I Am Beside Myself

FBI Director James Comey should resign or be removed, and then serious housecleaning must begin. Regardless of your political leanings, Comey interfered with an election for personal political purposes — not to get Trump elected, but to save his own ass ahead of leaks that he could not prevent. That means he has lost control of the organization, as if that were not obvious. The answer to his fear of politically-motivated leaks from agents unwilling to abide by non-disclosure rules should NEVER have been to violate years of Justice Dept norms because he was too weak of a leader to handle the criticism if he didn’t disclose information before it was illegally leaked.

What all this tells us is that Comey knew his agency was being weaponized by rogue agents against a presidential candidate. And rather than take steps to stop that from happening and the election being interfered with, he made it significantly worse.

He also allowed this to happen in the context of known Russian interference with the election, in coordination with Wikileaks, which appears also to be feeding its leaks to the Trump campaign in advance. So he compounded outside, coordinated foreign interference by Moscow and Assange, who are colluding to help Trump, by taking actions that had the effect of further helping Trump, because Comey wanted to help himself.

This FBI situation is such an incredible, jaw-dropping, anti-democratic and disgusting outrage, and it is not hyperbole to say that it boggles the mind that the Republican Party hasn’t condemned the leaks or Russian interference but is exploiting them with the glee of the useful idiot that Putin clearly knows Chaffetz and other GOP stooges to be, including the King of All Weasels, Paul Ryan, who used Comey’s preposterous letter to call for preventing Clinton from obtaining security briefings. These Republican leaders cannot control a single thing Donald Trump does, they know he is a foul and repulsive and catastrophically ignorant and lazy bigot, they know he is a global and a national security threat, they know he is a threat to democracy because he rejects so many aspects of our democracy and our Constitution and embraces and promises authoritariansim, and will say anything, regardless of truth, context, or effect, if he thinks it will benefit him in the moment, always, but always, putting himself first, and without a single known example in his sociopathic life of putting anything or anyone ahead of himself.

But these GOP leaders and millions — milllions! — of our countrymen are so blinded by their deranged loathing of Hillary Clinton that there appears to be no principle that they will not disregard in service of putting in office her opponent, even though he is by a wide, wide margin the most indecent, disgusting, cruel, petty, ignorant, unqualified, puerile, corrupt, deceitful, bigoted, vicious, immoral, selfish, crass, pathologically mendacious, and ill-equipped person ever to get this close to the presidency. His sexual predations and lies and his fundamental, almost primordial absence of common decency, kindness, and other basic values that are supposed to unite us in our humanity are not even disputed by his virulent supporters — these features are why they support him!

And the rest of the opportunistic and servile enablers who gaslight and attack and lie for him, which is most of the Republican party that currently holds office, are actively promoting the lie that Clinton is a criminal, threatening not to confirm her appointments, or to impeach her before she even takes office, or to weaponize the Congress itself against her to impede her presidency at every turn — -these little statements are escalating, they are no longer located in the darkest depths of the infested fever swamp of the tea party and alt-right, because that fever swamp is Donald Trump’s base and its avatars run Trump’s campaign, and so we see senators latching on to this insanity — and not the just the ultra-right Ted Cruz, but that faux-maverick John McCain, and we see Republican Congressman talking impeachment, and other elected officials tweeting that she is a cunt ( A CUNT FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!) and more and more of them suggesting assassination is too good for her.

AND WHY? Because people think she is corrupt? I disagree, but even if she is, how can that possibly justify the insane level of hatred the right has been fomenting, this idea she is Lucifer (from Ben Carson to others), these endless characterizations that there is something demonic about her? Did you see those debates? She stood there presidentially and, as a looming, orange-faced, ass-lipped bully interrupted and sniffed at and attacked her, calmly discussed her support for women’s rights, her plan to create jobs and raise the minimum wage and get equal pay for women and forgive college debt and deal with climate change, and address gun violence and the need to deal with implicit bias, but she is supposed to be the fucking devil? Because some emails????

And if this center-left politician, even if you think she’s corrupt, is elected, as if we’ve never had a corrupt politician in office before (hello, Dick Cheney!), what basic democratic principle will be abrogated? How will the republic crumble if a normal Democrat does what Democrats do, and tries to inch us closer to the aspirational goals of the Preamble to the Constitution? What has she proposed that is so horrible, and so out of the ordinary, and so beyond the pale of what has gone in our nation before, that it has now become normal, rather than unacceptable and outlandish, for Republicans to have no problem with Putin interfering in our election, to have no issue with private and governmental property being hacked and weaponized to tilt the election, to be unconcerned that the FBi director has no control over his own agency and that the agency has become a political weapon, to think it is just fine to refuse to even hold hearings on a Supreme Court vacancy if a president has a year left in his term with the absurd argument that the next president should get to do it, to state that it is okay to pre-emptively threaten that the next president will not get to choose a Supreme Court justice unless their preferred candidate wins, or to have no issue with threatening impeachment, or to have use ever-escalating language suggesting their opponent is a criminal who deserves to die?

Donald Trump didn’t get where he is alone. Yes, I know, Not All Republicans (and God bless them!). But the GOP has normalized Donald Trump out of a slavering fear of the rabid base that will consume everything in its wake that does not stand up to it. And they feed the beast every time, and have created the climate in which millions of Americans may not accept the legitimacy of the election result unless their preferred candidate wins, and, by actively contributing to the approaching Constitutional crisis that their years of obstruction and lies and disinformation and fact-rejection have been precipitating, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Reince Priebus and John McCain and a host of others are part of the problem. Indeed almost the entire GOP is with Trump, except for the handful of non-cowards and upstanders who are willing to admit that Hillary Clinton is a hard-working politician who knows what she is doing and will always put her country first, and who, in so saying, are themselves willing to put their country and basic human decency over the short-term benefit of destroying and hating Hillary Clinton.

Is love more powerful than hate? Are the rights of women, of children, of people of color, of the disabled, of Muslims, of Jews, of the LGBTQ community, of immigrants, worth so little that a majority of Americans are willing to put in power a person who is indisputably repugnant, and the premise of whose candidacy is denigration and deprivation of the rights of others? Are there so many millions of Americans who are so in need of putting others down to build themselves up? Or are they so full of fear and loathing of the rest of us that they don’t care how we are harmed by Trump’s policies? Are there so many who are so full of hate and are so angry that they are ready to accept a massive tax cut for the wealthy that will exacerbate the very problems they rail against, as long as millions of others are deported and have their rights rolled back? Are we really such a nation of insecure, self-loathing losers, projecting out our fears and resentments onto all our countrymen rather than work on our own selves, or try to effect change in a positive way?

Is the idea of losing oneself in the ecstasy of self-immolation — the kind of abdication of personal responsibility and accountability and agency that is required to accept the absurd proposition that “only I” can magically fix the complex challenges our country faces — actually appealing to a majority of Americans? Do they really prefer totalitarianism to democracy? Can people really hate one woman so much that they are willing to throw away the principles that make this country a democracy just to keep her out of office?

The fact that it is this close tells us just how fragile our nation really is. I am, as I said, beside myself. I do not know what I am going to tell my children if he wins. I do not know what I am going to tell myself.