I don't know Andy Rosenthal. In a different world, he might be editor of the NYTimes but he is instead at this point the author of what appears to be an occasional column. I've met him and talked to him. Times people are stand-offish but I found him at least marginally approachable. Today I find him almost on the same page as i am. He is saying what I say about Comey. But there is a difference. Andy knows the Times did not find that Comey was, in fact, aware that he would affect the election. So he lets things stand, barely. Rosenthal is like a contemporary theologian trying to hold on to the parcel of falsehoods that have undergirded the churches for millennia.
To be safe, citing precedent.
The body is a truth-sayer
Comey says he was mildly nauseous when he realized he might have an effect on the election, His body told him not that he was scared, but that he was committing a foul and terrible error. Comey is not a coward save perhaps morally. He is a guy who made his reputation protecting a mortally-ill government official from being bullied by the banal W. Armed with this rectitude Comey thought he could do no wrong. He was, after all, a supposedly non-partisan chief in a sea of moral turpitude. When the chips were down, his body told him he needed to think twice about the path he was taking.
Diagnostics
What got into Comey so that he did the worst thing possible?
He should have made his overture a twofer, Hillary and trump, two persons under FBI investigation. Instead, he hid the fact that Trump was under investigation for a much more serious offense than anything the FBI might dig up from the laptop of a confessed sexual troller, one Anthony Wiener. Mr. Credible. Comey, his stomach calmed by who knows what means, sat down and penned Hillary Clinton's political obituary and, like Macbeth and spouse, he knew exactly what he was doing. And he knew everyone would accept it because he had one good moral act to his credit, and that is not a common distinction anywhere.
James Comey Is ‘Mildly Nauseous’ About the Election. It’s Not Enough. https://t.co/tv91yaUK7c
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) May 4, 2017
What a picture
You can read every word of Andy's painful narrative above. It is painful not only because it almost tells Comey to confess the truth and then does the typical NY Times feint and lets things lay.
It is the same sort of stasis thing men like Reinhold Niebuhr did when people like David Brooks were drooling in abject admiration at such faux realism. You get nauseous when you are going out on that stage and doing what you shouldn't do. When you know you are right your tummy agrees. Look at Comey now, a self-admitted slippery sort. He has been an actor in what we all wish was a tragi-comedy but which looks ore and more like an incipient Shakespearean tragedy. A little honesty might help.
