enthusiasm for what Goldstone was telling him ["If it's what you say, I love it!"] and subsequent taking of the meeting with Veselnitskaya was not illegal, and how there is indeed no strict legal definition of collusion.

But I doubt if there's any significant disagreement in any quarters that it was dumb as hell. For starters, because it gave the New York Times the smoking gun regarding Trump camp footsie with a hostile foreign power that the paper of record had been itching for.

This is my first post on this. Don't be surprised if it's my last.

Gee, isn't this a big deal, especially if it's the tip of some iceberg?

In a sense, yes, but my position is, here we are, in mid-2017, combing over the president's sons emails and piecing together arcane details of associations and meetings rather than repealing the "A"CA, reforming the tax code and using all possible governmental instruments to remove cultural rot from our official institutions (i.e., ceasing and desisting all efforts to make transgendered people feel more "comfortable" in the State and Defense Departments and the CIA.)

And then there's Russia itself, and some very recent developments, namely the back-to-bakc tweets the president sent out after his meeting with Putin at G20. The first waxed enthusiastic about their discussion of a joint cybersecurity task force, and the second pretty much said, "never mind."

And my estimation of Tillerson is sinking fast. No, Mr. Secretary, we don't have anything like common goals with Russia regarding Syria.

And then, of course, there are Squirrel-Hair's water carriers. Sean Hannity's show last night was an hour-long exercise in what-about-ism. Yes, Hillary Clinton is skating with regard to some very bad breaches of national security, but that's not the subject at hand.

I'll end this post with the basic point with which I generally end such posts: We could have nominated an actual conservative, who would have beaten Hillary Clinton, and we'd be getting important stuff done right now.