Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Counterpunch on the Comey firing…
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nittany ram.
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May 13, 2017 at 7:56 am #68740
wvParticipantlink:http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/12/comeytose-in-washington/
“….Let us also recall that James Comey was one of the leading propagandists for the phony War on Cops, a smokescreen to hide the carnage inflicted by the police’s pitiless war on black street kids. This spring Comey ordered the FBI’s terrorism task force to investigate Standing Rock protesters. How can you repress your revulsion to lavish praise on such a man?
Trump’s welcome cashiering of Comey has been called Nixonian, the go-to metaphor for any executive temper tantrum. Yet this comparison demeans Nixon, who at least had the sense to fire Archie Cox on a Saturday. (In Trump’s defense, perhaps the president had a weekend tee-time he couldn’t break.)
Trump could have dismissed Comey for almost any reason or no reason at all. But the president couldn’t resist the temptation to create a cover story for Comey’s firing that proved as flimsy as a Kendell Jenner fashion shoot.
By all accounts, Trump became enraged with Comey after he learned that the FBI man had requested additional resources from the Department of Justice to expand his investigation into the Trump team’s ties with Russia. The FBI is apparently hot on the redolent trails of lucre left by Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, which confirms my suspicion that the real scandal isn’t Russian meddling in the 2016 elections but shady financial dealings by Trump’s dubious ensemble of associates. It always comes down to money, especially with people, and Team Trump is filled with them, who are stimulated by any opportunity for self-enrichment. Mannafort and Flynn are both vulnerable on these counts and thus are likely targets for being squeezed by the Feds until they squeal on Trump and his inner circle to save their own asses.
So Trump went on the offensive. He told Jefferson Beauregard Sessions that he wanted Comey’s head on a platter and Sessions, a nasty but dull piece of work who had already perjured himself before Congress, wasn’t smart enough to simply advise Trump that he had the power to can Comey without cause. Instead, Sessions instructed newly-minted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to prepare a brief against Comey based on the G-Man’s buffoonish mishandling of Hillary’s email entanglements. Rosenstein was viewed as the perfect patsy in this scenario, because he had recently been lauded by many Democrats (useful idiots in almost any grifter’s game) as a “man of principle and integrity” and had been robustly confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 94-6.
The key element in this charade was that Rosenstein’s bill of indictment against Comey had to sedulously avoid any mention of RussiaGate© in order to keep Sessions–who vowed to recuse himself from such matters–in the loop.
Then the President, in true Trumpian style, undermined the whole plot by writing in his dismissal letter this damning sentence: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.” Damning to Trump, Sessions and Rosenstein that is, because Trump couldn’t resist revealing that the real motive was to bury the Russia investigation. Trump’s letter is a kind of forensic IED, detonating legal shrapnel toward anyone who had a hand in it: Trump, Sessions, Rosenstein, Doug McGahn and Mike Pence.
When the affair immediately blew up in the face of the White House, Trump’s team reflexively tried to pin the blame on Rosenstein, saying the Deputy AG’s memo was the sole reason for the firing of Comey. After Rosenstein got wind of these reports, he called White House counsel Doug McGahn and threatened to quit unless the White House clarified that the impetus to fire Comey came from Sessions and Trump not him. According to the Wall Street Journal, Rosenstein told McGahn that “he couldn’t work in an environment where facts weren’t accurately reported.” Which begs the question, what administration did he think he was joining two weeks ago? In the end, Rosenstein’s threats were idle ones. He lacked the courage and character of Elliott Richardson and Bill Ruckelshaus. Threatening to quit and not following through is more ethically deficient than just quietly serving as a compliant Trump tool.
The blending of hubris and stupidity on display in the Comey affair is a recipe for political comedy and legal disaster. By concocting a false story for Comey’s expulsion, the Trump team, including the President and the Attorney General, have exposed their consciousness of guilt and laid the groundwork for charges of obstruction of justice against them–if there’s anyone left in the Justice Department or the Congress with the guts to bring it. Perhaps Ralph Nader will sue, as he did in 1973, when he won a seminal verdict in federal court that Nixon’s firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox was illegal. (The torrent of bullshit Ralph has had to endure from Democratic Party crybabies since 2000 has largely eclipsed public knowledge about the profound service Nader has done to protect the lives and rights of American citizens over the last six decades.)
