The Lesson Of The Comey Hearings: Character Counts
By David Thornton | June 8, 2017, 09:41pm | @captainkudzu James Comey’s testimony is not going to break the impasse in Washington and will satisfy neither side. Trump supporters are claiming that the president was exonerated because Comey did not claim that Trump ordered him to drop the Russia investigation and did not present an airtight accusation of obstruction of justice. Trump opponents point to the fact that Comey stood by his claim that the president asked him to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn and that such a request is unethical, even if it doesn’t clearly rise to the standard of obstruction of justice.
Whatever your opinion of the he said-he said dispute between Comey and Trump, the matter underscores just how wrong Trump supporters were about one thing: Character does still matter.
The fundamental question in the matter is who to believe. Do Americans trust the former FBI director with an axe to grind and a reputation for protecting himself politically or do they trust the sitting president with a casual regard for the truth, a man who has a reputation for saying whatever seems expedient at the moment and walking it back or pretending it was never said later.
When a president needs the benefit of the doubt from the country, as Trump does now, it helps if he has a good reputation. Trump does not. A Quinnipiac poll from May found that 61 percent say that Trump is not honest. When asked the first word that comes to mind about Donald Trump, the top three answers were “idiot” (39 percent), “incompetent” (31 percent), and “liar” (30 percent).
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http://theresurgent.com/the-lesson-of-the-comey-hearings-character-counts/
