Poisoning the well... Oops! Too much!

I'm starting to think that yesterday's post was the wrong one for everything to go in the most logical, self-evident order.

I guess the odds were always against this being perfect.

Anyway, I have been thinking about James Comey.

I have this memory of the first time that he was talking about investigating Hillary Clinton's e-mail server. That seems like it should have been the July 5th, 2016 press conference, but that doesn't seem quite right. 

It was definitely before October 28th of that year.

What I remember is that after admitting that he could not find any wrongdoing, but that maybe they hadn't had enough time, someone (I assume a member of Congress) asked about if maybe they could open some other investigation and Comey responding "I wish you would." They were all very pleased with how amusing and clever they were.

Then in October 28th there was the release of a new investigation into Weiner. Even before knowing it would not have any implications for Clinton, it would have been unusual to announce at that point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey 

Comey justified it as "guidance", perhaps feeling good about the final results exonerating Clinton, except that he just said it did not change his July results. 

Well, his July results had been to say that he couldn't find anything while still giving the impression that Clinton was crooked, which a lot of people were already eager to believe.  

I think Comey liked to see himself as a martyr for integrity. That he was accused of favoring Clinton by the right when he was clearly not being fair to her might give him the appearance of not being partisan.

I believe that Comey did not want Trump to win the election. Given how things played out, that would have been smart of him, though I do not believe he was thinking in those terms.

However, I also believe that Comey did not want Clinton to win. That she was on track to stuck in his craw. He didn't want her opponent, but he couldn't stand her being all high and mighty. He wanted to throw some mud at her so even though she would still win, she would at least still have mud clinging to her. He was the big boy who could make that happen.

Yeah, he lost his job, but other people have suffered far more for his actions. 

Comey was not a leftist; he wasn't even a Democrat. He still shares some traits.

One of those -- and we are in a different stage now -- was not truly understanding the depth of the racism in this country. (Easy to avoid when you're a white guy.)

Trump was such an unusually inexperienced, unintelligent, corrupt candidate that it was hard to believe he could possibly win. There should have been so much that made people reject him.

However, in the wake of a successful Black president, there were people who desperately wanted the racism, especially for the right to say that everyone else is the real problem; we're great! That's way better than a woman!

Maybe leftists do understand that now, and that's why they are going for white Nazi fail-sons. (Yeah, that's another post.)

Of course, that has drawbacks, and they have gone with some non-white candidates too, and even a few women. 

They remain notably racist and sexist. It's a feature, not a bug. 

Once you open the door to that, you can't always get it shut again.