Here is the concluding paragraph of Mr. Bromwich’s wan, almost apology, for Mrs. Clinton, he seems torn. Trump is such an easy target, he is always the Ringmaster of television fame. But Bromwich is a writer of the school of Murray Kempton, who married his talent as a political moralist, with a writing style that sometimes was hard to decipher, as to meaning, although it resembled a kind of poetry, at least to my younger self. Bromwich is easier to understand, his is a self-consciously literary style: sometimes arresting, at other times expressing superfluous garnish. But he seems to descend, in this last paragraph, into the demotic, that is surprising for such a practiced stylist.
The domestic state of the nation is so unpropitious in October 2016 that one may pity the winner of this election as much as the loser. We are living in a country under recurrent siege by the actions of crowds. There is the Tea Party crowd with their belief that global climate disruption is a scientific hoax; there is the Black Lives Matter crowd with their ambiguous slogan “No Justice, No Peace”; and there are more ominous developments, such as the acts of serial defiance of the federal government by the Bundy family in Nevada and Oregon. Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution—the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it.
Post-election, the liberal argument veered away from Trump and turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more popular and reliable target was Vladimir Putin, the preferred ‘enemy on the horizon’ for neoconservatives, adepts of humanitarian war and the national security state as far back as the Sochi Olympics. It is possible that Trump’s defiance of this multifarious establishment actually helped his popularity with non-political voters. Damage more telling than any emanation from the FBI or Russia probably came from Hillary Clinton’s remark that half of Trump’s supporters were ‘a basket of deplorables’ – an unforced error that was rightly read as an expression of contempt, addressed to her audience at the LGBT for Hillary Gala held at Cipriani Wall Street, and overheard by undecided voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Bromwich style is very readable in this instance, I don’t know that Bromwich has modeled his style on that of Murray Kempton, but it sometimes reads if it were. The essay seems quite straight forward, except that the shifting roles of hero and villain in The American Political Melodrama begins to fatigue the reader. Although the claim of Hillary Clinton as ‘victim’ is one of the comic aspects of this debacle.
We are supposed to take the word of Edward Snowden that Comey deserves our support. Quite frankly I admire Mr. Snowden, but he did not live through the Dark Age of J.Edgar Hoover! A closeted paranoid hysteric who had unquestioned power from 1935 to 1972. The FBI is his creation, and its culture of political oppression allied to its claim to be self-righteous upholders of The Law. It even qualified for a long running television show, that was Hollywood’s contribution to the FBI Myth.
The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:
Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”
The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
This history of the FBI is utterly relevant to the construction of Comey as Hero. How can one be that hero, if one heads an institution so riddled with corruption , not to speak of covered with lies and an impasto of Public Relations. The rise of The American National Security State asphyxiated the the Republic, and the FBI one of the nascent institutional strongholds of autocracy in the person of J. Edgar Hoover, now succeeded by Comey’s replacement. Aided by Trump’s jurisprudential catamite Rod Rosenstein.
Mr. Bromwich’s style is very readable in this instance, I don’t know that Bromwich has modeled his style on that of Murray Kempton, but it sometimes reads as if it were. The essay seems quite straight forward, except that the shifting roles of hero and villain in The American Political Melodrama begins to fatigue the reader. Although the claim of Hillary Clinton as ‘victim’ is one of the comic aspects of this debacle.
We are supposed to take the word of Edward Snowden that Comey deserves our support. Quite frankly I admire Mr. Snowden, but he did not live through the Dark Age of J.Edgar Hoover! A closeted paranoid hysteric who had unquestioned power from 1935 to 1972. The FBI is his creation, and its culture of political oppression allied to its claim to be self-righteous upholders of The Law. It even qualified for a long running television show, that was Hollywood’s contribution to the FBI Myth.
‘The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:
Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”
The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
This history of the FBI is utterly relevant to the construction of Comey as Hero. How can one be that hero, if one heads an institution so riddled with corruption , not to speak of covered with lies and an impasto of Public Relations. The rise of The American National Security State asphyxiated the the Republic, and the FBI one of the nascent institutional strongholds of autocracy in the person of J. Edgar Hoover, now succeeded by Comey’s replacement. Aided by Trump’s jurisprudential catamite Rod Rosenstein. StephenKMackSD
‘Had this been a normal criminal investigation, and had Comey been a special agent in the field, the memo he would have written would have been known, in the FBI’s parlance, as an FD-302. The FBI does not record conversations with subjects related to criminal investigations. Instead, FBI agents, using their memory and sometimes handwritten notes, draft memos that summarize the conversations and include purportedly verbatim quotes. Federal judges and juries have consistently viewed these memos as indisputable fact. For this reason, Comey’s memo is no normal government memo. It could do lasting damage to Trump’s presidency, if not contribute to costing him the nation’s highest office altogether.’
The recollections of FBI agents are treated as fact! Its not Law but Political Theology! StephenKMackSD
Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted author, and it contains passages most unusual for an official memoir:
There is a place I have visited on the coast of North Carolina where two barrier islands come close together. In the narrow passageway between them, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the waters of the huge and shallow sound that lies behind the islands. There is turbulence in that place and waves appear to break even though no land is visible. I imagine that the leaders of the Department of Justice stand at that spot, between the turbulent waters of the political world and the placid waters of the apolitical sound. Their job is to respond to the political imperatives of the president and the voters who elected him, while also protecting the apolitical work of the thousands of agents, prosecutors, and staff who make up the bulk of the institution. So long as the leaders understand the turbulence, they can find their footing. If they stumble, the ocean water overruns the sound and the department has become just another political organ. Its independent role in American life has been lost and the guardians of justice have drowned.
This depth of formal piety cannot be faked; the passage shows the burden (as Comey sees it) of maintaining constitutional and legal restraints on Donald Trump.
All the loose talk of the mainstream media about Mueller and Russia may have hidden the gravity of the contest between Trump and legality. And it is by no means certain that legality will win. The larger question is therefore whether law-abidingness will remain the pattern of American society. No doubt, the election of Trump was the efficient cause of the crisis, but it is worth considering the likely state of the nation had Hillary Clinton won. Depending on the appetite for mayhem that Trump himself chose to unleash, the country might easily have become as ungovernable as it is today; and that prospect was in Comey’s mind when he wrote about the necessity of keeping one’s footing in the turbulence.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
StephenKMackSD's Blog 