July 7, 2018 – REX MURPHY

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We’ve spent time posting about events in Europe. We get closer to home with a stop in Canada. Rex Murphy of The National Post has an entertaining way of describing events in our country. He is thinking it’s ironic Trump-haters have become nastier than him.

It may now join the propositions of Euclid, as impregnable to rebuttal, that Donald Trump or any news that alludes to him, unhinges the minds of those who oppose him. Trump, in this respect, is like global warming. He is the universal key to every phenomenon. Any statement about Trump, so long as it is in any way condemnatory, dismissive, insulting or condescending, requires neither proof, consistency, logic or (and especially) decency.

Just as enlisting in the grand cause of global warming invests the recruit with the immeasurable gifts of infallibility, moral superiority and boundless righteousness, so too does opposition, even to hatred, of Trump free the mind from all obligation to moderation, custom, or articulate argument. It is the ultimate pass to be as nasty and crude as anyone could wish, and — with rarely noted irony — even to be more nasty and crude than the great boorish Trump himself. How odd: to oppose Trump is to become a more clangorous version of him. …

… Sarah Huckabee Sanders, an articulate, tough, poised woman, is his press secretary, who with seven of her friends went far out of Washington to have supper at a restaurant, The Red Hen. Two minutes after placing the order, the zealous owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, asked/told Sanders to leave. (No free-range chickens for you!) The obliging, polite, still esurient Sanders did, without demur or protest.

The locust swarm of anti-Trumpers soon hit the high clouds of Twitter to cheer Wilkinson’s “resistance.” She was the Bonhoeffer of Today’s Specials. Those who spoke a word or two in Sarah Sanders’ favour were mauled mercilessly. …

… Do you hate and despise Trump? Why then, you are virtue itself and a vessel of perfect probity. When the day comes, and the greeting at the Gate is done, the following dialogue will ensue:

St. Peter: “Were you against Trump and all his works and pomps? Did you call him Hitler?”

Red Hen devotee: “Yes, I was. Yes, I did.”

St. Peter: “Will that be one harp, or two?” …

 

 

 

 

Next Mr. Murphy writes on the Inspector General’s report on the FBI and DOJ.

Such was Anthony Weiner’s admiration of his private parts, he burned to share their glory with the world — particularly, that part of it composed of young and female strangers. Thus it was he became the Ansel Adams of genital selfies. Iphone in one hand, his unspeakables on the pedestal of the other, Instagram his gallery, out went the junk mail.

His other fame, leaving aside such trivia as serving in the U.S. Congress, and a hilarious run for mayor of New York, was his (now exploded) marriage to Hillary Clinton’s top aide and principal pilot fish, Huma Abedin. If Disney did noir it could be a movie: The Princess and the Pervert. …

… The whole world knew of the Abedin-Weiner marriage. The bandits of the Afghanistan mountains knew Huma and Anthony were married. The chipmunks of Central Park knew Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin were married. There are anchorites sitting on a tree spike somewhere in a desolate and empty landscape that knew this. Charlie Rose knew it.

However, there was one man, one mind alone, not furnished with that factum. It was the top man at the FBI, the No. 1 sleuth of the greatest investigative institution in all of human history, James Comey.

But Comey, a full six feet and seven inches of righteousness and zeal, says he didn’t know that Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin were man and wife. The man conducting an investigation into the conduct of the world’s most famous woman, and presidential candidate, did not know of the infamous husband of Ms. Clinton’s principal counsellor.

Ineluctably this leads to the conclusion that the only conceivable reason James Comey was selected as the head of the FBI, was that Inspector Clouseau was too busy sorting out whether there was ever any connection between one Brad Pitt and a woman called Angelina Jolie. …

… the really significant message, the big “tell” of the IG report. They know what’s best. They will tailor things for what they see as the “right” outcome. They, and they alone, are the enlightened. Those who think differently are “pieces of sh-t.” It’s not that they were going to “stop it.” It’s that they thought they had the right to stop it. 

And in all that basket of contempt and self-righteousness, who’s at the pinnacle, the chief Pharisee of the lot? James Comey. He has presided over a biased, democracy-defying FBI. He has used his position, in secret, to set the terms of the game. He went from judicious public servant to self-appointed master.

This is corruption. Not the corruption of money. The corruption of unfathomable, reckless moral egotism. Was the Clinton investigation a fix? How could it have been anything other, with this guy in charge?