{"id":307860,"date":"2017-05-12T14:59:38","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T13:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/comeytose-in-washington\/"},"modified":"2017-05-12T14:59:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T13:59:38","slug":"comeytose-in-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/comeytose-in-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"Comeytose in Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_92652\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-92652 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-11-at-10.48.47-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"340\" srcset=\"http:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-11-at-10.48.47-PM.png 510w, http:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-11-at-10.48.47-PM-300x200.png 300w, http:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-11-at-10.48.47-PM-768x511.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by thierry ehrmann | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>So our Mountebank-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has finally fired James Comey. Good riddance. I\u2019ll shed no tears for our vain Inspector Javert. But once again Trump, the Master of the Self-Inflicted Wound, has done the impossible. In a single stroke, he\u00a0has transformed the almost universally loathed Comey into a sympathetic, if not heroic, figure.<\/p>\n<p>Trump, who once fired people for a living on TV, bungled the termination of the director of the FBI director so badly that he also succeeded in reigniting a scandal that had started to cool to\u00a0a slow simmer\u2013and, not incidentally, may have committed the impeachable offense of \u201cobstruction of justice,\u201d motivated \u00a0primarily by\u00a0personal pique. (See <a href=\"http:\/\/watergate.info\/impeachment\/articles-of-impeachment\">Article One for\u00a0the\u00a0Impeachment of\u00a0Richard Nixon<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>One might be tempted, like Voltaire\u2019s Dr. Pangloss, to assess the fallout from Trump\u2019s slo-motion purge of the prosecutorial state (Sally Yates, Preet\u00a0Bharara and Comey) as the best of all possible worlds: Comey is gone, the Department of Justice is implicated, the FBI is internally splintered and Trump is wounded, perhaps mortally.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, all very good\u2013except, naturally, for the intervention of the liberals, who have adopted Comey as a martyr in their Russian witch hunt and have started praising the FBI\u2013an agency literally engineered to prosecute (if not invent) the Red Scare\u2013as a \u201cbeacon of integrity and independence.\u201d A few minutes after the news broke, even Michael Moore&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2017\/05\/12\/comeytose-in-washington\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0 So our Mountebank-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has finally fired James Comey. Good riddance. I\u2019ll shed no tears for our vain Inspector Javert. But once again Trump, the Master of the Self-Inflicted Wound, has done the impossible. In a single stroke, he\u00a0has transformed the almost universally loathed Comey into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-307860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}