Will someone please tackle this man and hold him down, lest he blow out a rotator cuff patting himself on the back? On a day in which we learned even more about the ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election, James Comey had to testify before Congress again and pretend that he hadn't monkeywrenched the last two weeks of that same campaign.

Now, I will grant you that having Comey up there (again) to answer questions about Hillary Rodham Clinton's server practices is an exercise in the absurd, but one of the other bad things about it is that Comey gets to stand in a hallway afterwards and deplore the presidency his own bungling helped make possible. From CNN:



"Somebody has to stand up and speak for the FBI," Comey told reporters after his nearly six-hour interview with members of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, adding that he thought Republican "silence is shameful...The FBI's reputation has taken a big hit because the President of the United States has lied about it constantly," Comey said, adding "that damage has nothing to do with me."



Ah, well, maybe a little bit. But Comey wasn't done yet. From the Washington Post:



“At some point someone has to stand up and face the fear of Fox News, fear of their base, fear of mean tweets, stand up for the values of this country and not slink away into retirement but stand up and speak the truth,” Comey said, without naming names.



Dude, at what turned out to be a very critical time in recent political history, you couldn't stand up to pressure from your renegade New York field office. You couldn't push back against the bats flying out of Rudy Giuliani's belfry. I don't think you get to butch it up now, in retrospect, without at least doing some public penance for your part in electing the worst president* ever.

“Republicans used to understand that the actions of a president matter, the words of a president matter, the rule of law matter and the truth matters,” he said. “Where are those Republicans today?

Laughing their heads off at you, most likely.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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