David Levene/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

This is nuts. Republicans are now planning an investigation into the ridiculous myth that Hillary Clinton turned over America’s precious bodily fluids uranium to the Russians. Also Devin Nunes apparently has more to say about her emails. And I guess the infamous Steele Dossier is also up for grabs. Ed Kilgore describes it as a “bombshell” that it turns out it was financed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Has anyone notified Republicans that Hillary lost and will never be running against them again? Is this just a way to get into Donald’s good graces? A way to keep the press busy, since they can always be suckered into covering nothingburgers about the Clintons? Or perhaps they’re just doing it to distract their base, which is starting to realize that Republicans plan to shower money only on corporations and the rich, just like always.

The dossier thing is just weird. Let me see if I have the story straight: The DNC and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to conduct oppo research on Trump. Fusion GPS hired Steele. Steele produced his dossier. It was never used. End of story.

I suppose there’s some way to make a scandal out of that. Congressional Republicans have made hay out of less before. But do they really want to highlight the dossier anyway? And shouldn’t they be focusing their attention on Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders and whoever else is actually politically important these days?

Scandalmongering the Clintons has defined the Republican Party for the past quarter of a century. Maybe going cold turkey was just too much to ask.

Better late than never! A few weeks ago I told you that someday I’d post a photo of the Madonna at Coomakista Pass. Since I’m back in Ireland for a couple of days, why not today?

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Let’s see. Republicans first proposed a complicated border tax scheme as a way of paying for their huge tax cut to the well-heeled. That didn’t fly. Trump then preemptively declared both the mortgage interest deduction and the charitable deduction off limits. Republicans regrouped and laid out a proposal to eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes. That died when a bunch of red-state senators realized it would affect them, not just Democrats in blue states. Child tax credits are also off the table since Trump wants to increase those. Ditto for capital gains rates, which no Republican wants to increase. Finally, in desperation, Republicans recently tossed out the idea of limiting 401(k) contributions, but now Trump has killed that idea too.

So mortgage interest, charitable deductions, retirement income, state and local taxes, and education accounts are all now off limits. That’s basically everything. There is no longer any way, even theoretically, to pay for the Republican tax cut.

And yet wealthy business owners want their tax cut. That’s the only reason they supported an obvious simpleton like Trump in the first place. So Republicans need to deliver.

But how? I predict smoke and mirrors.

Bye, London!

What follows is a fairly petty gripe, and right at the start I want to say that I understand why things are the way they are. If I were in charge of a museum, I’d run things the same way. And yet….

I’ve long had sort of a nagging grumble about the professionalization of everything. Retail. Food. Magazines. Politics. Blogs. Blah blah blah. This is wildly hypocritical of me, since I personally insist on a pretty high degree of professionalism myself, but there you have it.

For some reason, this struck me harder than usual in the museum space on this trip. They are all basically identical. You approach the ticket counter, which seems to be staffed by the exact same cadre of well-scrubbed young people as the last one. You look at the tariff board, smartly printed in Univers or Helvetica for maximum readability. Not that you really need to bother: they’re all the same. It will cost €20 per person, maybe €19 if you’re over 60. You get a little pamphlet. Your ticket is scanned. You walk through the exhibits, guided by a very well-done audio tour. Everything is explained by neatly printed signs. You exit through the inevitable gift shop, all of them basically identical except with different details on their mugs and keychains. And then you leave.

It’s all well crafted and informative. But also somehow lifeless, simply because they all look so similar. The same tickets. The same prices. The same signboards. The same inoffensive, committee-written text.

I don’t know why, but the museum where this hit me the hardest was the Cabinet War Rooms. The rooms were all there, visible though plexiglass. The furniture was neatly arranged. The mannequins were realistic. The audio tour was competently done. The path from start to end was clearly laid out.

But I ended up with no real sense of what the place was like during wartime. Maybe there’s no way to do that. But somehow I felt like a bit of a robot walking obediently from station to station.

Maybe it’s just me. Anyone else feel the same way?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Kudos to the Cabinet War Rooms for entertaining me with my favorite form of communication: charts. Lots and lots of them. That was kind of cool.

