Summary: FBI director James Comey laid an egg yesterday. His attempt to lay to rest the question of whether Hillary Clinton will be indicted was marred by his editorializing, and it pleased no one. To Democrats, he went too far, while to Republicans and their enablers in the national media, he didn’t go far enough. To Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders, neither one of whom would been satisfied with anything less than Hillary’s bleeding head on a spike, the director’s performance was not what they had desired. The Republican response demonstrated that the “scandal” over Secretary Clinton’s emails was nothing more then a partisan witch hunt. The response of the hipster left and the Sanders campaign was just as bad. Bernie has not played his losing hand well, having ruled himself completely out of the running with his behavior. The rest of the country, the country that works for a living, the country that is not part of the undergraduate Sanders left or the hateful Trump right, will greet this announcement with a momentary flurry of interest, followed as always, by a collective “meh.”
If FBI director James Comey thought he had laid to rest the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails, his performance at yesterday’s press conference impressed no one. To Democrats, his performance went much too far and included extraneous political matters that should have been left out. Republicans, on the other side of the case, are having conniptions over his decision to recommend no charges be brought.
At all events, Comey managed to politicize further a process that has already been much too politicized already. The coverage has varied, depending on the partisan agenda of the institution doing the reporting. Fox “news” led the charge with its usual hyperventilating appeals to conspiracy theories and debunked, discredited notions. CNN, whose antipathy toward Hillary Clinton is an open secret, and whose drift into the camp of Donald Trump has been the subject of scornful wonder, led off its website today with half a dozen spin stories all faithfully repeating the Republican Party line.
Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver and his numbers crunchers what may be the most likely verdict on the whole sorry imbroglio, that this will last one or two news cycles and be greeted by the American public with a collective “meh.”
This, notwithstanding the apoplectic reaction from the Republican national committee, various Republican lawmakers, and, most particularly, Donald Trump and diehard real or ostensible supporters of Bernard Sanders. The reaction from the right, with which I include the supporters of Bernard Sanders, was to be expected, and, with the usual exception of Donald Trump’s outraged tweets, bore all the hallmarks of preprepared, staged, indignation intended for the consumption of the base. And, of course, the right had a great deal of time to prepare. For some time now, the Bureau had been telegraphing the result of the investigation, whose expected result came as absolutely no surprise, as a whimper, not as the bang director Comey and the Republicans were hoping it would be.
But I don’t think director Comey and the Republicans were anticipating was how, in just the 24 hours since director Comey’s much vaunted, but ill advised press conference yesterday, growing questions about the legitimacy of his press conference, about the Bureau’s conduct of this investigation, and about the whole so-called email scandal have begun to emerge and flutter about like hummingbirds congregating for nectar.
Let’s take a look at how director Comey managed to cast such doubt on the legitimacy of his enterprise.
First, by adding considerable “editorial” commentary to his announcement, he lent credence to the view that the Bureau was conducting what amounted to a partisan witch hunt. He would like to have been able to refer the matter to a grand jury, but apparently, his judgment as a member of the Bar and an officer of the court overrode his partisan inclinations in this case. Nonetheless, his extraneous, uncalled-for, remarks clearly were intended by him to serve as Republican talking points for the general election campaign. This is not the first time that an FBI Director’s disdain or antipathy toward a high-ranking official has called the legitimacy of the Bureau itself into question.
FBI Director Louis Freeh’s clearly demonstrated antipathy toward President Bill Clinton helped cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of the effort to drive him from office. The FBI director seems to have forgotten the lessons of the past, and by allowing himself to take political potshots at Secretary Clinton, to squander the FBI’s political capital as an impartial enforcer of the laws, possessed of unimpeachable integrity. Instead, we seem to have retreated 50 years to the time when J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of an agency that was to all intents and purposes a state within a state, or what we might now call a bulwark of the so-called Deep State.
Worse even than Director Comey’s missteps has been the unseemly Republican display of outrage, all of it nakedly partisan, and none of it even remotely connected to legitimate concerns over national security. When House Speaker Paul Ryan and his colleagues in Congress and at the Republican national committee had their collective conniptions, calling for investigations of the investigation, it was as clear as if they had shouted from the housetops their partisan anger at the FBI investigation’s outcome.
We should recall the remarks of Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Bakersfield’s gift to American politics, who admitted the partisan motivation for the investigations of Secretary Clinton, saying “[e]verybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” The Washington Post swiftly and mercilessly dissected Mr. McCarthy’s remarks noting that “[t]he Republican-led House hasn’t been particularly good at governing, but perhaps governing has never been the point. Why govern when there’s a future election to influence?”
For director Comey, a Republican stalwart who contributed to both John McCain and Mitt Romney, there was political capital to be made from going in front of the press and delivering an announcement that went considerably beyond his agency’s brief. It was the FBI’s job to determine whether criminal prosecution was warranted and whether there should be referral to federal prosecutors. Everything else beyond that, as we have noted above, was surplusage, and Comey should have known it.
