For those who missed James Comey being interviewed on ABC Sunday
night, (4/15/18), I'm including bits from a Times summary that I find most striking.
• I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally
incompetent or [in] early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of
above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going
on. I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally
unfit to be president.
• It was him talking almost the entire time, which I’ve
discovered is something he frequently does. And so it would be monologue in
this direction, monologue in that direction, monologue in a different
direction.
And a constant series of assertions that — about the
inauguration crowd, about how great my inauguration speech was, about all the
free media — earned media, I think was his term, that I got during the
campaign. On and on and on and on. Everyone agrees, everyone agrees, I did
this, the — I never assaulted these women, I never made fun of a reporter.
And — I’m sure you’re wondering what question did I ask that
would prompt those? None, zero. I didn’t ask any questions that I recall.
• He will stain everyone around him.
• [NY Times]: During much of the interview, Mr. Comey seems
disciplined and almost dispassionate. But at the end, he lets loose in a
remarkable way. It is hard to think of a time that such a senior official of
the government has gone on to so directly question the moral fitness of the
sitting president. He said that he hoped Mr. Trump would be held accountable
for his lies, but that impeachment would be a cop-out for a public that should
also be held accountable for electing Mr. Trump in the first place.
So, as per Comey, Trump is neither intellectually nor neurologically
challenged. To explain him in such terms — as, say, stupid or declining into dementia
—is, in effect, to excuse him, to get him off the hook, to give him a high
office version of an insanity defense. No, Comey sees Trump more simply as a
bad man, morally deficient by most standard but extravagantly so by the norms of
the presidency.
And give that high office, Trump's immorality can't be
quarantined; it has the capacity to "stain everyone around him." I
think other escapees from Trump Tower, if and when they gather the courage to
tell their stories, will confirm Comey's view.
Comey takes a similar view on impeachment. Sure it would be
nice to rid ourselves of Trump by any possible legal means but impeachment, for
Comey, would give not Trump, but the electorate, a pass it doesn't deserve. It's
the electorate that needs to cleanse itself of Trump.
Comey did not deny the possibility that his own clumsy,
badly timed announcements about Hillary's emails might have skewed the
election, though he hopes they didn't. To my mind they did, but still his point
stays with me: the American electorate, whatever turbulence it experienced on
the way to the polls showed its own moral caliber, or lack thereof, by making
Trump president.
Oh, Trump will make a serious, potentially violent stink however he is evicted, but as to
the electorate coming to its senses, I think Comey is right to say the only real
good riddance is to vote him out.
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