In 1964, the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.opened an anonymous letter addressed to her husband at their home. In part, the letter said the following:

No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself in all your dirt, filth, evil, and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. I repeat—no person can argue successfully against facts. You are finished.

And, also:

Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.

The source of this bit of historical e.coli was the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, a truly evil presence throughout his public career. He kept files on prominent figures, suitable for blackmail when he felt his position threatened. He extorted favors from politicians by abusing the powers of his exalted position in American law enforcement. He marinated in self-hatred and he had a fundamental contempt for constitutional norms.

And now, today, he is the lead actor in one of the most detestable performances of Bad Historical Analogy Theater that we've seen in some time. All day, people have been summoning the specter of Hoover's crimes and trying to make them the ethical equivalents of James Comey's writing memoranda of conversations he had with the president*. Both Matt Schlapp and Hugh Hewitt played this noxious game on MSNBC. Here's Michael Goodwin in The New York Post, wetting himself in delight. This is shameful even by the standards of public discourse established by those three worthies. The arguments are an insult to the people tormented by that miserable old paranoid, up to and including Dr. King. It is an argument based in the not-unreasonable suspicion that many Americans do not know their own history. But that doesn't make it any less offensive.

The more polite pushback strategy is to wonder, as Speaker Paul Ryan, among others, has, why Comey didn't bring news of the conversation immediately to his seniors at the Department of Justice, or to the Congress itself. This argument is based on the completely unreasonable notion that the current Department of Justice is a bastion of ethics and that the current Congressional majorities aren't made up of flannel-mouthed ideologues. (Already, we're hearing from the usual suspects that they also want any memos that Comey may have written regarding the investigation into Hillary Rodman Clinton's emails. The fog machine is warming up.) Desperation has arrived in Washington with the summer heat, and it hangs no less thickly over the Capitol.

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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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