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Most of the torpedoes that hit the Hillary campaign were launched by the captain of their own submarine. But she and her supporters cannot accept that. It is beyond their grasp

This brings us to the insane atmosphere that surrounded the James Comey hearings this week. The determination of every right thinker, backed by the unappeasable fury of the Clinton apparatus, has driven a crazed post-mortem of the Trump victory that has the press in its full service and represents a Watergate-sized lust for conspiracy mongering. An article by Lee Smith in Tablet magazine puts the matter neatly in a single paragraph:

“What’s new is a vulgar conspiratorial mind-set becoming the norm among the country’s educated elite — editorialists, distinguished professors, figures who were once talked about as future members of the Supreme Court — and being legitimized daily by truth-telling bureaucrats who make evidence-free and even deliberately false accusations behind a cloak of anonymity.”

The word that Comey himself leaked a memo to the press falls on an observer’s head with something of the force of a grand piano coming from a great height

Which is a good account of what brought us to the presumed high-drama of the Comey hearing. It disappointed, and proved, at least to me, only that James Comey is the Forrest Gump of the presidential contest. Pre- and post-election, whenever there is a crisis in the faith of American democracy, somehow James Comey is standing in front of a committee. One day he is sinking Hillary’s campaign, the next resurrecting it. Post-election he’s played cat’s-paw to Trump’s win. But in it all Comey asks us to take him as the truly lone disinterested, upright actor in the whole surreal drama.

The highlight, for me, of Comey’s testimony was his self-declaration that he himself is a leaker. And since “leaks” of one sort or the other have been the unfailing driver of every story since the election on the “Russian influence,” and since a primary duty of any FBI director is to chase leaks and identify leakers, the word that Comey himself leaked a memo to the press (via a friend) falls on the ordinary observer’s head with something of the force of a grand piano coming from a great height.

American politics right now is an embarrassing snarl, and while all should acknowledge Trump is the driver of a goodly portion of this disgrace, let us not fail to acknowledge two equal contributions: the lust for another Watergate has awakened in the press; and Clinton’s pathological inability to face the fact that she lost, all on her own self, to a vulgarian reality TV huckster.

National Post