Circle the wagons, jack up the buses

The right continues to pattern itself after a bucket of scorpions.  Sending the message that dissent will not be tolerated, KNUS radio in Denver yanked Craig Silverman off the air in mid-show after he played a 2015 interview with Roger Stone expressing unease about Trump's connection to McCarthy gunsel Roy Cohn.  Silverman, a reliable conservative in the Andrew Napolitano mold, even had his page removed from the station's website.  After he goes on CNN to describe the experience, there's bound to be a tweet or two calling him a loser.  By now, in fact, he's probably been offered a job on CNN.

John Bel Edwards opposes gun control and reproductive rights but he has a D after his name, which usually stands for "doomed" in Dixie.  That he won re-election as governor of Louisiana is therefore all down to Trump rousing the rabble for his opponent Eddie Rispone, not in fact a minor character in The Sopranos but a bidnessman "outsider."  Handed his second electoral failure in a week (because it's always about him), Trump apparently felt bad enough to spend two hours at Walter Reed yesterday.  The official story is that 1) he was visiting with the family of a soldier undergoing surgery, or 2) he needed a headstart on his annual checkup, or 3) he was in the neighborhood and decided to get his bone spurs removed at last.  The real story is that Stephanie Grisham actually did her job by sort of communicating with news media.  While speculation is fun, I'll wait for the necropsy.

"She's going to go through some things" is the kind of thinly-veiled threat that could cover anything from polonium tea to anonymous abuse from Breitbart cowards.  Anyway, it's a historic first:  witnesses against Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton never had to put up with shit like that, at least not directly from Johnson and Clinton, in the sight of the whole world.  Progress, I imagine, but Marie Yovanovitch doesn't look like she scares easily.  In her diplomatic career she has probably run into cheap gangsters before, wearing better suits.  And those who say the hearings lack "pizazz" -- no damp cigars or semen-stained dresses yet? -- have certainly never experienced the spontaneous ovation that followed her testimony.  Nor should they ever.

In Smartphone vs. dumb lawyer news, Rudolph Giuliani says he isn't worried about joining all the others beneath the wheels because "I have bus insurance."  Intriguing.  I'm so old, I remember when he used to prosecute gangsters.