Yes, we have no bananas.  We have no bananas today.

Those are lyrics from the 1920s.  Here's the tune, for those of you old enough to remember, which includes alternative lyrics for the English-impaired:

For the original version, go here.

Either way, it's the summary of Robert Mueller's testimony yesterday.  I feel sorry for him.  A lifetime of work destroyed in a single day.  It was sad to watch.

I don't blame him, necessarily.  He worked his way up the ladder from the old soldier he once was...into the realm of prestige...and then into an honorable retirement.  Then came a clarion call.  One last request for service to country...and a chance to move from the fading shadows of oblivion into light once again, whether deserved or not.  He heard the trumpeting of revelry.  And he stood tall and marched forward, like the soldier he once was, but this time into a withering hail of bullets, which he must've known were coming, at least in the final days, if only because he signed onto the losing battle and offered his reputation as the esprit de corps for those he trusted.  It was a bad decision. 

Yesterday, he sacrificed his honor on that battlefield.

I do not think suicide was his intention.  He seems an honorable man.  Andrew Weissmann, not so much.  In fact, not at all.  Weissmann is a guy out for the kill.  His former boss simply got in the way.  Stuff happens, if you know what I mean.  I think Mueller knew it the day he signed on to the special council's report.  If not then, then shortly thereafter.  He could've quit much earlier in the process and said there's no further point to the investigation, as most of us knew.  But for whatever reason, probably personal, he didn't.  I suspect he knew he was only a figurehead, and his reputation would get him beyond the bar, so he let his subordinates do all the work.  If yesterday was any clue, he was clueless about most all of which he was put in charge.

That was then.  This is now.  He now owns it.  I suspect he wishes otherwise.

Bill Barr offered him a path to salvation.  Barr told him he didn't need to testify.  In effect, Barr offered a way out of the impasse into which his old acquaintance Bob Mueller had entwined himself.  Mueller didn't need to own up to the special counsel's report that he put his name on, at least not on public display, and not this way.  But apparently, someone else had Mueller's ear.  Lawfare?  Who knows?  Maybe one day we will get an accounting.  But it seems obvious that Mueller felt his honor was at stake.  It was.  And Bill Barr was unable to help at that point.  So he let his friend Bob Mueller hang himself.  That's what happened yesterday.  Robert S. Mueller III committed the last public hanging in U.S. history.  He did it to himself.  And he did it of his own free will.

If I may paraphrase Bob Mueller's testimony, Yes, we have no bananas...we have no bananas today.

I don't think Jerry Nadler gives a rat's rear end about bananas.  What's one more soldier sacrificed on the political field of battle?  Plus, Mueller doesn't vote in his district.

R. Stephen Bowden blogs at the Steve Bowden Journal at https://bowdenbeat.blogspot.com.