Did you watch that McCabe thing on "60 Minutes"?

I did.  I watched it very closely. With some meticulous rewinding and analysis (where McCabe declared Trump "disgusting" and it was hard to understand exactly why (Trump, campaigning, had weaponized a factoid from the Wall Street Journal)).

I thought the "60 Minutes" presentation followed a clever narrative arc, with a beginning that allowed McCabe to inflate himself, a middle that brought in his wife and complicated the story, and an ending that gave us so much reason to doubt his credibility that I said out loud, "This really isn't favorable to McCabe at all."

At first, I thought the reasons to mistrust McCabe should have been presented up front, so we could question his telling of the story as we went along, but in the end, I liked the narrative arc, which I think is typical of "60 Minutes." We're drawn in, and then things are not what they seemed, and we're challenged. Then, suddenly, it's that ticking clock on the screen. That's all you get. Figure it out!

Here's the full interview, with video and transcript. I'll just excerpt the text of the part we rewound and rewatched about 10 times:

But in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, The Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined "Clinton Ally Aided FBI Wife." It was about Jill McCabe's funding the year before. The article noted, accurately, that her husband's role in the Clinton email investigation began months after she lost. But candidate Donald Trump seemed to conflate the two.

President Trump at Rally: It was just learned that one of the closest people to Hillary Clinton with long-standing ties to her husband and herself… gave more than $675,000 to the campaign of the spouse, the wife, of the top FBI official who helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton's illegal email server.

Scott Pelley: How do you feel when you see that?

Jill McCabe: Sick. Sick to my stomach.

Andrew McCabe: I think sickening is the right word. It's disgusting. To see the candidate for the presidency taking those lies and manipulating them for his own advantage, and then to hear you know, the chants and the boos of thousands of people who are just accepting those lies at face value, it's chilling.

My question was: What lies? And: How did Trump manipulate them? We even paused on the text of the WSJ article so we could read it (the "Clinton Ally" was Terry McAuliffe).

The best I came up with in answer to my question was that Jill McCabe received the $675,000 and lost her election before Andrew McCabe took on a role in the Hillary Clinton investigation, so when Clinton's ally gave the money to Jill, her husband was not yet in the position she had a huge interest having influence over. I don't think Andrew McCabe is saying the WSJ published lies, and the only "lies" I see in what Trump said is giving an impression about the time line.

I think Jill and Andrew are horrified at how effectively Trump weaponized the material. Of course he used it "for his own advantage"! Is that what Andrew McCabe is calling "manipulating"? Why isn't that just being a very effective candidate?

"It doesn't really matter what I believe or anyone else believes."

On "State of the Union," yesterday morning, Jake Tapper talked to Terry McAuliffe about the Ralph Northam problem. Transcript. Video:



McAuliffe was the governor of Virginia just before Northam, and Northam was his lieutenant governor, so McAuliffe could not avoid vouching for the man he was there to denounce. And with Northam having made such a fool of himself saying one thing and then another, it was important for McAuliffe to sound competent and lucid as he put together the argument that Northam has to go. That didn't happen:

TAPPER: Northam is now saying it's not him in the photo. Do you believe him?

MCAULIFFE: It doesn't really matter what I believe or anyone else believes.

Why not?!! It's Tapper's first question. You're going to say it's a bad question? You're on the show for a reason. You worked closely with Northam. Help us out here! Was he confused? Is he a liar? We want to know what to believe, and you're telling us it doesn't matter what we believe?

"Militiamen came to Charlottesville as neutral First Amendment protectors, commander says."

WaPo reports.

The show of strength was about “allegiance . . . to the Constitution,” particularly the First Amendment, said Christian Yingling, leader of the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia...

The fact that no shots were fired, Yingling said, was a testament “to the discipline of the 32 brave souls serving under me during this particular operation.” In a telephone interview Sunday, he sought to dispel “the absurd idea in the public’s mind” that his group of “patriots” was allied with or sympathetic to the white nationalists....

When his group arrived in Charlottesville, “we put our own beliefs off to the side,” Yingling said. “Not one of my people said a word. They were given specific orders to remain quiet the entire time we were there. . . . Our mission was to help people exercise their First Amendment rights without being physically assaulted. It was a resounding success until we were just so drastically outnumbered that we couldn’t stop the craziness. It was nothing short of horrifying.”...

“Jacka---s,” was how he described both sides, meaning the white nationalists, who billed the gathering as Unite the Right, and the counterprotesters, many marching under the banner of Antifa, for “anti-fascist.” Yingling also criticized police, saying that officers were poorly prepared for the violence and not assertive enough in combating it and that they should have enlisted the militiamen to help prevent the mayhem.

