The Liberal Crack-up

If played correctly, the psychotic explosion of the Democrats and their allies in the jackal press over the Comey dismissal and his alleged memo can become a decisive victory for the president. The Mueller nomination, a hybrid arrangement that will be a supplementary investigation with the FBI, will push the question into a cul de sac that will entirely clear the president.

It need hardly here be emphasized that the efforts to represent the firing of Comey as an excess of authority, an attempt to discourage an expose of a scandal between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, a replication of any aspect of the Watergate affair; and now enriched by the garbled claim of an interference with the Flynn investigation: all of this is part of a madness that has gripped the American political class as it sinks beneath the brackish, fecal waters of the swamp it has filled and wallowed in happily for twenty years.

I will not replicate the presumptuous error of the Trump-haters and mind-read Comey. Whatever his motives and delusions, in July, he seized upon the compromising misconduct of the attorney general, Loretta Lynch in meeting with President Clinton to make the decision- not to leave it to the equally publicity-eager deputy attorney general Sally Yates and not any prosecutor, that Mrs. Clinton was guilty of felonies but should not be prosecuted. When the election campaign was down to its last ten days, a mass of improperly withheld and misdirected emails came to the FBI director's attention and he felt, presumably with some agitation percolating beneath him in the Bureau, that he must refer to them publicly. With haste that cast doubt on the FBI's thoroughness, he then assured the country that the tens of thousands of emails confirmed his original judgment, that Mrs. Clinton should not be charged. This judgment was beyond his authority to make and an outrage to make publicly, and if he was determined to make it, he should not have announced the reopening of the email question for a few days before shutting it down again.

There is no question that he told President Trump that on the basis of all evidence, Trump was not suspected of wrongdoing in his campaign's relations with the Russian government, and Senator Feinstein, a militant Trump opponent, confirms that Comey had said this to her and the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Charles Grassley. The same person who rushed before the cameras to convict but excuse from charges Mrs. Clinton, could express privately the innocence of Mr. Trump, but could give no hint of it publicly, even though he knew perfectly well that the continuing confected cloud of the Russian collusion allegation seriously impeded the ability of the administration to govern. One could ransack the annals of Hollywood and of pulp fiction to find a more deserving candidate for summary dismissal than this mountebank who apparently fancied himself an electoral college of one to determine who was a suitable occupant of the presidency. There are reasonable questions about the firing of General Douglas MacArthur by President Truman, and about the firing of Archibald Cox and Elliott Richardson by President Nixon, but there is not about Comey.

The Trump-haters, somewhat muted after the passage of the health care reform by the House of Representatives, on the Comey news, ricocheted off the walls and ceilings in affected outrage and jubilation, in the hyperbole of their sanctimony. And the leaked, excerpted, alleged Flynn memo to Comey's file had them drinking champagne from fire hoses and ululating about impeachment. Such a thread does not constitute conviction beyond a reasonable doubt of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Some strange chord has been severed that separates the rabid media from their senses.

At least Nancy Pelosi is tried to tune down poor hopeless Chuck Schumer's Uriah Heap impeachment routine: what she and most of the Democrats want is Trump immobilized, so the country continues to wallow in political dysfunctionalism and flat-line economically, so they can regain the Congress, torment the president with a pseudo-judicial process, and go back to swimming in their swamp like happy, fat alligators. The Mueller appointment shuts them down but assures a reasonable process, and the chances of Trump having colluded with Putin to defraud the American electorate are equal to Chuck Schumer's chances of becoming governor of Mississippi.

As Trump, who had installed a competent cabinet and an irreproachable Supreme Court nominee and had started through the repeal of the Obamacare fiasco, the roll-back of the global warming and Dodd-Frank regulatory shakedowns, suddenly seemed vulnerable, at least to his haters, it looked like a delayed act of deliverance from a perverted providence. From every furrowed leftist and defected neocon highbrow, there debouched a kuckoo bird, flapping and gibbering. The rabid Trump-haters of right and left swarmed our screens. Woodward and Bernstein, epochal myth-makers, ever-persisting geriatric greasers 55 years after Watergate, exhumed themselves to warn of the president's turpitude. Eliot Cohen, perhaps the most overrated historian in America, late out of the starting blocks with Comey, rushed into print denouncing the president for giving secrets to the Russian foreign minister last week, simultaneously with the absolute assurance of the national security adviser, General McMaster, that the assertion was completely false. The Times' principal token of intermittent balance, Ross Douthat, called for removal of the president from office for mental incompetence.

Almost all of it is infantilist drivel and hypocrisy: the Golden Shower, collusion with the Kremlin to rig the election, tampering with justice according to a self-addressed Comey memo in which Trump wishes Flynn well. These are puny, sickly, pimply, conjurations of a constitutional argument-the contemptible last stand of the media swamp-reptiles. Bring it on. (In 48 years as the country's chief investigator, J. Edgar Hoover never held press conferences with political overtones like Comey routinely did, or referred publicly to investigations before handing them over to the Justice Department.) The president had made it clear that he sought thoroughness even more than haste in concluding the investigation of the Russian collusion charges and innuendoes, and Mueller's arrival proved it. The New York Times' claim that Trump had upheld funding for the Russian investigation was debunked by the acting FBI director, Comey loyalist and Democrat Andrew McCabe. McCabe also debunked the theory that a special prosecutor was needed, as the FBI had not been interfered with and would carry out the investigation scrupulously and thoroughly. Richard Rosenstein debunked the Times-Post story that he (Rosenstein) had threatened to resign. Despite this, the unimaginably ludicrous Chuck Schumer still demanded a special prosecutor, now with a foregone conclusion of the ultimate result, as the price for approving any nominee for FBI director, (even if it were Hillary Clinton). Mueller's appointment cuts the Democrats off at the ankles.

This time, the Democrats are headed for the last round-up. Trump should strengthen the White House staff. He will propose an FBI nominee of unquestionable stature and presumably secure confirmation. While Mueller and McCabe sort out the facts, the Supreme Court will toss out the attention-seeking antics of the West Coast flake-judges who gained their fleeting moment of gimcrack fame by challenging the president's clear authority over immigration. The Democrats' policy of obstruction will come crashing to ground, and the commentariat and White House press corps who are the real opposition now, will be afflicted by chronic glottal stops. The president will put through his health care and tax reforms and drive on. And the honeymoon to which all incoming holders of great office are entitled, will finally begin.

While the Clintons and Obama wait to see if they are in danger of indictment, with no one of either family to lead the Democrats for the first time in 25 years, the once loyal opposition have sown and they shall reap. The president has evident draw-backs, but he is trying to do what he was elected to do. Trump's enemies right now are an abominable mélange of snobbery, hypocrisy, and psychopathic partisanship. They will be weighed in the balance and they will be found wanting.