So, Bill Barr, you seem confused. Let's see if we can help you out.

"I spy with my little eye."



"Hey? Wanna spy on Bill Barr and his wife?"

See? The meaning of a word can be pejorative or not, depending on the context in which it is used. English is hard.

I mention this because the last stanza of the morning's performance of the low farce that is William Barr Covers the Royal Ass had the Attorney General of the United States telling Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, that when, at an earlier hearing, he had talked about the possibility that the Obama administration had spied on the Trump campaign, it was just a word that is a word and it just popped right out of his mouth. Bing! Like that. Whitehouse stared down at him as though Barr had grown a second head, and then everybody went out to vote and have a little lunch.

The morning's performance was shadowed, of course, by the revelation in Wednesday's Washington Post that Robert Mueller was agitated and upset with the way that his report had been summarized in Barr's four-page memo released at the end of March. In response, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to talk about the Steele Dossier, Strzok and Page, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and, god help us all, Her e-maillllzzzzz!

Barr is not a very good tap dancer. Win McNamee Getty Images

On the other side, the Democratic members of the committee insisted on talking about what Barr has been talking about ever since he put out his memo and pretty much poisoned the well with regard to what Mueller found and what should be done next. Barr tried to tap dance, but he's not very good at it, and his arguments kept colliding with each other. For example, he kept trying to deny that his four-page summary was actually meant to summarize anything, which, I think we all can agree, is a hard argument to make: that the purpose of a summary is not necessarily to summarize.

In addition, Barr had no answer for the fact that, a couple of weeks ago, while testifying before another congressional committee, he had said he didn't know of any problems Mueller had with how he'd summarized the counsel's work. By that time, Barr had received Mueller's letter expressing those very problems, and he had spoken to Mueller on the phone. Of course, when the chairman of the committee, Senator Huckleberry Graham, starts things off by stating flatly that he hasn't read the whole report, anything goes, I figure. William Barr is another figure in the Trump Organization wax museum, and he's melting down like all the others.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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