NEW YORK — Short of chomping into a cyanide capsule, there is nothing that President Donald J. Trump can do to satisfy the Left.
Precisely as I predicted on the
- “The American public is getting mildly nauseous listening to James Comey,” former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said Tuesday morning, via Twitter.
But after Comey got tossed, Podesta changed his tune more quickly than a jukebox. Just seven hours later, he said to President Trump: “Didn’t you know you’re supposed to wait til Saturday night to massacre people investigating you?” This was an overblown reference to President Nixon’s Watergate–era dismissal of Attorney General Elliott Richardson and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.
- “I do not have confidence in him any longer,” Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer of New York said of Comey on November 2, as captured in a video montage of the Left’s reversals on this issue.
On Tuesday, Schumer told journalists, “I told the president, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect, you are making a big mistake.’”
- “I think he should take a hard look at what he has done, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing for the American people if he did step down.” Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist – Vermont) said about Comey last fall.
On Tuesday, Sanders said: “Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey raises serious questions about what his administration is hiding.”
- “Maybe he’s not in the right job,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California told CNN on November 2.
However, Comey’s dismissal “raises the ghosts of some of the worst Executive Branch abuses.”
- “The FBI director has no credibility,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D – California) said last year.
This week: “I do not necessarily support the president’s decision.”
- “The president ought to fire Comey immediately,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D – New York) on November 16.
On May 9, Nadler said: “The firing of FBI Director Comey by President Trump is a terrifying signal of this Administration’s continued abuse of power on so many levels.”
- Representative Hank Johnson (D – Georgia) said about Comey on January 13: “He should pack his things and go…I do not have confidence in this man to lead the FBI.”
And on Tuesday: “By terminating FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump has continued his assault on our Republic.”
The Left’s Olympic-grade flip-flopitis on Comey stretches well beyond Washington.
“FIRE COMEY,” actress Rosie O’Donnell unequivocally demanded last December, via Twitter. She described herself as “furious” at Comey and “wanted him fired.”
But that sentiment is so 2016.
“He should not have been [fired],” O’Donnell told Gizmodo on Thursday. O’Donnell said that she chatted with a former FBI agent who “spoke glowingly” of Comey. O’Donnell now says of Comey: “I think he is a good man.”
So, in short, Democrats begged for someone to rid them of this troublesome FBI chief. At last, Trump did exactly this. And, now that he has done so, Democrats are more enraged at him than ever.
As he opened the Senate on Wednesday, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sounded justifiably flummoxed:
“What we have now is our Democratic colleagues complaining about the removal of an FBI Director whom they themselves repeatedly and sharply criticized; that removal being done by a man, Rod Rosenstein, whom they repeatedly and effusively praised — when Mr. Rosenstein recommended Mr. Comey’s removal for many of the very reasons they consistently complained about.”
Some liberals now say that Trump waited too long. He supposedly would have been on safe ground had he sacked Comey soon after taking the presidential oath of office.
“I think that if the president would have fired him when he first came in,” Rep. Waters told NBC’s Peter Alexander, “he would not have to be in a position now where he is trying to make up a story about why.”
Nonsense!
Had the president done this on January 20, the headlines would have screamed: “Day of the Long Knives: Trump Launches Dictatorship by Booting Comey before Lunch.” Given that the FBI has been sniffing around Trump’s circle since at least the transition, any time that Trump terminated Comey would have triggered hollers of “Cover up!”
Maxine Waters let the cat bolt right out of the bag when she referred this week to Hillary Clinton and Comey: “If she had won the White House, I believe that given what he did to her, and what he tried to do, she should have fired him.”
But, regarding President Trump and Comey, Waters said, “I believe that the president of the United States should not have done this in the middle of an investigation.”
Democrats and liberals who were once driven by concern for the common man now are fueled by little more than opportunism, hypocrisy, and situation ethics.
William de Wolff furnished research for this opinion piece.