Let A Thousand Watergates Bloom

So, just in time for the first post of the new morning, I seem to have lost the ability to properly embed tweets or images.   Hopefully, it’s the usual FYWP 3am/4am daily update, and the developers will be able to fix it later today…

ETA: I pulled out the extraneous code, for now.

From LA Mag, “Adam Schiff Is Ready to Rumble”:

… He is world-famous now. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence can now see himself caricatured on Saturday Night Live. In Trump’s Twitterverse, he’s the limp, Ivy League-educated elitist scheming to bring down the President of the Real America. To his supporters, he is Elliot Ness chasing Al Capone, Joseph Welch facing down Joseph McCarthy. Which of these images wins out may ultimately determine nothing less than the fate of the free world.

Or, as Schiff put it while sitting in his office, his expression indicating a half-hearted attempt at gallows humor: “Just another day.”…

I visited him the day after the Republican attempt to disrupt the hearings, which Schiff spoke of with a mixture of irritation and faint amusement. “We knew they were planning some kind of a stunt,” Schiff told me. “We didn’t know what kind, but we knew something was up because they had a [press conference] podium set up with a list of [speakers’] names.”

His reaction was pure Schiff: “I excused the witness so that she would not have to be part of it,” he said. “Then I left the room. Eventually, they got bored and left.

“They were disappointed,” he added. “They wanted a confrontation.” As it happens, they got one. According to a transcript of the proceedings released afterward, Schiff reserved special bile for Matt Gaetz, the fratty Florida Republican who has been one of the president’s most vocal Congressional cheerleaders. “Mr. Gaetz, please absent yourself!” Schiff said sternly when Gaetz crashed the hearing in violation of House rules. “You’re going to have someone remove from the hearing?” Gaetz replied with surprise. “No,” Schiff shot back. “You’re going to remove yourself.”…

Equanimity comes naturally to Schiff, but it’s also a part of a conscious strategy. “I do think that this is such a head-on-fire kind of a time that there’s a premium amount of people talking rationally. Along the way I’ve had people say, ‘You need to get angrier. You need to yell.’ I say, ‘Look, there are plenty of people getting angry right now. That’s just not who I am.’ And I think people in my line of work who have a problem, it’s often because they try to be something they’re not or someone they’re not. I’ve never tried to be anything other than what I am, and so I tell those who are looking for someone more incendiary there are lots of other choices.”

The other advantage, Schiff said, is that when he does show anger people pay far closer attention. “If you’re not angry all the time,” he said, “then people do notice when you are. And it tends to have more of an impact.”…

 

Schiff’s work ethic—and slight dorkiness —was on full display in June during one of several days that I followed him. His day began early with a morning “hit” on NBC, an interview carried out in a small hallway just off of the Rotunda…

The rest of the day included House votes, a meeting with a delegation of Armenian interns, a radio interview on the Mueller investigation, recording several spots for the Democratic Caucus, and, finally, an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

As Schiff drove me to the studio, he looked almost cool in his reflective shades. (It’s a fleeting moment. He drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from The Big Lebowski: “I don’t roll on Shabbos.”) Once inside the studio, just before he was miked up, Schiff tapped a small toy wolf on a shelf. “It’s a tradition,” he said, “for good luck.” At Blitzer’s desk—a small, red, glass-topped island in a sea of Pacific-blue tile—Schiff waited patiently as Blitzer recounted the day’s news, including Trump’s callous reaction to a photo of two immigrants, a father and daughter, found dead on a riverbank near the Mexico-U.S. border. “Does it ever stop?” Blitzer asked. The congressman responded with a withering takedown of Trump that left the room silent for a moment.

On the way back to his car, Schiff still seemed incensed, showing the rare flash of anger he had spoken about earlier. But there was no time to dwell—fresh outrages were piling up almost hourly. As fate would have it, he was one of the few people in America who could do something about it.

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