But if Comey's ill considered and gratuitous remarks, together with the predictable, but utterly unconvincing partisan outrage from the Republicans were not enough to demonstrate that what has taken place is indeed a partisan witch hunt, which would probably never have been set in train against a male former Secretary of State, and which has even less substance to it than the alleged misdoings of former CIA Director John Deutch, his foolishness, and the misconduct of Republicans on the Hill is nothing compared to the misbehavior of Donald Trump and of the Bernard Sanders campaign.
Trump’s reaction, of course, was utterly predictable. When the man-baby, or as the Scots describe him, the cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon, who has absolutely no impulse control, took to Twitter, his tweets were the usual-for-shitgibbon stuff: whines about how the system is “rigged,” attacks on any target who enters his field of vision, and the by now nauseating self-pity in which he so constantly indulges. The performance was typical, vintage Trump, and while it may have thrown red meat to his base, it did little to assuage the growing discomforts of many Republicans, and did absolutely nothing at all to attract the uncommitted and alienated voters he needs to have any hope of victory this November.
Also calling into question the legitimacy of the FBI’s findings was the “meltdown” of diehard, white privileged, Bernard Sanders supporters, who like man-baby, shitgibbon Trump, took to Twitter to express their disappointed outrage that their magical thinking had not produced the results they wanted. For the diehard Sanders people, the angry Bernie Bros and Bernie Bro-ettes who make up the diminishing “never surrender,” “100 million die together” remnant of the so-called Bernie or bust movement, the FBI’s decision not to recommend criminal charges against Secretary Clinton knocked the last prop out from under their magical thinking belief that Bernie’s path to the nomination, now closed to him, would somehow magically reopen if only Hillary were indicted. When, of course, the FBI investigation did not produce the desired indictment, such as Sanders supporters as That Idiot Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo, and, of course, the unbelievably un-self-aware Susan Sarandon, took to Twitter like little Trumps venting their infantile disappointment, and suggesting that they had, once again, been “victimized.” Along with them, much of the hipster left found itself in mourning that one of their fondest pet theories had been put down.
Of course now that would’ve happened had Bernard Sanders not grossly maladroitly overplayed a losing hand. Against his two pairs of deuces and treys, ten high, Secretary Clinton could play a high inside straight, reflecting the careful, methodical style in which she waged a campaign. Unfortunately, neither the Senator nor his supporters seem to have played much poker. The Senator had an opportunity to leverage his position into a possible vice presidential nomination or high-ranking cabinet post – had he been smart enough to have suspended his campaign and endorsed Hillary Clinton the day after the June 7 California primary. At the same time the Vermont Senator ought to have instructed his supporters to get with the program and flip their support to Hillary Clinton.
Instead, Bernie insisted on tergiversating, equivocating, triangulating, and making demands which he had no right to make. Had he been full throated in his support of Hillary Clinton, and had he taken the necessary steps to achieve party unity on the best terms he could get, even if they weren’t the terms he wanted, he would right now the enjoying a reservoir of goodwill from all parts the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Bernie chose to take the Leninist Road of his youth. Considering all differences of opinion to be irreconcilable, Bernie encouraged the militant tendency among his supporters toward foolish, Trotskyite thinking. Instead of telling his hipster left supporters to get with the program, Bernie encouraged a dangerous tendency toward what has come to be known as “puritopian” thinking, in which the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, is the enemy of the best and most practical policy obtainable.
As Bernard Sanders’s hopes go glimmering, the anger from his puritopian supporters, or at least the decreasing percentage of them which is not come home to Hillary, has grown. Because the Senator will not admonish his supporters, and will do nothing to bring them into the fold, they have decided that they would prefer to bern the country down, to “heighten the contradictions” in American society in the hopes of provoking some sort of revolution in the near future. As both Soviet and Maoist theoreticians might observe, this is a “right deviationist error.” To the extent that Bernie Sanders is indulging in magical thinking with his refusal to endorse Hillary Clinton and get on board with her, he is engaged in “right deviationist” thinking.
But one thinks that Senator Sanders is aware of his right deviationism, and that he embraces it. One is forced to the regrettable conclusion that Bernard Sanders really does want Donald Trump to be victorious this November. That, like his hipster left followers, Bernard Sanders wants to heighten the contradictions American society to the point where they will explode into some sort of outbreak of “revolutionary” violence. The only way that Sanders can accomplish this Leninist objective is to ensure a Trump victory by acting as an active fifth columnist within the Democratic Party. Sadly for the Ilyich from Burlington, not only is Hillary Clinton not facing the indictment he desires, but the Democratic Party is also rallying to her in unexpectedly large numbers and with an unexpectedly cohesive degree of unity.
Hillary Clinton emerged from yesterday with a distinctly equivocal victory, but it is still a victory, if only for having brought vexation to the Republican Party and their media outlets, to Donald Trump, and to Bernard Sanders and his diminishing cohort of hipster holdouts.
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