William P. Barr's Memoir Is Part Lawyerly Defense, Part Culture-War Diatribe

[Zorro]

In “One Damn Thing After Another,” the former attorney general suggests that Republicans move past Donald Trump and his “madcap rhetoric,” but saves his harshest words for the former president’s critics.

“It was a lie,” the former attorney general William P. Barr writes early on in his new book — a “fabrication” that “was repeated and amplified in media coverage throughout the election and is still repeated.” Barr isn’t referring in this instance to Donald Trump’s insistent lie about “massive election fraud” in 2020, but to an event that happened nearly 30 years earlier, when Barr was doing his first tour as the attorney general, for President George H.W. Bush. The media misleadingly described Bush marveling at a supermarket scanner as if he had never encountered the technology before.

The suggestion that the first President Bush was some elitist patrician who didn’t know his way around a modern grocery store continues to rankle Barr three decades later. He parses the event in minute detail in “One Damn Thing After Another,” letting loose an extravagant pique that makes sense when you realize that being seen as out of touch is the kiss of death for establishment conservatives, especially now, when right-wing populism is ascendant.

Barr takes care in this book to present his childhood as more hardscrabble than a rarefied prep school education and an apartment on New York City’s Riverside Drive would have anyone believe. In Barr’s telling, it’s Democrats who are invariably the “smug elites,” while Republicans are the true defenders of “ordinary middle- and working-class Americans.”

“One Damn Thing After Another” is an intemperate culture-war treatise smuggled into a lawyer’s memoir: a seemingly sober recitation of events that’s periodically interrupted by seething tirades about “militant secularism” and a “Maoist” American left. He compares Trump’s opponents to “guerrillas engaged in a war to cripple a duly elected government” and calls the pandemic restrictions adopted by some states the most “onerous denial of civil liberties” in American history, second only to slavery.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/books/review-william-barr-memoir-one-damn-thing-after-another.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DPDmwdiO4SBIubvF3Ae6tueJ4s3jCfRdZEdbUmXuY3y-JaOE13Dg6ur96IkZEDZjk1qIS8G2o4w5_XGLk-9iPqY3P_KPt6wPf3mSO6BwWKIK_Pjj1nLxB48dAjLQv0jWpZka3FG-92js152fh2Gpx7TDYfbXSBtu2-Ax4ubY6Fa06M7QkmSqoOD2Go6N2X6LoCcA9XC0uXDy8spDZht64PfY8fL639LBU_ecHhgrR3Cm1gLI-hA5ZZVJGD3vwx8uaL8UrQvZLwk_YmF6xUv6fGsHK7NTssQbCVPFb2XV8JpVvEGhFi_iiBGom0VQyPQmg&smid=url-share

Link is long but shared, so one can read the whole damning review.

[Stargleamer]

1. and all bs n/t

[Ocelot II]

2. So basically Barr loved everything about the TFG administration

except for the fact that sometimes TFG wasn't very sensible. But he was trying to do all kinds of wonderful things to keep the evil, rabid Left at bay; too bad he was a little excitable sometimes. I wasn't going to read the book anyhow, but this one sounds even worse than John Bolton's.

[Firestorm49]

3. No sympathy for Barr. None. Just another Federalist Society mouthpiece trying to save his ass.

[MyOwnPeace]

4. FUCK HIM!!!!!!

HE is the treacherous bastard that buried the 'Mueller Report' - the instrument that could have rid us of IQ45 long before 81 million Americans voted to do it. He should be down there in Gitmo along with all of those other terrorists and treasonous bastards.

[czarjak]

5. Whatta matter, Billy? Plane-Landing is hard when the runway is covered in bullshit.

[Frustratedlady]

6. Another book that will be on the 75% discount table unless the Repukes buy tons

and hand them out as gifts.

How many books have they bailed out since TFG took over? Hell, even before, come to think of it.

[Comfortably_Numb]

7. Should be called "One Damn Spineless Enabler After Another", with the first two chapters

the story of Coverup Barr and his lies and justifications of drumph.