A landslide victory! Doesn't he look excited?Yoshio Tsunoda/AFLO via ZUMA

The LA Times explains how Japan’s Shinzo Abe won easily in a landslide election on Sunday:

Despite scant enthusiasm for many of Abe’s policies, particularly his planned reform of the constitution’s pacifist Article 9, his position rarely looked seriously threatened. On top of a weakened opposition, the economy has posted consecutive quarters of solid growth after decades of stagnation, the stock market is at a 20-year high and there are 1.5 vacancies for every job seeker.

Too bad that didn’t work for Hillary Clinton.

Today is a travel day. We’re flying to Dublin for a couple of days, and then back home. So here’s something to entertain you while I’m offline.

Rebecca Louise Law is a London artist who specializes in installations constructed primarily of dried plants and flowers. Her largest piece to date, “Life in Death,” is on display at Kew Gardens, and it’s really quite lovely. It takes up a single large room and consists of hundreds of strands of flora hanging from the ceiling. Visitors can stroll through the room—a limited number at a time—and to my surprise they have no problem with taking as many photographs as you want.

The lighting is fairly harsh, but the dried flowers and the wooden walls soften it into warm tones. Here’s a selection of photos:

The EPA under Donald Trump has suddenly reversed course on regulating a raft of chemicals. The New York Times asked them for comment and got this in return:

“No matter how much information we give you, you would never write a fair piece,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in an email. “The only thing inappropriate and biased is your continued fixation on writing elitist clickbait trying to attack qualified professionals committed to serving their country.”

Before joining the E.P.A., Ms. Bowman was a spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council.

Do they make these folks attend a “How To Talk Like Donald” class before they join the administration? Is the entire government going to become Duck Dynasty? Do I even need to ask these questions?

At this point, I think James Mattis is the only person in the Trump administration who has still managed to avoid embarrassing himself. How long before Trump targets him and forces the issue?

A few days ago I mentioned that District Line trains are open for their entire length, which means you can watch the train swinging in and out of curves. It’s kind of mesmerizing.

And naturally I want to share. So here’s a video of the entire 1:12 minute trip from Victoria to St. James’s Park. It’s kind of shaky because that’s how it goes holding cheap equipment with one outstretched hand. But that just adds a touch of realism anyway. Watch the poles go back and forth!

This whole row over Donald Trump’s condolence call to Myeshia Johnson is, possibly, the most Trumpian controversy ever. I was inclined to ignore it at first, since Trump’s actual conversation with Johnson didn’t strike me as all that bad. The fact that he was apparently winging it on the call is typical Trump, but a non-hostile reading of what he said suggested to me that he expressed himself a little poorly but nothing much more.

But he couldn’t just leave it at that, could he? Of course not. He’s Donald Trump. So he blurted out something about Obama and other presidents not making condolence calls. This is a typical off-the-cuff Trump lie: something vaguely plausible that he invents on the spot to defend himself. Naturally, it prompted the press to check into this, and they reported that Trump was lying. They also uncovered the fact that he had promised $25,000 to a father he had called but had never delivered it. Then, instead of leaving bad enough alone, he decided to call congresswoman Rep. Frederica Wilson a liar, even though her account of the call to Myeshia Johnson was perfectly correct.

Then, because everyone close to Trump eventually pays a price, Trump roped chief of staff John Kelly into the whole thing, claiming that Obama never called Kelly when Kelly’s son was killed in Afghanistan. Kelly was then forced to offer a self-indulgent attack on everyone, and especially on Rep. Wilson, who he said had acted badly at a building dedication in 2015. Video of the event showed that Wilson had done none of the things Kelly said. Was he lying? Did he just misremember? Who knows.

But naturally no one backed down. That’s verboten in Trumpland, even in the face of video evidence. So of course Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly, saying that it was all but unpatriotic to even question the word of a 4-star Marine general.

The key thing here is that all of this was completely avoidable. All of it. Trump just had to provide a vague answer to the condolence call question on Monday and none of this would have happened. It’s 100 percent a result of the fact that Trump can’t abide even the tiniest hint of criticism and apparently has no control over his own response. No matter how dumb and self-destructive it is, he will automatically lash out and then continue to escalate things forever. Quite aside from his political beliefs, it’s yet another confirmation that Trump is simply a terrible human being.

For now, the only result is the character assassination of a congresswoman and the descent into the muck of Trump’s chief of staff. It’s horrible, but we’ll all live through it. Next time, however, we might not be so lucky.