RUTHFULLY YOURS

New Orleans — Robert E. Lee lost again.

The statue of the Confederate Army’s general in chief vanished Friday from atop a 60-foot-tall column in the middle of Lee Circle. This work is the fourth of four Confederate-oriented statues that the city of New Orleans has removed in recent weeks, amid considerable and well-deserved controversy.

During my annual pilgrimage to the Crescent City early this month, I saw Lee rise above well-tended grounds, including grass and flowers, although the concrete at his monument’s base was badly broken. Interestingly enough, the man who led one side of the Civil War to defeat stood just two blocks north of the spectacular National WWII Museum, which chronicles a unified America’s triumph in that mammoth struggle.

Along the landmark’s side, a graffito demanded: “Take It Down Now.” That ultimately victorious sentiment was popular around here, but not unanimous.

“They should leave it,” said Marquis, a black man in a white T-shirt. A couple of weeks back, he sat at the statute’s base and listened to music on a small speaker wirelessly connected to his cell phone. He breathed a whiff of disgust at those who wanted Lee toppled. “As someone said, ‘Ain’t no blood in him.’”

Marquis took a drag off of his cigarette and continued. “He’s just standing there. So, they’re going to take him down. And who are they going to put up there? Donald Trump?”

Even then, Lee was not long for the circle that bears his name.

In what seems like a major act of virtue signaling, New Orleans’ Democratic mayor Mitch Landrieu led the effort to purify the Big Easy of these four Confederate-era artworks. The first honored a bloody white rebellion against the city’s biracial government during Reconstruction. Workers then swept a depiction of Confederate president Jefferson Davis from a pedestal on Jefferson Davis Highway. Tuesday saw General P. G. T. Beauregard’s retreat. And now, Lee has achieved his rendezvous with obscurity.

This exercise is reminiscent of former Governor George Elmer Pataki (R., N.Y.). In his own massive act of virtue signaling, he secured federal funds from G. W. Bush’s EPA to dredge up and remove PCBs that had sat quietly for decades at the bottom of the Hudson River. This noxious industrial runoff was from General Electric factories in upstate New York. Rather than let sleeping toxins lie, Pataki had the riverbed vacuumed. The result? PCB levels shot up, and the Hudson’s relatively clean waters were befouled anew.

Likewise, this episode has stirred up the relative tranquility in New Orleans, with long-healed wounds being scratched open. Just blocks from the ever-delightful New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which I savored for the 23rd consecutive time a few weeks ago, a group of Confederate sympathizers waved the South’s Battle Flag beside Beauregard’s striking statute at City Park. A year ago, Beauregard sat in splendor beneath the sun, all alone. Confederate flags were nowhere in sight. This year’s display of Rebel sympathies and banners did not signal progress. And now, Beauregard has been scraped from his pedestal and whisked to an undisclosed location.

This episode has stirred up the relative tranquility in New Orleans, with long-healed wounds being scratched open.

Say what you will about these statues, they tend to be excellent works of art. Despite the horrors at their roots, they beautifully capture the human physique and, very often, the equestrian form. If nothing else, they added vivid, dramatic images to this lovely city.

Robert Mueller’s investigation will be incomplete if he does not deal with and resolve the competing narratives about what has transpired. Narrative one is that Donald Trump and/or one or several of his entourage colluded in some manner with the Russians over election 2016. Narrative two is that Democrats and much of the media have not accepted the results of the election and are smearing Trump to drive him from office or seriously wound him to the degree that he will accomplish nothing.

Although it is possible there is an element of truth in both narratives, it is more likely that one or the other is what we could call the “prevailing truth.” To get at this truth, three areas that are inextricably tied together must be investigated. They interweave like story elements in a novel and form what might be called the über-narrative of American politics over the last several years. For Mueller to separate them or to disregard any of the three will mean his investigation is essentially a useless charade. They are:

One: the matter of the Hillary Clinton email server. This has resurfaced dramatically in the firing of James Comey, reasons for which are laid out in Rod Rosenstein’s memo. Whether he wrote this memo before or after Trump decided to get rid of Comey is immaterial since the Deputy AG has now stated he stands behind its contents. Further to this portion of the narrative is the overall question of putative Russian government hacking into the Clinton campaign. So far we have seen no public evidence that this is true. We have actually seen circumstantial evidence (the Seth Rich murder) to the contrary. Mueller must also explain why the DNC refused to open its servers to the FBI after it was supposedly hacked by the Russians and why the FBI, incredibly, acquiesced in this. The questions here are endless—including why the FBI gave immunity in so many cases and allowed for the destruction of evidence. If Mueller seeks to resuscitate the reputation of the agency, he’d better provide us full explanations for all this. At this point, declaring key evidential material “top secret” will only be met by justifiable disdain.

Two: the matter of government surveillance of Trump and his people. The president famously complained in a tweet of being “wiretapped” by Obama. Despite endless criticisms of his language when he actually put the word in quotes, the possibility of this obviously high-tech surveillance and the various attendant unmaskings is by far the most serious question that must be dealt with in this investigation. If the massive intelligence capabilities of the NSA and the CIA are being used for internal political purposes, the United States of America, as we know it and the Founders envisioned it, no longer exists. We are a post-modern totalitarianism and the Russian collusion scandal was just an excuse to impose it—or, more scarily, to cement what was already there.

Three: Trump and the Russians, of course. It’s clear from his campaign statements that Trump wanted better relations with Russia and Putin. This was nothing new. Several American presidents have sought the same thing at the beginning of their administrations only to be blindsided by reality. Obama seemed particularly desperate when he got caught on camera naively whispering to Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more to offer Putin after the election (as if Vladimir didn’t know). The rest, including the failed “red line,” Iran on the rampage, and the endless Syrian civil war, is history. The question now is to what extent Trump and his people may have colluded with the Russians and whether this “collusion” meant anything. In the case of Manafort, as it was with John Podesta, this seems to have been no more than normal (and somewhat repellent) greed. In the case of the Uranium One and the Clintons, it may have been a great deal more (attention, Mr. Mueller). In the case of Mike Flynn, the problem might have more to do with the Turks than it does with the Russians. We shall see. CONTINUE AT SITE