Comey, the Apprentice, is fired

I suppose the backbone to any good governance is to have ethical men stepping into the political arena to call foul without any political partisanship. This is an ideal, of course, and one that I'm afraid has largely left us as a nation. I think of the rise of memoir in literature, or creative non fiction, and see how far we've come as a society that strives for objective truth, admitting the objective is subjective. The new journalists started this in the '60's, and I'm pretty sure Hunter S. Thompson wrote a great piece in "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," about how objectivity in journalism was a lie. He may have been right, but the human race goes on because some men strive to rise above partisan rancor and search for the objective truth. I'm sure philosophy, theology, law, and language, all attempt to do the Herculean task of rising above our own likes and dislikes, but driving by the Facebook building every night with a flag beneath the American flag giving a big thumbs up is disheartening.

The public imagination and reality have a strange way of playing with each other, but in the public imagination we first strive to ascertain reality, and so it does matter how people are thought of, even if their actions, or some of them, contradict the illusion. James Comey, Robert F. Kennedy, Patrick Fitzgerald, and a few others came to symbolize our love for the objective passionless governmental truth seeker, working within the confines of the law. I don't have it in me to go into a long analysis of James Comey's legendary F.B.I. biography, but I first heard about him going to John Ashcroft's hospital bed to get him to sign an order in defiance of the Bush Administration's wiretapping policies, or something like this. The partisan in me has been both angry and happy with Comey over the years, but this is secondary to his reputation in the public imagination as a truth seeker free of the Dem/Repub war. (I'm pretty sure Comey was a Republican at one time, but may have become Independent).

I can't get over the optics of Trump firing him because I watched the Apprentice a lot in season one, it's only good season. The drama of the show was that Trump would fire someone every week, and do it in a cold blooded way after watching a show of how well each contestant performed in his capitalistic endeavor. The best part of the show was that you really got the feeling that Trump admired good ol' American hucksterism and could get lost in watching some people try to open a lemonade stand, and critique them. The firing was part of the modern era where we all fear for our jobs in a society with less and less of a social safety net. It was also a TV show so the firings didn't feel that significant except within the drama of the show and how much we (the audience) related to the contestants. It's safe to say that in optics I haven't seen a President get this off on firing people, and making a public spectacle of it. The difference is Trump isn't judging young wannabe capitalists, but government workers who take their service to their Country seriously. It's not really a dollars and cents issue.

The thing in life is that anyone can argue any action, and why debate is never ending. Trump and his acolytes are claiming that Comey broke the public's trust with him when he revealed that Hillary Clinton had all but broken the espionage act in her email scandal but wouldn't be tried. I think Comey stepped in some political shit here, and like a referee trying to make up for a bad call, threw the election towards Trump in the week before Election Day. This doesn't make what he did right, but once the ethical mistake was made not to prosecute Clinton, there was nothing else he could do. Why he chose to explain the scandal in such depth, an unprecedented act for the F.B.I., spoke of an inner turmoil in Comey that few could understand. Did he feel guilty for letting her off, and wanted everyone to know that she was a criminal? It was hard to tell what he was doing, like a man hedging a bet on a bad ethical decision. Let's face it, Dems, Hillary Clinton was under too much of a cloud of suspicion before she ever threw her hat in the ring to run, and this should've disqualified from any major political party.

The idea that Comey's firing wasn't about Russia defies credulity, like how the Iraq War wasn't about oil.