Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
I had no plans to read James Comey’s memoir. Then I got stranded in the Indianapolis Airport, located in a cul-de-sac in a cornfield at the dead-end of the Ronald Reagan Parkway, when the FAA sprang surprise inspections on Southwest Airlines, after one of its engines blew up in flight killing a woman passenger. Both my flights were cancelled and what was meant to be a five-hour journey back to Portland turned into an 18-hour ordeal, zig-zagging from Indy to Denver, Denver to Vegas (the country’s most dismal airport), Vegas to Oakland and Oakland to Portland. I needed something to pass the time.
The battery on my Kindle was dead and I was nearly finished re-reading Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, one of the most enjoyable chronicles of political psychopathy since Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King. The choice in the airport newsstand came down to Comey’s A Higher Loyalty or Madeleine Albright’s Fascism. Tough call. But since Albright’s volume didn’t appear to be a confession, I made a quick calculation that Comey’s might prove the lesser of two evils. It was, at least, the shorter of the two volumes.
One of the first things you learn about Comey is that he loves to poor mouth. He complains that he and his wife couldn’t afford a New York City apartment and he had to commute 50 miles to and from his home in Connecticut to his office in Manhattan when he served as US Attorney for the Southern District of New…