What his Thursday testimony made clear is how much he has damaged the country.
Mr. Comey was not merely a player in the past year’s palaver. He was the player... Mr. Comey explained that he had lost faith in then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s ability to handle the affair, in part because she had directed him to describe the probe in public as a “matter” rather than an “investigation.” That one of President Obama’s political appointees outright directed the head of the FBI to play down an investigation is far more scandalous than any accusation aired about Mr. Trump... If Mr. Comey truly had believed the president was interfering, he had a duty to report it or to resign. Instead he maintained Thursday it wasn’t his role to pronounce whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice. Really? This may count as the only time Mr. Comey suddenly didn’t have an opinion on whether to render justice or to take things into his own hands... And why did he agree to dinner with Mr. Trump in the first place? Why keep accepting the president’s phone calls? Asked whether he, in those early meetings, ever told the president how things ought to go, he said no. Mr. Comey did nothing to establish a relationship he felt was correct.Instead, he kept secret memos, something he’d never done before. He wrote them in an unclassified manner, the better to make them public later. He allowed Mr. Trump to continue, while building up this dossier... Yes, Russia interfered. Yes, Mr. Trump damages himself with reckless words and tweets. Yes, the Hillary situation was tricky. Yet you have to ask: How remarkably different would the world look had Mr. Comey chosen to retire in, say, 2015
The Bow-Tied Bard of Populism
Tucker Carlson’s latest reinvention is guided by a simple principle—a staunch aversion to whatever his right-minded neighbors believe.
“I’m so pathetically eager for people to love D.C.,” he admits. “It’s so sad. It’s like I work for the chamber of commerce or something.”
If this boosterism seems out of character for a primetime populist like Carlson, he doesn’t seem to mind the dissonance. He speaks glowingly of his Northwest Washington neighborhood, a tony enclave of liberal affluence where, he tells me, he is surrounded by diplomats, lawyers, world bankers, and well-paid media types. They are reliably “wonderful”; unfailingly “nice”; “some of my favorite people in the world.” If you’ve watched Carlson on TV lately, you know they are also wrong about virtually everything.
.. “Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”
“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”
.. Carlson’s true talent is not for political philosophizing, it’s for televised partisan combat. His go-to weapons—the smirky sarcasm, the barbed comebacks, the vicious politeness—seem uniquely designed to drive his sparring partners nuts, frequently making for terrific television. Indeed, if cable news is ultimately theater, Carlson’s nightly performance is at once provocative, maddening, cringe-inducing, and compulsively watchable. Already, in its few short months in primetime, Tucker Carlson Tonight has created more viral moments than it had any right to do.
.. Though he has earned a reputation among his media antagonists for being an ambush artist—luring guests onto his show under false pretenses and then humiliating them with “gotcha” questions—Carlson says he’s always upfront while booking interviewees, and strives to avoid mean-spiritedness.
.. When I ask him why he was so infuriated by Duca, he thinks about it for a moment.
Finally, he answers, “It was the unreasonableness … It’s this assumption—and it’s held by a lot of people I live around—that you’re on God’s side, everyone else is an infidel, and by calling them names you’re doing the Lord’s work. I just don’t think that’s admirable, and I’m not impressed by that.”
.. the essence of Carlson’s case against the educated elites and well-heeled technocrats that comprise America’s ruling class (not to mention his neighborhood). They are
- too certain of their own righteousness,
- too dismissive of dissenters,
- too unwilling to entertain new ideas.
.. When Carlson first joined primetime last year, he assigned his show a mission statement: “The sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.”
.. united in their hatred of a common enemy, the smug elites who Carlson rails against every night. And while he may have spent his life happily living among them, he’s clearly demonstrated he has no qualms about taking them on.
Clinton’s top priority? Fighting her own worst instincts.
But she has also repeatedly displayed tendencies, overlapping and toxically reinforcing, that could undermine all those positive attributes:
To believe — correctly, in my view — that she is the victim of an implacable political opposition, and to respond by hunkering down and lashing out.
To believe — again, correctly — that she is being held to different, higher standards than others, and, rather than accepting this unpleasant reality and adjusting her behavior accordingly
.. To believe that her own good works are so extensive, and her goodwill so evident, that questions about her behavior can stem only from the malicious intent of political enemies, or the ravenous appetites of a hostile media.
.. Finally, to surround herself with a closed circle of advisers inclined more to enable than to prevent, and to reinforce Clinton’s us-against-the-world mentality rather than to challenge it.
.. These self-destructive instincts were on display at the outset of the email mess. Clinton wanted to keep emails on one device; her staff complied and accommodated when it should have pushed back — hard.
.. Thinking like a lawyer advised by other lawyers, Clinton chose to delete emails that she deemed personal. She had the legal right to do so, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal, before she left office, to expunge personal emails written from a government account.
But the mass deletion of emails that Clinton’s team alone deemed personal, conducted after the State Department asked for its official archives back, was guaranteed to create a firestorm when it became public.
.. Tanden, again, nailed it: “Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”
James Comey’s Self-Righteous Meddling
What law enforcement officer, by the way, announces that he is going to conduct a search before even obtaining a warrant?
.. Was Comey acting out of pure concern for the law? Or did he relish the chance to assert that he, and not the president, was right? We can’t know for sure, but Comey has always enjoyed flexing his power.
.. And now Comey is telling his staff that he felt compelled to tell Congress about the extra set of emails (which the F.B.I. most likely already saw in its original investigation) because, well, golly, he promised he would keep Congress informed.
.. The idea that he wanted to help his political party is pretty terrifying. But the idea that he acted out of moral self-righteousness is not much more reassuring, given the immense powers of his office.
.. Barry Goldwater, a real conservative if there ever was one, was outraged by the rise of morality politics in the Republican party.
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem,” Goldwater once said, according to John Dean’s book “Conservatives Without Conscience.” “Frankly, these people frighten me.”
.. Was Comey setting out to change the election results to benefit his own party and its leaders in Congress? Or was he posing as the owner of the moral high ground?
Neither option is comforting. And neither changes the fact that Comey had to know that his actions were not justified by government procedure or lawyerly protocol