The second-highest-rated comment over there is:

Yingling calls both sides in the protest "jackasses'. Yingling and his kind are bigger jackasses; bringing that kind of firepower to a protest. A bunch of punk cowboys who get erections dressing up and playing with guns. And did they have any effect on the outcome? No. Militias are bullsh - t. They just salivate for the day they can pop somebody. Buncha sickos. Grow up little boys.

Third highest-rated:

This is terrifying. You have armed individuals roaming the street who are neither military nor law enforcement but unapologetic storm troopers. Whatever this is, it is not about the first amendment.

ADDED: What would have happened if these people were not there? Would it have been more violent, or would the police have stepped up and maintained order? Remember that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe defended the inaction of the policy, seemingly on the basis of the scariness of the militia people:

“It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this, 80 percent of the people here had semiautomatic weapons. You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army.... I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; they had better equipment than our State Police had,” he said, referring to the militia members. "And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”

I don't know where he got the 80% number.  He weirdly blames and credits the militia.

"There was no police presence. We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park watching."

"It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other."

Said Brittany Caine-Conley, of the Sojourners United Church of Christ, quoted in "McAuliffe Counters Critics of Police Response to Charlottesville Violence" (NYT).

What is Governor McAuliffe's answer to the critics?

“You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon. He is a terrorist.”

That doesn't explain doing nothing about the fighting and brawling Caine-Conley describes. And if the police had managed the crowds, perhaps the car incident would not have been triggered.

Interesting that McAuliffe is calling Fields a "crazy guy." So many people seem intent on characterizing Fields as part of a significant political movement.

Jason Kessler, the organizer of the so-called Unite the Right rally... complained that the authorities had “exacerbated the violence” by failing to separate his followers from counterprotesters, leading to the melee.

I've seen how the police have managed crowds here in Madison, Wisconsin — huge rallies with opposing sides. I'd like to know how the police in Virginia could be so impotent. Are they so afraid of being accused of doing something wrong that they protect themselves by doing nothing?

Asked about the brawling and why police did not do more to control it, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety, said in an interview on Sunday that “it was a volatile situation and it’s unfortunate people resorted to violence.’’ But, he said, “From our plan, to ensure the safety of our citizens and property, it went extremely well.’’

Governor McAuliffe also defended the police response, saying, “It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this, 80 percent of the people here had semiautomatic weapons. You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army,” he added. “I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; they had better equipment than our State Police had,” he said, referring to the militia members. “And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”

Pathetic. The police were afraid of the guns? But no shots were fired, even in response to punching and brawling. That makes it sound as though those people with guns were quite restrained, and yet they terrified the police.

"Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe gutted a bill to let Virginia use the electric chair when it cannot find scarce lethal-injection drugs..."

"... making an 11th-hour amendment Sunday that would instead allow the state to hire a pharmacy to make a special batch in secret," WaPo reports.

The chair is already an option in the state, where condemned inmates are allowed to choose between it and lethal injection. The measure was intended to remove the choice if the state cannot obtain the drugs, which have grown scarce amid political pressure against the death penalty.

McAuliffe’s amendment comes at the scarcity issue in a different way, by allowing the state to special-order the drugs from compounding pharmacies, whose identities would be kept secret to shield them from pressure....

All I could think was what Justice Harry Blackmun wrote (more than 20 years ago): "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

"The Republican Party would not mind at all if the takeaway in Virginia was it was a Terry McAuliffe landslide against the Tea Party."

"I'm not exaggerating," says Rush Limbaugh.

Christie wins big, de Blasio wins, and what's happening in Virginia?

"Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey won re-election by a crushing margin on Tuesday, a victory that vaulted him to the front rank of Republican presidential contenders and made him his party’s foremost proponent of pragmatism over ideology," says the NYT.

"Bill de Blasio poised to usher in new era of liberal governance in New York,"
says the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, in Virginia....

UPDATE: "Democrat Terry McAuliffe wins Va. governor's race, Fox News projects."

UPDATE 2: Looks like New Yorkers are happy with judges forced to retire at age 70.

Polls close in Virginia in 20 minutes.

And here are the 5 counties to watch.

While you're waiting, check out the Althouse blog polling.

McAuliffe or Cuccinelli — do you care?

They're voting in Virginia today. But do you care?

What's it to you?
	It's a referendum on Obamacare, so I want Cuccinelli to win.
	It's a referendum on Obamacare, so I want McAuliffe to win.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party, and I want the Tea Party to gain strength.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party, which I want to fail because I'm a liberal.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party and I hope it loses so the GOP can get back on a mainstream track
	This is a race for governor of Virginia, nothing more, and McAuliffe is the better man.
	This is a race for governor of Virginia, nothing more, and Cuccinelli is the better man.
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