So here we are adrift in uncharted waters. No president has ever fired an FBI director on a personal whim. The only other termination occurred in 1993, when Bill Clinton gave William Sessions the boot for using FBI funds to install a new security system on his home and for travel to see his daughter at college. Even then Clinton treaded cautiously, relying on a 161-page report on Sessions’s improprieties compiled by George HW Bush’s Justice Department. Still it took Clinton six months to summon the courage to send Sessions packing. Clinton said he moved so slowly to evict Sessions because he feared “politicizing” the FBI. This is laughable. The notion that the FBI is somehow an “apolitical” enterprise is one of the most preposterous, if enduring, fantasies of the Beltway…. see link
May 13, 2017 at 10:35 am #68745
ZooeyParticipant“Yet this comparison demeans Nixon, who at least had the sense to fire Archie Cox on a Saturday. ”
I thought that this was just another symptom of the stupidity of this administration.
They are such amateurs.
May 13, 2017 at 11:04 am #68748nittany ramModerator“Yet this comparison demeans Nixon, who at least had the sense to fire Archie Cox on a Saturday. ”
I thought that this was just another symptom of the stupidity of this administration.
They are such amateurs.
Which makes this all so surreal. Any other president would already be facing impeachment for doing just a fraction of what Trump has done since he’s been in office.
Yet he persists.
May 13, 2017 at 11:27 am #68752
PA RamParticipantThis is not a “country first” nation. It is a “party first” nation. If the Clinton had won and the Republicans were in charge she would already have been impeached. However, if Clinton had won and the Dems were in charge they would no doubt cover for her. There are few true patriots in Congress and wrapping a flag around yourself does not make you one.
This is about a two royal classes protecting their own self interests. The peasants in the middle do not particularly matter.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick
May 13, 2017 at 11:48 am #68754
Billy_TParticipantGood article. A minor snippet from it reminds me of the ongoing attack by the Dems against the Greens, Stein, Sanders, etc. They keep bringing up Nader in 2000 and blaming him for Bush. I wish they’d go back to school and take math classes again.
In 2000, barely half the electorate showed up. Roughly 100 MILLION voters stayed home — or had their votes suppressed. Nader’s total, nationwide, was roughly 2.8 million. How on earth is it Nader’s fault when 100 million voters stayed home, and an additional 50 million voted for Bush?
Basically, it’s 2.8 million versus 150 million. And it’s all on Nader?
May 13, 2017 at 11:51 am #68755Billy_TParticipantAnd, if they just want to focus on Florida. Gore lost by 538 votes. But 320,000 Democrats in Florida voted directly for Bush. Nader received roughly 23,000 potential Gore votes.
320,000 versus 23,000. If just 270 from that 320,000 had switched from Bush to Gore, he wins Florida.
Oh, and half the Dem electorate in Florida stayed home.
People need to take some remedial math courses before they decide to blame the Greens.
May 13, 2017 at 11:55 am #68756Billy_TParticipantThis is not a “country first” nation. It is a “party first” nation. If the Clinton had won and the Republicans were in charge she would already have been impeached. However, if Clinton had won and the Dems were in charge they would no doubt cover for her. There are few true patriots in Congress and wrapping a flag around yourself does not make you one.
This is about a two royal classes protecting their own self interests. The peasants in the middle do not particularly matter.
Well said, PA.
May 13, 2017 at 12:01 pm #68757
znModeratorn 2000, barely half the electorate showed up. Roughly 100 MILLION voters stayed home — or had their votes suppressed. Nader’s total, nationwide, was roughly 2.8 million. How on earth is it Nader’s fault when 100 million voters stayed home, and an additional 50 million voted for Bush?
Because of those who DID turnout, as your own math shows, Nader leaked votes from the dem total.
May 13, 2017 at 12:36 pm #68758ZooeyParticipantAnd Buchanon got 449,000, and the Libertarian candidate got over 384,000. Which candidate were those votes taken from?
And beyond Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa, and Wisconsin were all decided by less than half a percent, New Mexico by less than a tenth of a percent.
May 13, 2017 at 12:51 pm #68759Billy_TParticipantn 2000, barely half the electorate showed up. Roughly 100 MILLION voters stayed home — or had their votes suppressed. Nader’s total, nationwide, was roughly 2.8 million. How on earth is it Nader’s fault when 100 million voters stayed home, and an additional 50 million voted for Bush?
Because of those who DID turnout, as your own math shows, Nader leaked votes from the dem total.
When someone does “what ifs,” they can’t just stop where it pleases them, to make their point. That’s just cherry-picking, when people do that. It’s kinda like this:
You put out the word to all Rams fans, from all 50 states, that you need a certain number to respond in order to qualify for a venue to house a huge gathering. The response is mixed, and you fall short by a few hundred. But you have this particular dislike for Rams fans from Vermont. They really tick you off, cuz they’re all, like, DFH and shit. So, you make sure to spread it far and wide that the Vermont Rams fans, and they alone, were responsible for killing the gathering.
This, even though all kinds of Rams fans, from all the other states, didn’t bother to respond either.
