James Comey goes stale fast, hits end of his shelf life

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey isn't quite the book bonanza he's been touted as. His book opening shows it. And, well, look at the book he's selling: with little more than florid descriptions to speak for his otherwise content-free book, and no big revelations, what we get from it is that he has a high opinion of himself, he's mad about getting fired, and he wants revenge. Yeah, yeah. And as the subject of his own book, he lacks the usual affection bestowed upon such people from the rabidly left-wing Occupods or the less rabid Hillaryites, because, well, he ran the FBI. So now we see just about nobody showing up for the book's launch at the prestigious Kramerbooks, at the heart of the capital, on Dupont Circle at its opener. The Weekly Standard noted that there were more cameras than customers for this washed up bureaucrat's hectoring dialectic about his own virtue, and the store sold only about a dozen books, many to the reporters.

It didn't stop at Kramerbooks. Stephen Kruiser of Pajamas Media noted that the New York Times wrote an unflattering review of Comey's book tour behavior, here, because he made himself at home in the gutter, seemingly in an audition bid for an MSNBC commentator slot. He didn't actually do what a buyer of books might want him to do, which is tell us something new. As Thomas Lifson accurately noted the other day, the signs have been out there that we have already reached "Peak Comey," and the miserable sales from his book launch are a strong one. Apparently, people in Washington, D.C., who are often swamp things, can see the game he is playing well. First there is the rollout, then the sycophantic questions from political allies, such as George Stephanopoulos, questions designed to conceal inconvenient facts rather than to shake out information – take a look at these missed questions noted by Real Clear Politics's Peter Berkowitz, and people knew they were being played. (I'd throw in a question about why he claims he had never heard of Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth company Carter Page was connected to, and if he was so ignorant of that, why did he go after Page?) The lefties don't like him, either. A liberal television host called Comey out for his hypocrisy and told him to quit putting one over on us by claiming he was doing it for the country. Even the lefties, still smarting over Hillary Clinton's loss to President Trump, recognize his soulless political animal act. Maybe worst of all, the voters are beginning to notice that Comey's act is all an act. A CNN focus group unexpectedly bashed Comey and questioned his credibility (and even his manhood), while a poll shows that a growing plurality of voters wants Comey prosecuted for his self-serving leaks. Breitbart has the story here. This is not the makings of a bestselling book. For the publishers, this big rollout represents a lot of bad judgment clouded by life in a left-wing bubble, given that they paid Comey reportedly millions in an advance. For the rest of us, the popped bubble represents a victory: people aren't as stupid as their supposedly betters make them out to be.