FBI Director James Comey delivered the verdict on Hillary Clinton today – not guilty by reason of … of … of ….

There are a lot of details on why this was a miscarriage of justice. The best starting place is Andy McCarthy’s column at National Review, FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook.

But those are mere details. Important details, critical details, details worth writing about — but not the big picture.

Noah Rothman at Commentary wrote:

No amount of cynicism could have prepared Americans for what they witnessed on Tuesday morning, and 2016 has not been short on cynicism.

Getting closer.

The best truly big picture view I saw was from Karol Markowicz, a columnist for the NY Post and an ex-Soviet who moved the the United States as a child.

In response to the Comey verdict, Markowicz tweeted out a statement as to how others who came from the USSR expected no other result:

.

“Guys, the ex-president’s wife was never going to get indicted.”-all my USSR-born friends”

She linked in the tweet to a post of hers on her personal website from 2013, which has this sentence in it referring to Americans who complained about their government:

“They weren’t born in a country where hundreds of years of backward government had led to this kind of cynicism that gets passed on from parents to children.”

I understood what she meant. While I wasn’t born in and didn’t grow up in the USSR, I studied there and vicariously came to know the cynicism of the system, particularly through refusenik friends.

It wasn’t just that the powerful were above the law or there was no rule of law. It was in another dimension.

I tweeted back:

“Those who lived under communism understand exactly what just happened.”

I asked our resident ex-Soviet EdgeOfTheSandbox for her quick reaction to Markowicz’s tweet:

In the waning days of the Soviet Union, the goings on of the nomenclatura were shrouded in mystery. We gossiped about the families of Politburo members, but didn’t know who they were for sure. The only thing certain was that they were above the law, or whatever pretense at law the USSR managed to stage. This produced a culture of cynicism and hopelessness and an epidemic of alcoholism.

It’s hard to explain.

I guess you had to be there to understand. But my guess is a lot of Americans are coming to understand.