May 13, 2017 at 12:55 pm #68760Billy_TParticipantAnd Buchanon got 449,000, and the Libertarian candidate got over 384,000. Which candidate were those votes taken from?
And beyond Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa, and Wisconsin were all decided by less than half a percent, New Mexico by less than a tenth of a percent.
Exactly.
Plus, no state can be “decisive” in our system. No one state has another ECs to do that. Bush won 30 states; Gore 20. Rather than pin it all on Nader, perhaps the Dems should consider the other ten states he couldn’t win, including his home state of Tennessee.
But the real kicker here? In Florida, 320,000 registered Dems voted directly for Bush. Last time I checked, 320,000 is a hell of a lot more than Nader’s 23,000. If we’re playing “what ifs,” that has to include those registered Dems, too, and their numbers dwarfed Nader’s.
May 13, 2017 at 12:56 pm #68761znModeratorn 2000, barely half the electorate showed up. Roughly 100 MILLION voters stayed home — or had their votes suppressed. Nader’s total, nationwide, was roughly 2.8 million. How on earth is it Nader’s fault when 100 million voters stayed home, and an additional 50 million voted for Bush?
Because of those who DID turnout, as your own math shows, Nader leaked votes from the dem total.
When someone does “what ifs,” they can’t just stop where it pleases them, to make their point. That’s just cherry-picking, when people do that. It’s kinda like this:
You put out the word to all Rams fans, from all 50 states, that you need a certain number to respond in order to qualify for a venue to house a huge gathering. The response is mixed, and you fall short by a few hundred. But you have this particular dislike for Rams fans from Vermont. They really tick you off, cuz they’re all, like, DFH and shit. So, you make sure to spread it far and wide that the Vermont Rams fans, and they alone, were responsible for killing the gathering.
This, even though all kinds of Rams fans, from all the other states, didn’t bother to respond either.
Not sure how that’s a response, really. I just looked at numbers. Among those who turned out, Nader took votes from dems.
May 13, 2017 at 12:57 pm #68762znModeratorAnd Buchanon got 449,000, and the Libertarian candidate got over 384,000. Which candidate were those votes taken from?
And beyond Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa, and Wisconsin were all decided by less than half a percent, New Mexico by less than a tenth of a percent.
I would figure, republicans.
My thing is though that we would have been better off with a dem in those years. So that’s all that really interests me. In fact with Gore in office, there’s a real chance they would have figured out 9/11 before it happened (that is if, which is likely, they continued agency intel sharing policies that were in use under Clinton and which Bush cancelled.)
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May 13, 2017 at 1:01 pm #68763Billy_TParticipantZN,
Yes. And so did Bush. He took Democratic Party votes away from Gore, at a much higher clip. So why focus on the guy who took away far fewer? Especially when those voters said no to either party. In the case of the 320,000 registered Dems, they went directly for Bush. It wasn’t an indirect bi-product of their vote, as it was with Nader.
The real issue for me is that the Dems ran a terrible campaign, and couldn’t make the sale. That’s on them. It’s not Nader’s problem. Ironically, given that one of the biggest complaints about the Nader effect was Iraq, he was the only antiwar candidate in the race. I hear from all sorts of Dems that voting for Nader gave us the Iraq War indirectly.
Um, no. A vote for Nader was a vote against war. I have no doubt Gore and the Dems would have engaged in warfare as well. Different targets. But war all the same.
The logical antiwar vote was Nader, not Gore or Bush.
May 13, 2017 at 1:08 pm #68764znModeratorA lot of this has to do with how discussion gets framed.
We lefties often act like we’re surrounded by non-listening, bad argument types from among righties and liberals. We then have this huffy “can you believe THIS” response to that.
That doesn’t work when it turns out we disagree among ourselves.
Fact is, there is no one simple dogmatic “true answer” to the Nader thing. It is entirely possible for people on the left to disagree about his impact, and whether or not a dem was preferable in those years. If you conduct that conversation like we do with righties, it just doesn’t acknowledge that there will be diversity among left responses.
My thing is that Nader did no good and that a dem was preferable in those years. That’s a vote (ie. an informal poll vote in a discussion), not an announcement of indisputable dogma.
Probably the better response would be, I vote differently on that issue, I don’t see it that way. A manner which begins with the premise that there’s no such thing as a pure position on that on the left, just different positions.
And so yeah I acknowledge the “time to get out of the dem/repub same-same routine and promote alternatives.” I acknowledge it, and respect it, and don’t share it. To me that’s an entirely pragmatic, case by case thing.
And btw that right there–acknowledge differences–is one of the reasons I am to my core a leftie. So we may just have to agree to disagree.
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May 13, 2017 at 1:17 pm #68765Billy_TParticipantZN, well, we disagree a bit about possible frames, too. But, yes. Lefties definitely can disagree in good faith, etc. No worries on that part.
