Quote:Remember when we were ominously warned by Democrats and the national media that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was all that was standing between the public and President Trump's threat to turn America into an authoritarian nightmare?

I do!

"Make no mistake about it, if @realDonaldTrump fires Rod Rosenstein it would push this country into no less a constitutional crisis," said Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

"Firing or impeaching Rosenstein ... could cause a political crisis," wrote Amber Phillips in the Washington Post.

"If Rosenstein or Mueller gets fired, it will be the clearest signal yet that Trump is willing to trigger a constitutional crisis to save himself," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"'It may be the start of a major constitutional crisis': Is Rod Rosenstein a dead man walking?" Abigail Tracy asked in Vanity Fair.

"I believe that firing Mueller or Rosenstein would create a constitutional crisis," said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.

But like every one of these people's would-be heroes burdened with the unenviable task of rescuing them from Trump, Rosenstein is now being thrown into the dumpster, portrayed by a new (and explosive!) report as a scheming deviant who actually protected the president.

"Law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them," the New York Times said on Sunday. "Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere."

The phrase "all but ensuring it would go nowhere" with regard to the Robert Mueller investigation is a bit of a leap, even by the New York Times's own account of events in that very article. It went somewhere. After all, the paper said, Mueller "produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry." If that's "nowhere," then it's nice to see someone of authority in the national media finally admit it.

But, no. By "nowhere," the New York Times means that Trump was never found to have committed a crime, nor to have engaged in any efforts to influence the 2016 election in coordination with the Russian government.

That's now apparently Rosenstein's fault.

The report, which came complete with an aerial view of Rosenstein's balding head, said that Rosenstein instructed to Mueller to look for crimes specifically as they related to Russia and the Trump campaign. You know, the things that Democrats insisted were there all along.

The problem now, according to the New York Times, is that this should have actually been a "counterintelligence" investigation, rather than a criminal one. And if it had been, so the tendentious conspiracy theorist's argument goes, then we would definitely be scandalized in a way that we've never been before.

Promises, promises!

They never rest. They can't. They're like a drunk gambling addict who just knows the next spin will hit the jackpot. And if it doesn't, what's one more try? It has to happen eventually. It just has to.

Poor Rosenstein. But he's not the first one to go from hero to zero in the never-ending Russia saga, and he certainly won't be the last.