James Comey Gets Pilloried from Left, Right, and Center

[EasyAce]

It’s obvious he deserved to be fired. All there is to quibble about is the precise reason why.
By Kyle Smith
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/james-comey-gets-pilloried-from-left-right-and-center/

For months, the media and President Trump’s loudest opponents convinced themselves that James Comey’s much-anticipated book was the ticking bomb that would blow up the Trump administration. Instead: No boom.

Comey hoped to guide the spotlight to his self-image as ultimate G-Man — a stalwart, sober, nonpartisan public servant whose courage and rectitude guided him through a moral, legal, and political thicket. Instead, the book reveals Comey to be a hack. A blunderer. A blowhard. He took a mighty swing at Trump and managed to punch himself in the eye.

Not only does the book offer zilch in the way of damaging new evidence against the president in the Russia matter or anything else, but its most revealing and most noticed passage pulverizes Comey’s own reputation. The former FBI director is being pilloried from left, right, and center. Perhaps even worse for him, he is being mocked as a pompous ass from left, right, and center. This is quite an achievement when you consider that it isn’t a Fire and Fury–style exposé but Comey’s own memoir that is making a fool of him.

“Donald Trump is contagious: He turned James Comey into Donald Trump” runs the headline of Karen Tumulty’s column in the Washington Post. Tumulty highlights Comey’s “pettiness, insecurity and need for affirmation,” plus an “ego” that “stays in high gear.” Fellow WaPo columnist Alexandra Petri relentlessly spoofs Comey’s gassy references to Reinhold Niebuhr and his sanctimonious self-regard: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and then, on Dec. 14, 1960, I, James Comey, was born. The initials, as Reinhold Niebuhr would tell us, are no coincidence.” The paper’s nonfiction-book critic, Carlos Lozada, compares Comey’s lack of self-awareness to Trump’s, questions Comey’s ethics, and says his “self-criticism — and self-regard — is almost comical,” scorning Comey both for lying about playing basketball for William & Mary and for ostentatiously flogging himself for the fib later. The very D.C. collision of the trifling and the sanctimonious in Comey’s personality is irresistibly funny: He’s James Comedy . . .