Encore

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Double-Teaming

This is the first time I’ve ever posted a Civic Duty column in tandem with one of my partner Don Day’s remarkable cartoon strips, but the Comey firing deserves all the attention we can bring to bear. It is the high dirty water mark in a brief presidency chockablock with sleaze, lying, conflicts, and general ugliness not seen since the dying gasps of the Nixon administration.

Donald Trump is something of a miracle worker of dark deeds. He has managed in a little over one hundred days to bring the nation to a critical point in its constitutional history that took Dick Nixon in all his paranoid majesty the better part of two terms to arrive at. Things are faster now, more eyes are out there. For every Woodward or Bernstein there are a hundred – a thousand? – investigative personae churning the Internet and leaping with their findings onto the eternal awareness of the social media. Still, Trump is so clueless and blatantly without a vestige of political awareness that he is a giant fish in a rapidly shrinking barrel to be shot at by anyone with an inclination and those ranks are increasing by the moment. Check out the most dismal poll numbers in history. And they’re before Comey. The next polls could actually put Trump in the twenties.

Now, of course, where on Thomas Jefferson’s green earth do we go from here? Right now, Donald Trump is in a very small room with a very small number of henchpeople and the walls are slowly closing. Too slowly. The vast array of cowards that make up the Republican party will not do the right thing until it is indelibly clear that this president is going to scuttle whatever remnants of their sorry careers remain after his first – and only – term, if he lasts that long.

The reckoning for this disgrace to the founding principles of our nation could be coming sooner than later. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was reportedly furious with the administration’s attempt to lay  the blame for the deciding straw to fire Comey on his three-page memo and requested to address the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors. There is no way his testimony can put the Trump rationale to fire the FBI director in a favorable light.

Also, next week, Comey himself is slated to testify before the committee. Trump, in firing him, said that he asked the director three times point black if he was under investigation and was told, he says, he was not. This has all the earmarks of typical delusional Trump lie and Comey is sure to be asked about the president’s assertion during his testimony. His reply could go a long way towards laying to final rest any doubts  about Donald Trump’s honesty.

Meanwhile, putting the Comey issue aside – as difficult as that is at this juncture – Republican lawmakers on break are being pilloried from all side by constituents enraged at the criminal health plan that they pushed through before adjourning. When these cowards see what their blind party allegiance has wrought in terms of their precious political survival, many scales will be removed from many heretofore blind eyes in terms of the viability of keeping their shaky wagons hitched to Donald Trump’s rapidly dimming star.

Stay tuned. As they say on the streets that most of our politicians have very little  real knowledge of: paybacks are a motherfucker.