I, too, see Gore as preferable to Bush, and Nader as preferable to both of them. So, it’s not an issue, for me, of saying, it’s okay that Bush won, cuz both parties suck. I think Bush was among the worst presidents ever, and until Trump, I might have had him in the top three. Trump pushes him out of that now and has the top slot — at least so far.
My point is the blame game. Not who was preferable. I wrote what I wrote to try to demonstrate that lashing out at the Greens, or Stein, or Sanders, when people do that, just makes no sense. Not logically, mathematically, ethically or morally — in my book.
May 13, 2017 at 1:19 pm #68766Billy_TParticipantOh, and apologies if I came across as too combative. Was not my intention.
May 13, 2017 at 4:06 pm #68769wvParticipantThis is not a “country first” nation. It is a “party first” nation….
This is about a two royal classes protecting their own self interests. The peasants in the middle do not particularly matter.
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The poignancy of the situation of course, is that the peasants themselves
keep voting for one or the other, of the two ‘royal classes’.The peasants dont have to do that.
Except they ‘do’ have to do that, cause their brains
have been colonized by the two royal classes.w
vMay 13, 2017 at 4:12 pm #68770wvParticipantThat’s a vote (ie. an informal poll vote in a discussion), not an announcement of indisputable dogma…
..Probably the better response would be, I vote differently on that issue, I don’t see it that way.
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That was a good post.I agree with you. And BillyT.
Oh, and i blame the system for all those millions
of brains who voted against Nader.w
vMay 13, 2017 at 4:39 pm #68771ZooeyParticipantThere is no doubt in my mind that we would not have invaded Iraq under Gore, and that ISIS wouldn’t exist in its current state, if it existed at all. So without doubt, the election of Bush was catastrophic.
Personally, I do not blame Nader. I blame Jeb Bush and Kathleen Harris, and Justices Scalia and O’Connor most heavily.
May 13, 2017 at 5:27 pm #68772wvParticipantThere is no doubt in my mind that we would not have invaded Iraq under Gore, and that ISIS wouldn’t exist in its current state, if it existed at all. So without doubt, the election of Bush was catastrophic.
Personally, I do not blame Nader. I blame Jeb Bush and Kathleen Harris, and Justices Scalia and O’Connor most heavily.
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Oh heck yeah.
Gore woulda been better.And most voters…
um…voted for him.w
vMay 13, 2017 at 10:02 pm #68787
waterfieldParticipantThis is not a “country first” nation. It is a “party first” nation….
This is about a two royal classes protecting their own self interests. The peasants in the middle do not particularly matter.
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The poignancy of the situation of course, is that the peasants themselves
keep voting for one or the other, of the two ‘royal classes’.The peasants dont have to do that.
Except they ‘do’ have to do that, cause their brains
have been colonized by the two royal classes.w
v“Peasants” and “colonized brains”.
That is precisely why progressive will never move forward. Most people see this language as elitism. And that pisses them off. You know the common person-the one you need to be on your side in order to make the very changes you want. There are some very bright and well educated people who voted for Trump. And there are some “peasants” and yes “colonized brains” who voted for Nader. We simply have to stop blaming our life’s misfortunes on “corporations”. To not do so is to forever waddle around in a hopeless sea of mud.
May 13, 2017 at 10:38 pm #68790znModerator“Peasants” and “colonized brains”.
That is precisely why progressive will never move forward.
W, you just did precisely what you complain about. The kind of language WV uses does not represent all progressives on this board let alone in existence. But on the basis of one guy doing one thing you just generalized about an entire group of people.
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May 13, 2017 at 10:49 pm #68793wvParticipantThat is precisely why progressive will never move forward. Most people see this language as elitism.
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Progressives wont move forward because there are very few of us in this country.
Democrats/liberals and rightwingers will move forward because they ‘are’ the system.
w
vMay 13, 2017 at 11:01 pm #68794nittany ramModeratorThat is precisely why progressive will never move forward. Most people see this language as elitism. And that pisses them off. You know the common person-the one you need to be on your side in order to make the very changes you want. There are some very bright and well educated people who voted for Trump. And there are some “peasants” and yes “colonized brains” who voted for Nader. We simply have to stop blaming our life’s misfortunes on “corporations”. To not do so is to forever waddle around in a hopeless sea of mud.
W, setting aside the democrats for a minute, you would agree that Trump doesn’t have the best interest of the poor at heart. So why did so many vote for him? Why do so many poor whites vote for the GOP in every election? It’s not as if their message changes from election to election. Their central message is always a mix of xenophobia and trickle down nonsense. Why do so many poor people vote against fair wages, affordable healthcare, progressive tax plans, etc. Why do they vote against their own best interests? What causes them to do that?
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