The frustrating thing, a man was telling me on a podcast Monday, is that we can't even agree on plain facts on which to base reasonable or productive debate.
I didn't give a very good response, partly because there wasn't one. With equal frustration, I merely cited our extreme polarization and called it a frightful cancer on our political discourse.
The even greater complexity of the problem became evident later in the day.
It is that carefully gathered facts presented exhaustively with subtlety and nuance are never strictly partisan. They likely will give both sides some element to ignore and some other element to seize on and feed to the salivating political bases.
It's not simply that we can't agree on the facts. It's that elements of fact within broader truth get chopped up and used or discarded as desired.
These aren't alternative facts. They are subsets of facts, chosen from a menu. Our facts are now a la carte.
Thus, nothing changes in the hardened preconceptions that existed before the facts were carefully gathered and presented. Full context gets left unconsidered in favor of partisan convenience.
The Justice Department's inspector general put out a vast report Monday concluding that the FBI acted properly with sufficient foundation in launching an investigation of alleged Russian ties of persons close to President Trump's campaign in 2016.
Aha, said the Democrats. Trump's whining that the FBI spied on his campaign for partisan reasons was clearly revealed to be false, they pointed out, quite correctly.
But the inspector general went on in the lengthy report to outline occasions during the investigation when the FBI gave too much credence to allegations against Trump campaign figures and not enough to exculpatory factors--when the G-men were too hell-bent in their pursuit of the allegations, a charge nearly everyone ever under federal criminal investigation has leveled, often with sound basis.
Aha, said Trump and his defenders. The inspector general plainly faulted the FBI for being biased toward the Trump campaign, they said, not incorrectly.
So, what were the real facts? In this case we can see six:
(1) The FBI didn't do anything improper in undertaking an investigation into persons affiliated with the Trump campaign on Russia-related charges.
(2) The FBI did things wrong along the way in barreling ahead to investigate certain angles without giving sufficient weight to offsetting evidence.
(3) Democrats talked after release of the inspector general's report only about No. 1 and not at all about No. 2.
(4) Trump and Republicans talked only about No. 2 and not at all about No. 1.
(5) Everyone was right as far as they went.
(6) Everyone was incomplete, and thus misleading, which is to say inaccurate.
We can't possibly get to the vital context unless and until everyone agrees to accept--and then proceeds to absorb--all of the report.
Only then might Trump and Republicans be able to say they agree that the FBI undertook the investigation appropriately but that they are entitled to resent some of the tactics once it was undertaken--tactics that suggested a desire to make the case, either from typical investigatory zeal or partisan motivation, or, as is likely and almost always the case, elements of both.
And only then might the FBI and Democrats be able to say that the investigation went awry and that there are lessons that must be learned and applied from that, but that there is no basis for Trump and Republicans to slander our federal criminal justice system by saying the investigation amounted from the get-go to a corrupt partisan witch-hunt.
From the breadth of all of that, this kind of healthy context could arise: We'd confront an FBI that we could generally trust even as we demanded that it do better to gain our specific and ongoing trust.
That would be an important win for the country and a fair-is-fair wash for the political parties, who could proceed to battle in the next election over the relevant and decisive electoral issues, which simply are:
(1) Is Donald Trump fit to be president?
(2) If not, can the Democrats produce someone demonstrably fit?
And, alas, a postscript: This matter is made even more dysfunctional by the fact that Attorney General Bill Barr behaves in a highly irregular fashion that is more in Trump's personal interest than the government's greater interest.
Barr publicly rejects his own inspector general's report in favor of an ad hoc investigation he's ordered up to placate the president.
Federal department heads often take issue with inspector generals' reports ... to say they're over the top in their negative findings, not that they're wrong in that they didn't go far enough.
Trump wants the nation's attorney general to act as his personal advocate, not justice's. He openly admitted as much in belaboring his resentment of Barr's predecessor, Jeff Sessions.
Bill Barr is no Jeff Sessions, while Trump remains Trump.
And that takes us back to the simple question of Trump's fitness for office and whether the Democrats can give the nation someone able to scale that low bar.
A young mayor of South Bend? A gaffe-prone former vice president? How about a billionaire from New York City flooding the market with money on the hunch that the young mayor of South Bend is too inexperienced and the gaffe-prone former vice president too experienced?
That looks to be about it for choices.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Web only on 12/11/2019