Quick takes on the debt ceiling and the Durham report

 I will make two brief observations for the morning.  First, I wrote an earlier post that suggested that Biden appeared to be blinking/swerving/otherwise metaphorically crying "uncle" in the debt ceiling crisis that we must all endure.  For all the posturing of recent events, I do not think there can be any other reasonable interpretation.  Biden's original position was that he wouldn't pay a ransom for a debt ceiling increase.  McCarthy's position was that Biden must pay a ransom.  They are now negotiating the size and structure of the ransom.  Biden can yell up and down the boulevard that the ransom he is paying is a separate thing from the debt ceiling, but if you buy that, let me introduce you to my pitch-man, George Santos.  He has some great products to sell you.  Biden is paying a ransom.

I intend to write a longer form post on the Durham report this weekend, but this is a strange document.  It is difficult to reconcile the headline claims that Durham, himself, makes with publicly available facts, or the Mueller report, but I will ask two questions for today.  Is it necessary to believe that the FBI did everything right?  No.  I write that as the most ardent Trump detractor this side of E. Jean Carroll.  It can be true that the FBI did things wrong, but also that Durham's headline claim-- that the investigation should not have happened-- is also wrong.

Why?  Suppose there had been no investigation.  Suppose, for example, that Comey had done exactly as Trump demanded and shut down all investigations.  Comey would have stayed, there would have been no Mueller appointment, and so forth.  Yet Mueller did not find "no collusion," in the words of Donald Trump, and Bill Barr back when he was just running interference for his boss.  Instead, Mueller asked if there was enough evidence of a specific crime called, "conspiracy," to secure a conviction, writing that the threshold for that crime is extraordinarily high.  What Mueller actually wrote was that there was a fuckton of evidence of conspiracy, but since the threshold for conviction was so high, he could never get a conviction.  That's very different, and also important to have in the public sphere when it comes to the President of the United Fucking States.

No, it wasn't a hoax.  It is merely that the evidentiary bar for conviction under conspiracy law is really, really, really high.

So ask, what if the investigation hadn't happened?  What if Trump had successfully pressured Comey?

Or, more to Durham's claim, what if Trump fires Comey, evidence-- some of which is questionable at that point-- comes to DoJ, and they ignore it?

This is Durham's claim?  It shouldn't even take hindsight to see the problem.  Task 1 for an investigatory body is to investigate.