by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
PHOTO/Thierry Ehrmann/CC by 2.0
So our Mountebank-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has finally fired James Comey. Good riddance. I’ll shed no tears for our vain Inspector Javert. But once again Trump, the Master of the Self-Inflicted Wound, has done the impossible. In a single stroke, he has transformed the almost universally loathed Comey into a sympathetic, if not heroic, figure.
Trump, who once fired people for a living on TV, bungled the termination of the director of the FBI director so badly that he also succeeded in reigniting a scandal that had started to cool to a slow simmer–and, not incidentally, may have committed the impeachable offense of “obstruction of justice,” motivated primarily by personal pique. (See Article One for the Impeachment of Richard Nixon.)
One might be tempted, like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, to assess the fallout from Trump’s slow-motion purge of the prosecutorial state (Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Comey) as the best of all possible worlds: Comey is gone, the Department of Justice is implicated, the FBI is internally splintered and Trump is wounded, perhaps mortally.
Yes, all very good–except, naturally, for the intervention of the liberals, who have adopted Comey as a martyr in their Russian witch hunt and have started praising the FBI–an agency literally engineered to prosecute (if not invent) the Red Scare–as a “beacon of integrity and independence.” A few minutes after the news broke, even Michael Moore panted: “COMEY FIRED! Dirty, corrupt things afoot.”
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