Mueller Lite?

Whew! At least that’s over…

The big investigation … or witch hunt  … or fact finding expedition … or whatever you choose to call the poking around Bob Mueller’s been doing into some of the political shenanigans that did or didn’t happen during the last presidential go-round has finally wrapped up and the initial tentative occlusion is that the 2016 election wasn’t a real-life replay of The Manchurian Candidate .

What exactly Mueller and his squad of high powered gumshoes did uncover has yet to be revealed and, as they say, the devil’s in the details, but each and every one of us ought to be giving the proverbial sigh of relief that at present it doesn’t appear that the president plotted with Putin to put himself in his present position.

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, that’s good news.

Watergate was bad enough. Folks may not have believed it when Tricky Dick insisted “I am not a crook,” but even those who considered him to be the ultimate political no-goodnik thought he might have been in cahoots with the commies to keep control of the Oval Office. There’s a word for working with agencies of a foreign power to take control of the American government – some dare call that treason.

Fortunately, the bumbling mess of venial criminality that pervaded the current occupant’s campaign didn’t rise – or descend – quite to that level. Had Mueller concluded otherwise, no good would have come of it.

We’re living in a time that’s facing real troubles – I don’t have to go through ‘em, we all have lists of our own. Long lists of situations that threaten our well being, our security, our happiness, heck, potentially our very survival that are beyond the reach of any of us as individuals to address, but in need of immediate, serious attention to resolve.

But attention is a finite resource. If our national focus is on “what did the president know and when did he know it?” odds are that dealing with rising seas, growing deficits, declining wages, unstable economies, and unhinged individuals will get shoved aside. We’d get ourselves worked up into a finger-pointing frenzy over the fine points of “did he” or “didn’t he” to the point that when it came down to our collective future, his fate would appear to be all that mattered.

That’s the real problem that follows somebody fouling the political nest. Just like the individual who passes bad gas in a crowded elevator, one bad actor can foul the whole country’s political and social atmosphere. And the stronger the stink, the harder to overcome it.

So it’s a good thing that the worst possible outcome of that long, long investigation was averted. To have found otherwise would have virtually demanded Congress take action to remove this duly elected president -- with all the drama, distraction and divisiveness that would have entailed. As it is, we may well heed wiser counsel – “He’s not worth it.” – and move ahead with the world’s business.

Now that’s not to say that the whole stinking business is gone and done with. If it’s true that when you’re up to your arse in alligators it’s hard to remember your original objective was to drain the swamp, it may well be that now that the biggest, meanest of those accusatory ‘gators is gone we all can give closer attention to what remains lurking in the weeds. There may be ‘no collusion,” but there have been plenty of arrests, indictments, convictions, sentencings -- and the investigations keep going on and on and on. How we react is going to say a lot about the kind of people are and the kind of country we’ve become.

Meanwhile, let’s air out the elevator and move on.