Letter 2 America for February 19, 2019

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Dear America,

I read Michael Wolf's (no relation) and found it believable, but it wasn't well supported by first hand accounts.  Then I read James Comey's book, but it was so self-serving that I didn't even read the final chapter about his last contacts with our buffoon-in-chief.  But my wife just ordered the Andrew McCabe book, and she did so just after we watched McCabe on television being interviewed by Scott Pelley.  The difference between Comey's and McCabe's interviews is that Comey's primary concern always seemed to be the spotlight and how he looked in it.  While he never blanched at questions that implied self-interest as a motivation, he was poised in his responses, he suggested, at least implicitly, that it didn't make any difference as he was telling the truth.  The residual impression for me was always that he was a bit too smarmy and unctuous to be persuasive about Donald Trump, even if he was telling the truth, and I believe he was.  McCabe, on the other hand, doesn't have that aura of egocentricity about him.  He doesn't seem like a camera hog or a hysterical personality who loves attention.  McCabe seems like the kind of guy who would have been happy going through life in anonymity while doing his work and trying to get to a point at which he was comfortable personally, both financially, and spiritually in the secular sense.  To be concise, he seems like an honorable guy who wants to mind his own business, but now can't because of what Donald Trump and his allies have taken from him.

McCabe was the acting director of the FBI after James Comey was fired.  He, like Comey, was summoned to testify to congress about the investigation of the Russian election interference of 2016, and of course the name Trump came up, and in a somewhat dubious regard.  The fact is that the firing of James Comey looked like interfering with the Russia investigation to me, but when McCabe had conversations with Trump, they exacerbated any suspicions that McCabe may also have had in the same vein, and the connection between Trump and the Russians became the subject of an FBI investigation because they were so suspect.  You have to remember that Trump wrote Comey a letter thanking him profusely for allegedly assuring Trump that he wasn't the subject of investigation, concomitantly telling Comey that he was fired for his handling of the Clinton email inquiry.  Then, in both an interview on the evening news and in the widely reported presence of Russian diplomats at about the same time, Trump admitted that he was going to fire Comey no matter what he received in a supporting memo he had ordered from Rod Rosenstein, the assistant director of the FBI, to give him reasons, specifically the email investigation and associated publicity.  The real reason for the firing, Trump said on those two occasions, was the Russia investigation.  If that isn't obstruction of justice, I don't know what is, but it also is a demonstration of Trump's inadequacy for the presidency.

The first inadequacy is his lack of intellectual acuity.  He openly admitted that what he had sought to create as a cover for his dubious desire to get rid of Comey was a ruse...a pretext and nothing more...intended to obscure his already admitted aversion to the FBI and its investigation of Russia.  Put concisely, he's dumb.  Then, there's his only passing acquaintance with honesty and integrity.  That needs no elaboration; he has said one thing and done another so often that even his adversaries barely mention it anymore.  And finally, there is his apparent desire to lead autocratically, which has now been reaffirmed in not just his "emergency" executive order relative to what he peremptorily characterizes as a border crisis but his admission after signing the order that he didn't have to do so because he could have accomplished building his wall in other ways over time.  Emergencies that require extra-constitutional executive orders are not addressable over time in other ways.  They are emergencies!

As I have said before, I started hearing the name Trump when I returned to my mother's home on holidays in my early thirties, now about forty years ago.  All of a sudden, this guy started turning up being interviewed by the late gossip columnist, Rona Barrett, pontificating on one subject or another and getting out of limos with leggy models wearing an expression reflecting the same emotional state that a fly fisherman is in when he catches a 14 inch trout.  Since then it has come out that the money he started out with was siphoned off the operation of his failing father's business in an amount approximating half a billion dollars, rendering Trump's claim that he is a brilliant, self-made billionaire real estate tycoon preposterous.  Add his philandering and casual infidelity to principles that he professes to hold, his grandiosity, nepotism and obvious staging of adulation every time he appears in public at the White House, his hypocrisy about simple things like his criticism of President emeritus Obama for going to Hawaii for a vacation once or twice a year when Trump flies to one golf course or another to entertain his huge entourage of toadies every weekend, and there is plenty to support McCabe's decision to open an investigation into Trump's activities no matter what Trump tweets.  I can't wait to read the book, though I'm not expecting any surprises.    



Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on February 19, 2019 11:06 AM.

Letter 2 America for February 13, 2019 was the previous entry in this blog.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on February 19, 2019 11:06 AM.

Letter 2 America for February 13, 2019 was the previous entry in this blog.

is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.