Having To Depend On Broken Vessels To Carry The Truth, The Limits Of A Hollywood Western View Of Life

Since we are reportedly about to start hearing a lot from James Comey, former Director of the FBI in regard to his forthcoming book, I have to agree and disagree with this piece by the writer Steve Almond listing why Comey is a "national disgrace". 

As director of the FBI, he had one basic moral duty: to remain impartial in the midst of a rancorous election. He failed miserably.

The facts on this could not be more clear:

Comey knew that both of the candidates running for president were under investigation.

At the behest of Republicans in Congress, his FBI spent months looking into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Comey also opened an investigation, in July 2016, into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

It should be noted that he opened this investigation only after intelligence officials from five other countries flagged suspicious contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians. One Trump advisor, Carter Page, was a suspected Russian spy.

Given these disturbing facts, there’s a strong argument to be made that Comey should have broken with Justice Department policy and informed the American public that the Trump campaign was under investigation for potentially treasonous activity.

But again, his underlying duty was to remain silent and thereby impartial.

Instead, Comey chose to speak about the Clinton probe on three occasions. He did so because he was afraid conservatives would criticize him if he followed department policy. In other words, he got bullied.

I can't disagree with any of that and there are several things I could add.   I think that Comey and many of the people in the FBI not only were bullied into holding Hillary Clinton to a standard over literally nothing as compared to Trump's suspected collusion with a foreign mafia state crime boss due to their partisan, Republican preferences and very likely due to their not liking the idea of having a woman being president.   I was furious with Barack Obama when he appointed Comey because there were a lot of reasons why he wouldn't be a good Director, I think Obama, as he always did, was eager to please Republicans in what he chose to do, both in the FBI and outside of it.   I'll go so far to wonder who Andrew McCabe supported in both his vote and in his professional life in the FBI and I find McCabe a far less problematic figure than Comey.

But, all of that said, I don't agree with Almond's conclusion that Comey should shut up now that his irresponsibility landed us with Trumpian fascism.   I'm sure I will grit my teeth as Comey presents himself as some great figure of integrity and virtue, he's nothing like that, but he has a duty to expose the criminality of a man he did so much to put into the presidency.

I don't know if the general public has the ability to appreciate these matters on a basis more subtle than they learned to think of them from Hollywood westerns where you're either good or bad, sometimes that being based on no substantial moral difference but just because you're manipulated into rooting for the guy in the white hat.   I don't know if Steve Almond is demanding a level of sophistication that Americans have been stupefied out of being able to navigate by entertainment media.  I look at our history and wonder if Americans have been able to regularly think more subtly than in those terms.   If that's a human limitation, it is a dangerous one for self-government and any means of avoiding the dangers of it have to be taken. 

When I looked into James Comey and read the really weird fact that he once wrote a paper for school linking Jerry Falwell to Reinhold Niebuhr and read more about his own view of his life and the world,  I think he might be especially prone to thinking in those terms.  I mean, Jerry Falwell?  Reinhold Niebuhr?   One of these is not at all like the other.  I wouldn't say that Comey is too stupid to appreciate the differences, which are obvious, you really have to do a lot of talking yourself out of seeing that to associate the one with the other.

I don't trust James Comey, I don't trust a lot of the people who are what stand between us and Trump as the American Federalist-fascist dream of a "unitary executive,"  such as I read Alan Dershowitz is encouraging Trump into being, but that's what we're stuck with depending on.   I'll wait to find out what Comey's book says.   Maybe he comes clean about his own culpability in producing Trump, stranger things have happened.  In a lot of ways I feel the same way about him that I did while watching John Dean's testimony before the Impeachment Committee.  He earned my respect over the coming decades through honesty about those things - I respect him more for serving time in prison for his crimes, something I doubt Comey will ever face.   We'll see.  I don't expect Dershowitz will ever regain the respect I mistakenly held for him about thirty years ago.   After I looked past the PR fraud, the articles in leftish magazines and his position at Harvard.   I don't trust any of those, now.

Update:  It doesn't surprise me that Alan Dershowitz is, in effect, arguing for a position that would rapidly pitch us into fascism.   Not with his other activities over the past two decades or so.  I think the guy is a fraud when he presents himself as a Constitutional scholar and not really a great supporter of egalitarian democracy.  I don't think he cares about much outside of American support for Israel, his real overriding interest.   Which I think accounts for why he's such a big fat Trump supporter, though he claims to not have voted for him.   The only other reason I can think of has to do with the unsubstantiated rumors about Dershowitz which I won't go into as the place for that is in a court trial.  I have no idea if those are true or not.  There is no rational reason for him to be making the outlandish claims he is on the basis of Constitutional law about which, in most of the informed analysis I've seen, he seems to know not much, peddling his Harvard association on FOX and other fascist venues to gull the gullible.  The most dangerously gullible of those being their #1 viewer,  Trump, who can act on what Dershowitz tells him on the screen.