Bitching About Poor James Comey Is Missing the Damned Point

Our resistance doesn’t hinge on Trump’s meddling at the FBI

by ANDREW DOBBS

In his hapless ambition and bland, bureaucratic weakness of character, ousted FBI director James Comey became the perfect reference point for the shifting values of the American political class.

Democrats kinda liked him when he didn’t indict Hillary Clinton, and Republicans hated him for the same reason. Then it became clear that his non-indictment rhetorical take-down of Clinton was wreaking political havoc — and Democrats resented that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

When he issued his late campaign letter alluding to a reopened investigation of Clinton’s emails, Democrats full-on hated him and the GOP was quick to defend his honor. Pres. Donald Trump kept him as FBI director and gave him a hug in the Oval Office before deciding to attack him on Twitter and, ultimately on May 9, 2017, shit-can him.

At that point Democrats identified him as a noble and independent hero bravely struggling to expose the underside of the Trump administration, while Republicans saw him as the very sort of swamp creature they hoped Trump would flush down the drain.

Comey has no moral content or any meaning in his own right, but in his very ethical mediocrity he allows us to see just how unprincipled and unmoored the U.S. political system has become.

More importantly, this phenomenon helps us to answer the central question in world politics today. Is Trump a fascist, a wannabe strong man despot just waiting for his moment? Or is he a total incompetent, a bored nincompoop yelling at the T.V. without even the minimal intellectual capacity needed to be a Nazi? Is he establishing a dictatorship or is he barely hanging on?

Comey’s firing shows that the answer is both and neither, and that the essential character of Trump’s presidency is a creative tension between his corruption and his incompetence. He is corrupt in an incompetent way, and his incompetence allows for tremendous corruption. Both produce and necessitate the other even while they undermine and contradict themselves.

It seems probable that Trump fired Comey because of the advancing investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russian state interests. This is an act of corruption, but he did it in the most incompetent way possible. He fired Comey mere days after the director requested more money for the investigation — and one day before Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov visited the White House.

Why not agree to the money but then drop the hammer before it was actually delivered, long after Lavrov had gone back to Moscow? Shit, it was May — he couldn’t wait two and a half weeks to fire him the Thursday or Friday before Memorial Day, dampening the news coverage?

This is what a competent crook would do. It’s so stupid that it makes you wonder if maybe it really wasn’t corrupt, maybe Trump just got a wild hair up his ass and decided to fire the guy because he’s a petulant dipshit with no sense of how these things work.

And that would make sense if it weren’t for the corrupt way this incompetent decision was handled. Rather than just fire the guy and say, “I fired him because I don’t like him,” or whatever he actually cooked up a paper trail of patently dishonest rationale.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017 because the guy was too hard on Hillary Clinton back in July the year before? This is what Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo said in a memo clearly thrown together with nothing other than basic news coverage for evidence and issued the same day Trump delivered the termination.

Everyone knows that the document was created to justify a decision Trump had already made. The justification is total bullshit.

Trump then went on to say in his termination letter — without context and without prompting — that he was glad the director had assured him three times that he was not under criminal investigation.

This is like if your husband comes back from a work trip and the first thing he says on the ride from the airport is, “Boy, I sure am glad I didn’t sleep with Karen from accounting while I was there!”

You should probably be sniffing at his collars.